Bi/Gay Heterosexually Married Men

Coming to terms with being gay or bi and coming out

Internalized homophobia is the biggest issue for bi and gay heterosexually married men. They have spent a lifetime being who others wanted them to be. They have sacrificed whom they are in an attempt to fit in and be accepted by society. To do this, they have rejected who they are. To be gay or even bi, and out would make them unacceptable to themselves and society as they see it.

In most cultures, shame is a large part of sexuality. Shame is feeling badly about whom we are, while guilt is feeling badly about what we have done or want to do. For most, there is an overlap between shame/guilt and sex/sexuality as they are deeply intertwined. To be out as a gay or bi man, some of that shame and or guilt must be addressed and worked through.

The Internet, tea rooms (public bathrooms where they have sex), bathhouses, and adult bookstores are full of men that have not come to terms with their sexuality or shame. They are lost in their erotic feelings of sex while desperately trying to avoid any real intimacy that would force them to really look at themselves and accept who they are. Burying the shame of being gay will only bring more pain as you make poor choices in partners or do other things that are self-punishing.

Spending time alone and being engaged in the community are both required to move through the process of redefining who they are as men, humans and gay. It takes time and feeling to move through the self-loathing and self hate. To be healthy sexually and emotionally, it is necessary to move beyond just the erotic as the motivation for male-to-male sex and move on to love as the foundation of being gay.

Too many guys want the fun of gay sex without any of the work of gay relationships. They cannot really comprehend a gay relationship. They have been socialized to believe that marriage or other serious relationships requires a woman. To be in a wrong sexually orientation relationship also means a lack of profound sexual attraction or excitement. Gay men can have sex with women just as straight men have been having sex with men forever, but it is not the same as sex with the appropriate gender of a man’s sexual orientation. I believe that in part it has to do with the age-old issue for men: the separation of sex and intimacy. Men are not socialized to combine the two. It is sometimes called the whore/Madonna complex. Sex is dirty and therefore not to be done with someone I love. I think more often it is the result of being emotionally incested by mom, and when someone gets very close emotionally, all or most sexual desire dissipates. If your model for intimacy is a parent who has consumed and overwhelmed you, then being loved is a bad thing since you risk being consumed and overwhelmed. By staying on an erotic or sexualized level, the risks of real intimacy are minimized.

Men who are coming out of a marriage rush out and look for their fantasy man/boy. They are in the heat of adolescent lust and mistake that for love and rush into a relationship. I have seen too many men who start to come out, find the “perfect” young man who fulfills all their fantasies, at least on a physical level, and think that they have fallen in love. They invest time and often a lot of money into keeping the boy. (I am using boy as a description of an older/younger relationship between two males of legal age.) Most of these dalliances end in sadness if not tragedy. I have heard from many who have blown a huge amount if not all of their retirement savings on this sort of “love.” Eventually, they retreat back into the closet or make huge generalizations about what it means to be gay, thereby solidifying their internalized homophobia. They run away, and stop trying and growing.

It is the equivalent of being three and stubbing your toe on a door. This experience causes you to decide that all doors are dangerous, and you are never going to go through one again. The journey of coming out really begins when you start telling people who you really are, and facing possible rejection because of it. This growing up is a right of passage for an out gay man, and it is one that was avoided by men who got married and have played the “fit in and belong game.”

Even as an adult, the beginning of the coming out process is still an adolescent mindset. Adolescents do not make the best decisions and neither will a man coming out without information or guidance. Being gay or homosexual or queer is about the combination of love and sexual attraction. Sex and love is not about sexual orientation; it is about lust and sexual expression. As a man comes out, he enters that painful exciting stage of an adolescent. He is experiencing what many of his heterosexual peers did in Jr. High and High School. It is a process that if short changed, is damaging to the man and any relationship he will enter into afterwards.

I strongly recommend that a man who was married to a woman wait at least two years after the divorce before getting into a serious relationship. That time is needed to reorganize one’s identity. Being in a relationship interrupts that process. We get to know ourselves best when we are alone. A serious relationship before the two-year maturation period is a distraction from oneself, especially in the beginning. Being gay is different from being straight. It is not just a matter of having a different hole to use. There is a very important process that must take place so that a man is able to fully be present in a relationship. A gay identity is not easy, especially for a man who has gotten all the societal benefits of being heterosexually married.

