Ladies, Is Your Husband Gay?

Remember the movie Brokeback Mountain? In it, there were two guys who were married but who ended up having both a sexual and romantic relationship with one another. In one case, the wife caught on, but only after she happened to catch a glimpse of her hubby embracing the other guy.

I thought that, after that movie, a lot of women were going to begin to have anxieties about their own husbands and suspecting that they might be gay. If anyone ever thought that, because a man is married and maybe has children to boot, that he can't be gay—well, that idea has gone the way of the idea of a flat earth.

I once heard a saying, "Married at 20, gay at 30." An awful lot of gay men my age (late 60s and thereabouts) have been married, many formerly and undoubtedly some currently. I've heard it said that, "back then"—that is, when we were younger—they were pressured by family to get married, or they felt it was "the thing to do," or they themselves had not realized their homosexual leanings.

So it was not uncommon for gay men in, say, the 1960s to enter into heterosexual marriages, and certainly that hasn't stopped. A man may not yet recognize his attraction to men; or he may want to "pass" and/or he gets married for the sake of the myriad advantages of, shall we say, doing the majority thing--like even having a political career!

This blog even received a comment from a woman who said she suspected her husband was gay but needed to come out, and she wasn't sure what she could do to help him.

The online magazine Huffington Post has reprinted an article from Christwire.com titled "Nine Signs Your Husband Is Gay." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/18/signs-your-husband-is-gay_n_687160.html#s128442&title=He_Has_A Evidently Christwire is a satirical site, and thus, if taken literally, their "nine signs" would be ridiculous.

But, as with a lot of satire and stereotyping, there may be a germ of truth in those "nine signs." At any rate I think it's very interesting, and doubtless a sign of our post–Brokeback Mountain times, that many modern married women might at least be considering the possibility that they could be married to a man with gay leanings.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein