“As long as it’s ‘also’ and not ‘only’..."

Telling Your Wife You're Queer Despite The Odds

This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter focused on the late blooming queer experience, the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.

Journal, Aug. 15 2011

We’ve been letting Bugsy run free. 

There’s plenty of land here at the cabin. There are trees but it is not too heavily forested so we can see him most anywhere he goes. The jingle of his tags and collar also help us with locating him.

Not that letting him off his lead was an easy decision. I stood on the gravel driveway for what seemed an eternity, rolling the prospect around my brain as [my now wife] stood there, uncertain…

I came out to my wife the same day I learned I was being demoted at my job.¹

I had only come out to my therapist a few days before and was working up the courage to say something, find the right moment.

I went home early that day and my wife was home and I told her about the job and we commiserated, comforted, fretted. And I thought: should I say something about it now? Or would it just complicate things, bewilder her, overwhelm her? But if not then, when? I had no idea how long it would take me to find a resolution to this sudden career curveball. Couldn’t I wait?

Deep down, I knew he’d be fine. He’d stayed close to us at the large dog park outside Tacoma and he’d come right back to the house when he got out months ago.

But out here there are cougars, badgers, bears, other dogs, people with guns. And no control…

My wife is incredibly pro-LGBTQIA2S+. She loves drag and was part of an ongoing production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in her college days. During our honeymoon to New York City, she made it a point for us to visit Stonewall, get a cone at the Big Gay Ice Cream Shop and we saw a great off-Broadway production of Avenue Q, which she introduced me to by constantly listening to the soundtrack. We have attended Pride events and queer rights protests for years, before and after having kids. If some demagogue is attacking or calling for a boycott of a queer creator’s work, she buys something from that queer creator to support them and spite their critic.

And we’d been through plenty of crises together. The near-death of our first child just 30 minutes after she was born. Perilous finances when I told her to leave a toxic workplace after coming home for the fifth day in a row crying. Living and working through a pandemic stuck at home with two young children.

But that was it: we did those things together. This was something I’d kept from her, a secret, a potential dealbreaker, a lie by omission, a deceit. 

I had drawn up a list of potential questions she might ask—Do you love me? Do you find me attractive? Have you fantasized being with a man when with me? Are you wanting to explore with a man? Why did you keep this from me? Have you ever cheated? I didn’t necessarily know some of the answers. I was afraid and ashamed to tell her some of the answers.

I knew the odds were stacked against us as they are against any other mixed orientation marriage (MOM).

I have twice previously referenced a 2012 paper on the problems facing queer men in straight-passing marriages from the Journal of GLBT Family Studies and much of what it details applies here. Joe Kort², a psychotherapist who has built something of a cottage industry focused on the challenges facing closeted queer men, wrote about the myriad pitfalls in MOMs years ago, ranging from personalities or behaviors of individual partners that existed before rings were even exchanged to the broader social implications being partnered with someone opposite to your sexuality. There’s no shortage of counselors, therapists and others (a surprising number of which are focused on the Latter Days Saints community…) offering support for straight spouses contending with their queer partner’s disclosure in what one unfortunately labels as “mis-marriages.”

A study conducted as part of a thesis at Minnesota State University-Mankato in 2022 seems to reinforce how society at large instills an intuitive hostility toward mixed orientation marriages. Female volunteers were asked to read and respond to hypothetical scenarios where they were in a relationship with a man who was either of unspecified sexuality or bisexual and wanted to spend time with an old high school friend, who was either female or male. Participants were asked to rate their jealousy in situations ranging from the hypothetical boyfriend picking up the friend from the airport to not answering texts for several hours that night. 

The results indicate that heterosexual women experienced significantly higher emotional and sexual jealousy in vignettes where their partner’s friend was a woman, regardless of their partner’s sexual orientation, and experienced significantly higher emotional jealousy in vignettes in which their partner was bisexual, regardless of the gender of their partner’s friend. Overall, these findings allude to a potential causal mechanism behind heterosexual women’s negative attitudes toward dating and being intimate with bisexual men, as established by past research.

- Madison Marie Glende, Examining Jealousy in Mixed-Orientation Relationships: An Experimental Vignette Study

Depending on your source, between 70 to 80 percent of MOMs fail, if not right away then within several years of the queer partner disclosing their sexuality. Even in those that persist, straight spouses typically responded with devastation, shock, anxiety, confusion and betrayal when confronted with their partner’s disclosure of queer sexuality, according to one study published in Edification: The Transdisciplinary Journal of Christian Psychology.

But I hadn’t read any of these academic papers or found these blog posts when I was preparing to come out to her. I had heard the stories from other men I met online seeking support and guidance as they wrestled with their identity and its effect on their marriages. 

Some had cheated but many hadn’t. 

Some knew they were “not straight” before marriage but others didn’t. 

Some had told their wives about their identity, before marriage in a few cases, and some were still working up the courage to tell them. 

Most were still attracted to their wives and wanted to make their marriages work. 

Many had spouses who were otherwise outwardly supportive of queer folk and their rights before their disclosure.

Nearly all of them were facing cold bedrooms, open hostility from their spouse, demands to separate and divorce, either from the moment they disclosed or even months after the fact.

