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PART 2 (page 12 of 34)
Homosexuals and Bisexuals Are Usually Invisible,
Pretending to be Somebody That They are Not, Straight
Heterosexual Marriage for Gays?

Simplistic and lazy thinking plus stereotyping are so much easier than doing the hard mental work to find out the truth. The truth is that most homosexuals and bisexuals are invisible, who live in hidden and quiet misery. Many gay men and lesbians do stand out by having some of the mannerisms of the opposite sex; like the "limp wrist" for gay men and the "masculine swagger" for lesbians. But I want to say right now that I applaud and support the right of gays and lesbians to be exactly who they feel most natural to be as long as the behavior is not abusive. But I believe that the majority of homosexuals do not stand out, that they look and behave like and are indistinguishable from heterosexuals, at least on the surface. 

Many gays and lesbians marry someone of the opposite sex in order to try and fit in and do what’s expected and even demanded of them by their families, many conservative Christian and Catholic leaders and society in general. They get regular jobs, are law abiding citizens and some are even members of gay-bashing Catholic and Protestant Churches (some of the most anti-gay members are gay themselves trying to protect themselves from being discovered). They know that if they make themselves known for who they really love, that their lives will be over as they know it. As was mentioned in "A Gay Christmas Carol" in Part 1, Chapter 3 - "The Second Spirit" (or click here), they know that they would have to live with the constant fear of being:
            beaten up,
            hated (even by their own families),
            laughed at and humiliated by being made the butt of jokes,
            made to feel as if they were somehow sick or mentally defective,
            condemned to hell by organized religion,
            arrested and thrown in jail,
            lose their jobs,
            refused housing and
            isolated to a large extent by society.

Heterosexual Marriage for Gays?
So homosexuals pretend to be somebody that they are not, straight, and get themselves into opposite-sex marriages that are doomed to fail from the start and even have kids. They are almost always good and loving parents but the critical relationship with their spouse can be very strained, artificial and not very satisfying for either participant. As Bruce Bawer says in his book, A Place At The Table,  "any intelligent, sensitive person who has ever seen such unions in real life knows that they are [a] mockery of marriage."  Separation or divorce is the usual outcome. And the innocent victim in the relationship is the heterosexual spouse who doesn’t understand what went wrong, at least at first and then is devastated when the truth comes to light. Because who in his or her right mind would choose to come to the most intimate relationship of life knowing that one was always "second best" in the heart and desire of one's mate?  (1) The other victims of course, are the children who always suffer when their parents don’t get along with each other.

So with the above mentioned fate sort of preordained for such marriages, it is highly disingenuous for conservative evangelical Christian leaders to suggest that heterosexual wedlock is a solution to the dilemma of the gay Christian who believes that celibacy is not an option. For them to suggest that all that is required for a successful heterosexual marriage by a gay person is the ability to function heterosexually and the ability to control homosexual behavior (2), is a grotesque, sterile picture of marriage, one utterly lacking in that community of spirit, mutual desire and genuine emotional connection - the rising up of soul to soul - that are essential to a happy, life-giving union. (1)

But Gary, what real evidence do you have that heterosexual marriage is a bad thing for gay men? And for their unsuspecting straight partners? Please read on:

First of all, John J. McNeill, in The Church and The Homosexual writes:

It is interesting to note that one priest, acting as a canon lawyer in a marriage tribunal, claims that over one-third of the divorce cases he handled were based in the fact that one or the other partner was homosexually inclined.  For as I have pointed out, many homosexuals attempt to hide their condition by entering into marriage.

If the homosexual community were allowed to play its role in society with full acceptance, homosexuals would cease to play their present negative role of undermining the marriage relationship, into which they have been forced by their desire to escape detection. (3)

Secondly, Straight Ex-spouses Are Another Witness of the Damage That Demonization of Homosexuals Causes To Our Society
Read the following article from the Washington Post, By Theresa Vargas on Sunday, November 8, 2009 to understand one of the results of religious homophobic poison: 

a quiet voice for gay marriage
Legalization could avert doomed relationships, straight ex-spouses say
By Theresa Vargas, The Washington Post

If anyone could have talked himself out of being gay, Kimberly Brooks said, it was her husband.

He wanted to be straight; she wanted him to be straight. She once followed his gaze across the beach to another man but quickly dismissed the thought. No, he couldn't be. Then he started spending more time with one particular friend, and an unease pushed Brooks to ask the question that ultimately confirmed her fears: Was that friend gay?

"He said, 'I don't know.' And in that moment, I knew," said Brooks, who is a therapist in Falls Church. "That day, the marriage was over."

As the debate over legalizing same-sex marriage in the District [Washington D. C.  Same-sex marriage in the District of Columbia was legalized on December 18, 2009 after this article was written] grows louder and more polarized, there are people whose support for the proposal is personal but not often talked about. They are federal workers and professionals, men and women who share little except that their former spouses tried to live as heterosexuals but at some point realized they could not.

Many of these former spouses -- from those who still feel raw resentment toward their exes to those who have reached a mutual understanding -- see the legalization of same-sex marriage as a step toward protecting not only homosexuals but also heterosexuals. If homosexuality was more accepted, they say, they might have been spared doomed marriages followed by years of self-doubt.

"It's like you hit a brick wall when they come out," Brooks said. "You think everything is fine and then, boom!"

Carolyn Sega Lowengart calls it "retroactive humiliation." It's that embarrassment that washes over her when she looks back at photographs or is struck by a memory and wonders what, if anything, from that time was real. Did he ever love her?

"I'm 61 years old," said Lowengart, who lives in Chevy Chase. "Will I ever know what it's like to be loved passionately? Probably not."