There is healing from the divorce. There is financial recovery. There is the discovery of a different world. There is moving beyond an adolescent fantasy of every available sexual permutation. There is a new set of values that relate to a different paradigm. There is facing the self-hatred that comes from being gay in a straight world. And that process of discovery and healing never stops, but it does get much easier to face and deal with and can become an exciting part of being a live and growing.

Reasons Gay Guys Marry Women and/or Paths to delayed coming out

1) Kids/babies have one big job while growing up. They have to figure out how the world works. So they try to understand and make sense out of what they encounter and see. One of the big ways they do that is to swallow the values and beliefs that their families, teachers and society tell them about being an adult. The good kid who downloaded all the programming about who he was supposed to be in life is typical of a man who comes out late in life. Not being a questioning or introspective type of guy, he will either stumble over a guy that he falls in love with or have a mid-life like crisis. It will be at this point in his life that he finally figures out that he is unhappy. Suddenly, his life will not be fulfilling, and it is then that he really starts to search inside of himself and starts the process where he hopefully will figure out what is missing.

2) Some men acknowledge that they have had feelings for other boys and men while growing up, may have even had several sexual experiences, but feels that he cannot still be loved and be gay. He may continue to have sex on the side or not, but he feels like an imposter as he acts and does what is expected of him even as he dies inside.

3) Another possibility is that as a boy he was sexually abused. Whether he identified what happened as abuse or not, he uses those feelings as the basis for the belief that he would not be having those feelings towards men if it had not happened to him. This man is deeply ashamed and full of self-loathing. He desperately wants to be normal and is angry about what was done to him as child and how it is keeping him from feeling/being normal.

4) Any and all of the above maybe tied to a religious belief that homosexuality is wrong. Buying into the belief system that who you are or what you do is bad is a common part of the self-hatred that makes up the core of how a gay man or boy may see himself. While religion can and does play a positive role in many people’s lives, when a religion tells its believers to hate ones self for being who they are, it is criminal, and creates unnecessary pain in the world.

Feelings and Emotions

Through out this section I will be addressing emotions and feelings. For some men this is a foreign concept. I believe that as a rule men are not taught an emotional vocabulary as they grow up. If a man does not have an emotional vocabulary, then he cannot develop that part of himself, and he is not going to be happy in any relationship. Society has made women the keeper of feelings, and both men and women and especially relationships have suffered as a consequence. Feelings start as a thought that is then felt in the body. Memories are feelings that are stored in the boy. Letting those feelings move through the body is the path to healing and release.

Feelings/emotions can feel good or bad, but they are never irrelevant or invalid. Trying to control them is usually a loosing battle. Traditionally men have been taught to ignore and suppress their feelings. But a man’s job to manage his emotions and hopefully understand them so that a he can learn more about himself and his experience of others in the world. How we feel when we are with someone, even casually, tells us a great deal about him or her. Deciphering this puzzle, of what does this response to them mean, makes the experience of being in the world much easier.

Again, psychotherapy maybe needed to assist discovering the emotional self. It can speed up the journey and make the process easier. It can help to have an ally. The discovery, work and feelings are the individual’s, but having a coach on the road will make the journey a lot less lonely and much faster.

Grieving your heterosexual life/identity

Coming out means losing a lot. It is possible to lose one’s family, both immediate and extended, one’s friends, home, job, etc. Coming out is never done without cost. At the very least, one’s self-image must be reinvented. This reinvention requires that part of one’s self-image must be changed. So part of that process is to grieve a loss. Each person grieves in his own way, but the stages of grief apply to most:

Denial: I am not different. This will be easy. Nothing will change except having sex with men rather than women. A relationship is a relationship, just different parts. No one needs to know, this is private.

Anger: This is not fair. This should not be happening to me. It messes up everything. People will not like me anymore. They will only see that I am gay and I can’t handle that. Why me? I did not ask for this. I don’t want it. I won’t do it.

