And I didn't care what went on behind others' closed doors. I didn't think there was anything wrong with being gay - I have an openly gay cousin. Early in our relationship, Chris told me he'd had homosexual experiences as a teenager but assured me it was youthful curiosity. I suppose I was always suspicious, but I was in denial. There are so many obvious questions for a wife like me: Didn't I realize he was gay? Did I ignore red flags? And if I had suspicions, why didn't I confront him earlier or divorce him? While the media focuses on the men, I watch their wives standing next to them and wonder about the suffering, lies, emotional confusion and rage that they may be living through. We periodically see stories about married men in public life who are gay or have been implicated in homosexual behavior - such as Senator Larry Craig (R–Idaho), who was arrested last summer for allegedly soliciting a male police officer in an airport bathroom, and former New Jersey governor James McGreevey, who proclaimed that he was a "gay American" when he announced his resignation from office. That means there are a large number of women who have no idea what their husband does in secret. This kind of union happens more often than people may think research done by University of Chicago sociologist Edward Laumann, Ph.D., estimated that between 1.5 million and 2.9 million American women who have ever been married had a husband who had had sex with another man. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I wanted to scream: "It is such a lie! Don't do it!" My mind flashed back to my own wedding day, when I was the virgin bride standing before family, friends and a minister. When I saw the movie, I started to cry as I watched Ennis, the young cowboy played by Heath Ledger, wed his sweetheart even though he'd been involved with another man. But that film only scratched the surface of their wives' miserable experience.
The movie "Brokeback Mountain" turned a spotlight on gay men who lead double lives, having sex with other men while they are married to women. At that moment, I felt as if I were standing alone in the world, stripped of all dignity, with a big sign on me that read idiot. Yet I finally understood that our entire married life, except for our children, whom we both loved completely, was built on a falsehood. Both of us grew up in the small-town South, and Chris was in the military. We looked like the perfect family in our Christmas card portrait. I was 30 years old when this happened, and Chris and I had been married for 11 years. But I kept quiet and thought, I've held up as long as I could. At gay bars, there are back rooms with holes in the walls." A wave of nausea swept over me as I listened to his agonized confession. "I don't know how this could have happened," he stammered. That evening, after we'd watched our three children play on the lawn of our home in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, he curled into a fetal position on a porch chair and admitted more than I ever wanted to know: He had been having anonymous sex with men.
When Chris spoke to a health official who called to check on me (my case had been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta), he realized our baby was at risk for premature birth and newborn pneumonia, and he became hysterical, as though he were having a nervous breakdown. It took a few more days of wrenching confrontation for our marriage to disintegrate. "I haven't done anything wrong." Instead of arguing about how I felt or figuring out how I wanted to handle the larger issue, I focused on what I needed at that moment - to take medicine and get healthy - much as I had throughout our rocky marriage. "They've got to be wrong, or I must have picked up something in the gym," he insisted.
When I confronted my husband, Chris (not his real name), with my test results that night, he denied he was to blame.
"We're both monogamous." But of course I knew that wasn't really true, and the doctor's words forced me to finally acknowledge what I'd suspected for a long time: My husband was most likely gay. "You've got to talk to your husband." I was in total disbelief. "You have chlamydia," my obstetrician told me as I lay on the examining table, six months pregnant with my fourth child.