Discovering The Truth
She gave her husband 31 years, just a little less than she gave the State Department. Because of her job, she bought a home computer, and on that computer she got the first hints that her husband was gay. Once, she said, she glimpsed gay pornography on the screen; another time, she found a printout of an e-mail about a rendezvous.

"In 2002," she said, "she asked her husband for the truth. He told her. They separated that year."

"I said, 'When did you know?' " Lowengart recalled. "He said, 'When I was a teenager.' I said, 'Why did you marry me?' He said, 'Because I didn't want to be.' "

For her, devastation blended with relief. The devastation: Raised Catholic, she believed marriage was forever. The relief: For three decades, while she struggled with her weight, she thought it was her fault that they weren't intimate.

Lowengart's ex-husband could not be reached to comment, but Carolyn Lowengart has spoken publicly about their marriage through the Straight Spouse Network, which organizes support groups across the country.

"We want people to have the right to be who they are," she said. "If that were the case, people like me wouldn't exist."

People like her wouldn't question every memory. "In a regular divorce, you don't question whether you were loved or desired at the beginning," Lowengart said.

The Author
He was her first love and promised to be her last, Joy Parker said. They had met in high school but had lost touch for decades, until she received a message from him through classmates.com. It came a day after she'd been looking nostalgically at prom photos of the two of them.

"It was like we were meant to be together," Parker said. In 2004, at 43, she traveled across the country, from California to Virginia, to move in with him. By the end of that year, they were married. "He seemed like the perfect husband, buying flowers, gifts."

Then, as she tells it, came the night she decided to check her husband's voice mail. "There were two messages from a guy calling him 'Baby' and telling him how good he looked," Parker said. She says she woke him up to confront him. "His eyes got huge, and he said, 'You're going to try to destroy me.' I said: "Destroy you? What about me?' "

Parker, who lives in Manassas, said she became severely depressed by the breakup of her marriage. She and another woman have written a book, "The Straight-Up Truth About the Down-Low," about being married to gay men.

Reached by phone, Parker's ex-husband, who did not want to be identified, denied that a man left him that message and said he is not gay. He said Parker wrote the book because she is hurt.

Parker, an IRS agent for 16 years and an investigator after that, said she wrote the book to help other women. "I used to sit on the bed and count the pills, too," she said. "I didn't want to live. I was just in a dark place I couldn't get out of."

Parker, who was raised in a church where she was taught that homosexuality was wrong, said she goes back and forth on the issue of same-sex marriage. Even if it is allowed, she said, there will always be men and women who deny they are gay and who marry heterosexuals. It'll take much more than changing the law to alter [community] perceptions about homosexuality.

"Socially, we'll just have to see it as normal," she said. "That's the only way."

The Therapist
Kimberly Brooks calls people whose marriages ended like hers "collateral damage."

 "I think straight spouses are the nameless, anonymous victims," she said. "We're not ignored -- because that sounds intentional -- but unseen."

Brooks, who lives in Arlington County, was 28 when she met Robert Webb on a blind date. He was perfect: tall, handsome and a lawyer. As a husband, she said, he treated her "wonderfully," celebrating with champagne the day she got her master's degree. They talked about having children.

Webb said he never meant to hurt her.

"I married her because I loved her," said Webb, a lawyer in Orlando whose firm has an office in the District. "I married her because I wanted us to spend the rest of our lives together. We had lived together, and things were fine. I thought I had conquered that thing I didn't want to be."

But then he met the man he's been with since. "And there was this incredible overriding basic attraction that drove everything else out of my life," he said. "It was no longer a matter of mind over matter."

Webb, who views his 23-year union with his partner as a marriage even if it's not recognized in Florida, said that even if same-sex marriage had been legal at the time, he still would have married Brooks. "I didn't want to be gay," he said. He estimates that he lost two-thirds of his friends when he came out, including one who sent him a Bible.

"You want the things you're taught to want," Webb said. "You want the life you're taught to want."

Brooks, who is starting a therapy group for straight spouses, said that for a long time, she neither favored nor opposed same-sex marriage. But as the [Washington] D.C. Council prepares to vote on the matter next month, she thinks about her former husband.

"It would be heartbreaking if in Rob's final days his partner was not allowed to be in the hospital with him, was not allowed to make decisions for him," she said. "And he's the one person Rob would want there."

[Same-sex marriage in the District of Columbia was legalized on December 18, 2009 after this article was written]

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Having a spouse or parent disclose his or her same-sex attraction is a shattering experience fraught with pain, confusion, anger, and a profound loss of self-esteem.  For further reading on this subject I recommend the two following books:

Buxton, Amity  Pierce, Ph.D., "The Other Side of the Closet - The Coming-Out Crisis for Straight Spouses and Families", New York - Chichester - Brisbane - Toronto - Singapore, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1994

Barbetta, Francine, Ph.D., "A Pebble In His Shoe - The Diary of a Straight Spouse", USA, Xlibris, 2008

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Footnotes:
(1) Holben, L. R.  What Christians Think about Homosexuality - Six Representative Viewpoints, North Richland Hills, Texas, BIBAL Press, 1999, page 118.
(2) Schmidt, Thomas E., Straight and Narrow? Compassion and Clarity in the Homosexual Debate, Downers Grove: Inter-Varsity Press, 1995.
(3) McNeill, John J., "The Church and the Homosexual", Boston, Beacon Press, 1976, 1993, page 137.
 

Click for Page 13 - As The Hysteria About Homosexuality Gives Way to Real-Life Experience-The Sky Hasn’t Fallen After All

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