I could not imagine my life without my wife being part of it, without feeling her warmth against my body, without her terrible jokes and the incorrect way she pronounces ‘ruin’ and her amazing cooking that requires the use of every dish in the kitchen that I then must clean and her unabashed independence and strength to call me on my bullshit. And yet, here I was, potentially on the precipice of throwing it all over the edge and, for what?

It’s always about control with me. I have to know where I’m going, what I’m doing, who I’m with at all times. I can’t just say “let’s go drive around.” I have to say “what’s the itinerary?”

Control makes for security but also stagnation. It makes for comfort but stifles creativity. It promotes tranquility but leaves fear just on the doorstep.

I don’t remember the exact words I said, the order I said things. I know I said I am bi, that I have hidden and struggled with this part of myself for some time, that I kept the secret from everyone and not just her. I told her I love her in all the ways, that I am still attracted to her, that I enjoy being naked with her. And then I paused. 

I couldn’t read her expression. There was no anger. Surprise? Maybe a little. Uncertainty? Sure. But there was nothing else I could decipher. Then she spoke.

“Thank you for trusting me.”

And the banter, the sarcasm, the irreverence that we’ve shared and loved about each other since we met more than a decade ago came back out of both of us and we laughed at the quips we made about each other. And she smiled. And I smiled. 

She did ask if this admission was about having an equal attraction to women and men, to which I honestly replied, no, you’re the only woman I think about being with. Men, on the other hand…

I asked her if she ever suspected. 

“When we first met. You just seemed to have a quality,” she said. “But then we slept together and I figured I must have been wrong.”

Sure I let Bugsy run free mostly because he needs the exercise and the ability to choose his bathroom. But it’s also an exercise for me. It teaches me to trust that he loves and knows me so well that he doesn’t want to run away, just go where he pleases. 

And that is why I’m seriously considering asking [a jeweler friend]’s help in getting a ring.

My wife’s reaction is not the norm. I acknowledge the grand fortune I have that she didn’t appear to bat an eye after I told her I am queer. She didn’t question my love and loyalty to her. She didn’t think I wanted a divorce. She didn’t think she wasn’t enough for me. She accepted my queerness as part of who I am, albeit a part I hadn’t ever really expressed. She saw me and for that I am forever grateful.

Mixed orientation relationships can and do last. That study from Edification notes that in those that have persisted, both partners reported generally positive satisfaction with their marriages, although not always equally. A few queer men I’ve met and befriended are themselves still in MOMs which they feel are working, though it takes constant effort and thoughtfulness. There is some vague consensus around what can predict a queer individual and their straight partner staying together: the basic strength of the marriage, mutual love and respect, open mindedness, comparable sex drives, strong and/or similar religious beliefs or lack therof, all things that I feel my wife and I meet in our relationship.

It’s not all puppies and unicorns. My wife and I have struggled. She has since more explicitly acknowledged that she felt anxiety after my coming out. We’ve had frustrations, doubts, fears. Tears from both of us. 

I have said, “you didn’t know when you married me that I liked dick also.” And she’s responded, “as long as it’s ‘also’ and not ‘only,’ we can make it work.” 

She has said, “It just seems to be working less and less.” And I’ve responded, “I know. I still love you.”

I can’t predict the future. I don’t know if this will always be how we regard each other, with understanding, with tenderness. But I don’t think I’ll ever consider our marriage a failure. Love isn’t about keeping people close to you at all times, always in sight. It’s trusting that when they aren’t, they are always happy to come back.

Last Week Today

• Some good news: all but one of the anti-LGBTQ+ “policy riders” that the GOP put in the recent spending bill to avert a government shutdown were killed. The one remaining is pretty narrow, doesn’t impact the ability for queer folk to receive care or services and there’s plenty of ways to work around it.

• If you in any way identify as bisexual and are a dad, I highly recommend you take this anonymous survey on bisexual fatherhood out of the United Kingdom. Despite estimates that bisexual folk are likely the largest proportion of the queer community, there is shockingly little data and research related to bisexuality and how it intersects with lived experience. Let’s start changing that.

• The Honest Broker once again with a great writeup, this time about the increasing animosity of the public toward AI and it’s super-rich promoters.

• Learned this week that anybody can get access to the Library of Congress and just…go learn stuff whenever they want. I live on the other side of the country, so this knowledge just makes me sad, but if you live near D.C., go get your Library of Congress reader card!

• Read about the first known “queen of drag” in the United States.

• Anne’s ability to connect the current millenial crisis around the inability to create and maintain friendships as adults with our nation’s twisted founding mythology and “principles” is making me very eager to read her future book.

In next week’s newsletter…

Did you know Michelangelo may have been queer? Or a 19th century U.S. President? Throughout history queer folk have had their own words altered or obscured, often by family and friends, to hide their queerness after death. I share about the potential cultural impacts of that erasure and how I connect it to my own prolific writing habit.

1. Understanding my demotion involves a fair amount of inside baseball. Talking about it now will detract and distract from the subject at hand. However, it was a not insignificant part of my journey accepting and expressing my identity, for better or for worse, and I plan to delve into it later.

2. I have…issues with how Joe Kort has approached how some men accept—or more specifically don’t accept—their queerness. For another time.