Bargaining: I will only tell a few people. I will only have sex or be gay when I am out of town. I will only get sucked or do the fucking because that means I am not gay. I am not like that.

Depression: I don’t see a way to be happy. I can’t be gay. I can’t come out. I can’t stand this lie anymore. It is killing me. There is no happy ending for me.

Acceptance: It won’t be easy, but I will do what I have to do. I want to be happy; I want to be who I really am. I am worth it and people who love me will love me no matter what.

The loss can include loss of social status, loss of people, jobs, church/religion and money. Each part has its own process and consequence. Some pay higher prices to be who they really are and live in integrity. For the vast majority, the journey is worth the price and they become much better, happier people. But it is crucial that the stages of grief be felt and expressed in whatever way is appropriate for each individual.

Paths through grief:

• Writing/journaling
• Meditation/prayer
• Support groups
• Psychotherapy/counseling
• Reading others stories
• Art
• Physical expression of feelings

Celebrate

With every loss there is a gain. In this case, gaining a truer sense of self, a rightness with being in the world and most importantly we find out who really loves us for who we are, not who they thought we were or who they wanted us to be. So, be sure to celebrate the gain. It is like graduating. We should always take time to celebrate the good that comes, just as we need to acknowledge the losses.

Alone Time

I have mentioned the importance of being alone several times. At the end of any relationship and especially the end of a long term one, it is imperative that time be taken to re-discover you. To be in any relationship requires that a certain amount of reorganization of an individual to be part of a couple. When the relationship ends though divorce, death or separation, it is necessary to take a new inventory to see who you are now, because the person who existed before the relationship does not exist anymore. You have changed. You have much more life experience and you have seen the world through a different set of experiences. This is time to figure out who you have become so that when you are ready to couple again, you will know whom you are bringing to this new relationship.

Suggested Ways of Healing and Taking Inventory

• Live alone if possible
• Writing/journaling
• Meditation/prayer
• Psychotherapy
• Art
• Travel alone

Divorce

There is nothing fun about divorce. It is painful for everyone involved. Most men are glad to move on with their lives. By the time they decide to divorce, they just want it to be over. Many of the men that I have worked with feel a lot of guilt about the divorce, and often give away all of their assets to compensate for this guilt. It is important to be fair but not to give away the farm. Depending on at what age the divorce happens there are custody, childcare issues, retirement, and property settlements.

All too often the wife attempts to use the sexual orientation card in the divorce and it can be really ugly. That sweet woman you married may turn out to be your worst nightmare.

Be sure to get the best, most experienced divorce lawyer you can afford, especially someone local that understands the courts, the judges and the local prejudices and approaches. There is little to no advantage to stretching this out. Get it done as quickly and fairly as possible, but get it done. You new life cannot really begin until the old one is finished and until you are divorced, you cannot really grieve it or move on with your life.

I have heard many rationales for continuing the marriage on paper only. She needs the health insurance is the most popular one. If you were straight and divorcing or separated from a wife, the new girl friend would not tolerate your continuing to be married and frankly neither should you future boy friend. While you may not be emotionally tied to your wife, the piece of paper that binds you to her is an energetic link that keeps you from really being free and available for another. It is saying that my gay life is not as important as my straight life or commitment.

Bisexual

In some many ways it is much easier to be straight or gay than truly bisexual. The old joke is that if you are bisexual you have twice the chance of a date on Saturday night. The punch line is: but only if you are in the closet. Bisexuals are much less accepted than men on either end of the Kinsey scale.

What I mean by bisexual is a man who is both emotionally and sexually attracted to both sexes and able to be in love with either gender. Many straight men in my experience have sex with men. For them it is easy, there are no emotions involved and since it is with a man it does not feel like cheating to them. It is just sex, getting off, nothing more. So to be truly bisexual is rare in my experience and difficult.

Most bisexual men that I know are married to women. The pay offs in this society are so great to be straight that there is little incentive for them to deal with the extra stress and issues of being in a gay relationship. Recently, there has also been an increase in the number men in open and polyamorous relationships. This allows them to attempt to have various relationships as a way of trying to get their various needs met. I think it is acting with integrity.

