Married Homosexuals

I was at a friend's birthday party a couple of weeks ago and one of his old college roommates was there. He talked not so much about his wife -- who was not present -- but a lot about his daughters, whom he seemed genuinely proud of. He seemed to be a nice, rather attractive fellow in his fifties -- and as gay as a goose.

Yes, I know, if gay guys can be very masculine, straight guys can be kind of "girly," I suppose. Still, something told me that this guy was essentially -- well I really can't say "gay" because he's not exactly out and proud -- but I can say homosexual. Since he has children which I assume are his own one could get technical and call him "bisexual," but I don't think that was the case. I felt sorry for him, depressed by him, and irritated by him all at the same time.

I have met a lot of married homosexuals (as opposed to married gays or gay couples who are married). I would say that one in four men that I meet and have met in gay bars have either a wife, girlfriend, or fiancee. I'm not talking about so-called "straight" guys but guys who are actively cruising for sex partners.

Now the politically correct view of bisexuality says that bi's do not need to have sex with both sexes, only that they can have sex or fall in love with either a man or a woman. Which is -- if we accept this -- why I see these guys with wifes and kids who cruise gay bars as being married homos and not bi's. Presumably a bisexual man who's fallen in love with a woman can be satisfied by her alone (unless monogamy is simply not natural for him, which is true of some gays, straights, and bi's), but if he is driven to have sex with men, then it's probably because his homosexual impulses are stronger than any attraction he has for his wife. He is not "bi" -- he is gay (or would be if he ever came out).

Cornell University did a study of married homosexual men (there are married lesbians as well, of course) and found that they all had serious self-esteem issues stemming from childhood which made it impossible for them to "take on" society, as it were, by being openly gay and equally impossible for them to fully accept their sexual orientation. Sad.

Yes, this is still going on all these years after Stonewall.

In my twenties and later I would occasionally wind up with a man who turned out to be married. There would be this picture of the wife and kids in the bedroom, and the guy was almost always a bit arrogant, conspiratorial almost, about who he really was and what he really wanted. ["Yeah I'm gay, too." Well ... ] Gay Pride did not enter into these guys' way of thinking. They were either suffering so much internalized homophobia that only the sex urge got them out into the gay bar -- where they'd look right or left before exiting or entering -- or else they felt the wife and kids routine would get them farther in their chosen career. They weren't "conflicted;" they knew they were homo -- they just didn't care about using a woman as a beard. A typical example of this kind of person is Jim McGreevey. [Let me make it clear that I've never slept with Jim McGreevey!]

I don't recall if I'd give them my Gay Lib rap. Probably not. It seemed too hopeless and they wouldn't listen. I did not like helping someone commit adultery, although I could have argued that if it wasn't me it would have been someone else. Then there was the night I slept with a guy who in the middle of sex shouted out "Yes! Yes! It's men! Men! Yes, yes, yes! Men!" I thought to myself, "yes, men are great --I'm pretty great (my egotistical twenties)-- but what's up with this guy?" What was up is that I later found out that he was just about to get married. [Don't know if that wedding ever took place or not. It probably did. Maybe I wasn't that great.]

I don't feel sorry for former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey. He came out of the closet because of circumstances, not because he'd suddenly developed a conscience and a sense of gay pride. He treated his wife like crap, and I'm of two minds about whether or not she knew he was homo (let's not call him gay at that point). Some women do feel a man can "change," especially if she sees him as being bisexual. But it's just as likely that, like many other wives, Mrs. McGreevey hadn't an inkling. Understandably hurt and bitter, she's bound to get tacky and homophobic in her tell-all book, so what exactly has Mcgreevey done for us all? Nothing but started a round of stupid, stereotyping jokes. Yes, there he is -- smug jackass Jay Leno, who hasn't got a clue about any of this, laughing at the very notion of any woman not knowing that her husband was gay.

Yet many of them don't.

I have met other, more positive "married homosexuals" but this was after a sense of pride [or at least a deperate need to be true to themselves] brought them out of the closet. They were no longer married homosexuals, but gay men. Some remained friendly with their ex-wives; some did not. Some wives came to accept and understand --- bless 'em -- some did not. Most of these guys were genuinely conflicted; they did not neccesarily view their wives as beards. Some of them may have been bisexuals who ultimately realized that they leaned strongly in the gay direction. Whatever the case, whatever the initial pain and disillusionment for their families, they were all the better for it.

So there I was at this party, and the activist in me wanted so badly to say something to this poor married homosexual, but the only time I got him alone we talked about Edgar Allan Poe.
(Wouldn't it have been funny if instead of Poe we had talked about Oscar Wilde?! Talk about openings!)

I settled for giving the fellow a big wink as I walked out the door. I'm convinced I'm going to run into him at the Eagle some night. [Okay, maybe not the Eagle. Maybe Marie's Crisis -- if I ever went there. Besides, nowadays he'd probably be there with his wife!]

Things seem to go in cycles. I'm running into a lot of "married homosexuals" in gay bars these days as I did years ago. Gay pride has never taken such a beating. So many guys want to have sex with other men -- they just don't want to be "gay." Occasionally I get cruised by one of these guys.

Curiously, they're almost always bottoms.

What's up with that?

So I go into Marie's Crisis in the West Village on Friday night, hoping to see a larger gay constituency than the last time I was there [when I met the straight-identified bartender who has “a gay brother.”] The place was pretty straight that night, a Thursday evening, but I figured the weekends would still be pretty gay. Standing around singing show tunes isn't one of my favorite things to do, but I generally found a sympathetic, pleasant group of people to talk to at the bar. Until recently, Marie's catered mostly to a crowd of gay men of mixed ages, with straight women, lesbians, and less often, straight men or straight couples mixed in. Most of the straight people seemed aware that it was a gay bar and were respectful for the most part.

I went over to the bar and saw a group of people sitting at the far end, three guys and two women. I perceived them as three gay men and two “sisters,” supportive straight female friends. Because you never know these days, I asked them in a light, friendly way if they were gay.

I didn't get the reaction I expected and was hoping for.

Nope, they weren't gay. None of them. And they didn't seem thrilled that I'd asked. [Let's just say they said they weren't gay. These days – who knows?]

Obviously referring to her boyfriend, one gal said, “I would know.” [Sorry, lady, you probably wouldn't.]

I was rather surprised and said so. I won't say the reaction from these people was necessarily homophobic, but it wasn't especially friendly. I later learned that none of them were aware that Marie's was [or at least used to be?] a gay bar.

Looking around the place, I got the sinking sensation that there were more straights than gays in Marie's that night, and, worse, many of them thought they were in a straight bar -- and maybe they were. I had a conversation with the other straight gal in this group which did not begin auspiciously. She said she thought the bar might be gay because of the show tunes. I told her in a nice way that that was stereotyping. She had the good grace to be a little embarrassed. She turned out to be a nice person who did me the courtesy of letting me talk to her about the bar, how I worried that some of the straight people [including the men she was with] were not the gay-friendly kind that used to come into Marie's. Because I could tell she was decent and probably gay-friendly [if a little young and naïve, which is forgivable] I assured her that I thought she was a nice person and that people like her should certainly be welcome in the bar. She told me that I seemed like a nice man, too.

Then something very odd happened. A very drunk gay guy at the bar turned to me and said. “You were terrible to those people. You're an asshole.”

I was flabbergasted and told him that I and the young lady had just had a very nice conversation, and that I hadn't been “terrible” to anyone. I felt like I'd been bashed in a gay bar. And not by straights, but by a fellow gay [or at least homosexual] man. What the hell was this guy's problem? It's possible that his inebriation, which made him rather incoherent, also made him incapable of really hearing or understanding anything I was saying. I realized that his negative reaction might also have been due to my sounding to him like some kind of – gasp! -- Gay Libber or something [although I wasn't on my Gay Lib soap box] and how dare I make the probably closeted asshole [except when he's in a gay bar] feel uncomfortable by reminding him that some of us gay men have an unapologetic gay identity to go along with our self-esteem. I'm too nice a guy to say to the man what was on my mind: “I'm not an asshole but you're a self-hating homo who is drinking himself into a stupor because of it."

I used to feel sorry for guys like that. Now I just wish they'd get into therapy or seek counseling at the gay center and for crying out loud accept themselves and their orientation already. You can't always help these guys, mired rigidly as they are in their alcohol and misery, attacking gay men and women with a relish that almost rivals that of the straightest homophobe.

What a sad schmuck!