At the core of insecurity for men and women is the question: “How can I satisfy the needs of my bisexual partner if I am not everything that they want or need?” The fallacy here is that any one partner can ever completely satisfy the needs of another. When we choose to be in a relationship, particularly a monogamous relationship, we are agreeing that this person meets enough of my needs to be happy. If a man cannot and knows that he cannot be happy enough in a monogamous relationship, then he should either not be in that relationship or should be clear from the beginning that he is only interested in an open or polyamorous relationship. Honest conversations in the beginning about what the relationship means and represents will save a lot of pain and betrayal later.

However, in my experience, many men attempt to have it both ways by having sex or relationships on the side without their wife’s knowledge. Hiding a relationship is to have shame about it. Being married to the woman and having the man on the side says that the male relationship is about sex, not love, with the exceptions noted above. Infidelity does not destroy relationships, dishonesty does.

Hetero-flexibility

This is a term that I have only heard in the San Francisco Bay Area. It means that a straight guy that is emotionally attracted to women and sexually is attracted to women but at the same time can enjoy the intimacy and occasional sex with another man. They are confident in their sexual orientation and open to pleasure and contact from someone that attracts their attention. I believe that a lot of the men that are soliciting sex from other men fall into this category. They maybe getting little to no sex from their wives and by having sex with man there is not chance of emotional entanglements and they don’t feel like it is cheating. They are not bisexual and they are not gay. They do have some type of homosexual sex once in while or frequently.

Redefining being a man

What is a man? This is a question that haunts straight, gay, bi, men and transsexuals. We strive to answer it as best we can, given whatever roles models we grew up with. Many years ago when I was managing convenience stores, I had a handsome Latino vendor that came in one day and announced that his girl friend was pregnant, and that he was now a man. One of societies prejudices against gay men is that they do not procreate, and since they don’t, gay men are not really men.

You will have to decide what it means for yourself. I think that as a whole we have moved beyond the John Wayne, strong, tough, unfeeling manhood stereotype, but each man must find his own way in life. Can you be a man and get anally penetrated, or perform oral sex on a man? To accept or come to terms with what it means to be a gay man, may and probably will mean, grieving what you thought made a man. As we let go of our fantasies and ideas about who we are, then grief is a natural process that follows.

For most being with another man emotionally, sexually and physically, means that you do not have the defined gender roles of a man and woman, either sexually or practically in a relationship. Most men are to some degree sexually versatile and who does the cooking, dishes, cleans the house or does the year work has to all be negotiated, it is not just assumed based upon gender what the role is going to be. So does trading roles make you a partial man? Personally, I think that being a man is about knowing and expressing all the parts of you, the masculine as well as the feminine, the top and the bottom, all defined as a fully integrated you and how you choose to express that. Being gay is an interesting journey, one with less societal rules, and thus more room for creative exploration.

Online Game

Shame is a poor substitute for self esteem. Men who post personal ads without a face are telling you they are a shamed of being gay. And if the ads are just a dick or naked pictures with no face, they are telling you that being gay is just about sex. They have not fully created a three-dimensional self-picture of being gay.

The Internet is by far and away the method of choice now for hook ups (finding sexual partners). When reading profiles, read between the lines. Look for what is not there. Ask questions. If a question is asked and not answered that is a bad sign. The same thing can and will happen in a relationship or hook up. What else are they not telling you? I think it is called sins of omission.

Is the picture current? Is your picture current? If the profile picture is 10 years or 40 lbs out of date, then they are lying to you and themselves. They have not accepted themselves so they are not ready to be in a relationship. Pictures in a profile should be updated at least yearly. It is pretty easy to take a new picture.

Is there more than a one sentence description, or is all of the description about the kind of sex they are looking for or the kind of body they are looking for. I call the later “parts shopping.” They are not looking for a person; they are looking for the fantasy parts that will make them happy at least for 10 minutes or so. Having a pretty boy friend will not make you happy. I might distract you a while, but in time it won’t work. There has to be more to the person and the relationship than the external appearance.