We get e-mail from teens who are gay but not out to their parents, and think they will probably end up doing what their parents expect of them – getting married and having children. Graeme addresses that issue in this essay. We are very grateful to him for his contribution to Authors Speak to Teens. His e-mail address is: GraemeAussie@hotmail.com

I have been asked to say something about myself, what motivates me to write, and what I think this means to the youth of today.

These are simple questions but with complex answers. If you feel that what I have written is incomplete then all I can say is that real life is not easily distilled down into words.

Firstly, a little bit about me. I am a forty-year-old married Australian with two young children. I have been married for fourteen years now. We have had a couple of times of crisis in our marriage but generally it has been a happy marriage that was further enhanced by the addition of our two young boys.

The biggest crisis that we have had to weather in our relationship, and one that we will probably be working on for the rest of our lives, is when I informed my wife that I’m gay. That was earlier this year.

At the time, I didn’t think this was a big deal. To be honest with myself, I couldn’t have married her without giving her some indication of my sexual preference first. This I did several months before we took our vows. What I didn’t understand was that it hadn’t sunk in. Apart from a couple of comments early on, this was a topic that just slipped away and we hadn’t discussed further for more than ten years. So, when I told her, she went into shock for the next three months. Being my usually observant self, I didn’t notice. It was only when I came home one night and found that she had had a nervous breakdown that we really started communicating. It seems that she had been worried that I had told her this as a prelude to leaving her. This was not her only concern, but it was her main one.

Given that I’m married, I have been asked if I’m bi-sexual several times by gay friends. This seemingly simple question is one that I have trouble answering. The problem from my point of view is that all of the labels Gay, Bi, Straight have connotations that are not applicable to me. Gay implies that I would be uncomfortable having sexual relations with my wife. This is not the case. Bi and Straight imply that I would be sexually attracted to women other than my wife. I am not.

I prefer to use the scale from 100% homosexual to 100% heterosexual. On that scale, I would rate myself as roughly 80% homo and 20% hetero. I believe this describes me more accurately that either the Gay or Bi-sexual labels.

To make a long story shorter, we have both re-committed to each other and our marriage still seems strong. Whether or not our marriage survives is now totally up to me. She is doing everything possible to show that she still loves me and I’m doing the same for her. For this to work I have to accept my sexual orientation but I also need to ensure that it does not control my life. As it would be if I were straight, fidelity is the key to our long-term success as a couple.

This brings me back to why I am writing and why I told my wife that I am gay. After all, if I was planning on staying (I was), why did I say anything?

I have known I’m gay since my early teenage years. Knowing, however, is not accepting. I only really accepted myself as a gay male at the start of this year. In my early years, it was fear that kept me from being myself. Fear of disappointing my parents. Fear of losing my family. Fear of being alone. By the time I was in my mid-twenties it had become a habit. I knew what I was but I suppressed it. I didn’t let it rule my life. Later on, as a married man, it was something that was in the back of my mind, but what was more important to me was that I didn’t hurt the one I love – my wife.

Despite this, I needed some release. For me, the internet was the perfect solution. I could explore my “gay side” without endangering my marriage. Avoiding chat-rooms and message boards like the plague, I eventually ended up at sites hosting gay fiction. An avid reader all my life, I took to reading gay fiction late at night. Late last year I found a succession of quality gay stories that found me re-evaluating the person that I was. I eventually decided that I was not being honest to either myself or my wife the way I was going. This lead to the events described above.

My writing is one of my new releases. It also played a part in telling my wife that I’m gay. After all, it would’ve been dishonest and cruel for her to find out by finding copies of my stories on our home computer. With my wife an active participant in the editing process, I am now exploring a part of my personality that has been suppressed for over twenty years in a way that doesn’t threaten the life we have established together.

In my story New Brother I was originally just exploring how the coming-out process affects those around the gay person. I quickly found that I was more motivated to write if I could also educate at the same time. Sometimes that education is just about Australia, as I recognise that most of the readers will be living overseas. At other times, I am trying to teach a lesson that I have learnt so many times in my life – there is always more than one side to a story. I’ll give you two real-life examples of what I mean.

I used to be the referee supervisor one night a week at one of the local basketball stadiums. As such I would often receive complaints about refereeing standards from disgruntled players and parents. One memorable time I was accosted by an angry parent who complained that their son had been knocked down on the court and that the referee had sent him off the court. I checked with the referee. I was told that the son was knocked down, got up, tried to punch the person who knocked him down, and was then sent off the court. The parent had not lied but without hearing the other side of the story I would have incorrectly blamed the referee for poor judgement.

The second example is partially hypothetical. As part of the process my wife and I are going through, she is attending a support group with other women in mixed-orientation marriages. One of those women has a husband who, for at least a year, has regularly gone out looking for male companionship, leaving behind a sobbing wife. They have an eleven-year-old son who is very much aware of how upset his mother is. From what I have been told, I’m confident that the son understands that it’s his father’s actions that are causing the pain. If he knows or learns that it is because his father is gay, I believe there is a good chance that he will grow up to be a homophobic young man. Could you blame him for this? He would be generalising from the behaviour of one individual, which is wrong, but for an eleven-year-old boy it is perfectly understandable. I for one will not condemn him if this scenario eventuates. The one I would condemn would be his gay father, not the boy.

What lessons can be learnt from this? The main one for me is that there is almost always an explanation for a person’s reactions. They are not always completely logical – I knew I was loved by my parents and I knew I could survive on my own, so why couldn’t I admit to them that I was gay? – but the reasons are usually there. Even homophobia has an explanation. In the example above, the boy would be reacting to a particularly horrific period of family life. More commonly it would be based on fear, ignorance or the inheritance of attitudes from the community (school, family, religious, etc).

On the topic of mixed-orientation marriages, I would like to offer some advice and insights from my experiences and from what my wife and I have learnt in our quest to keep our marriage together.

If you are gay, or believe you might be, please do not marry someone of the opposite sex.

My marriage is very much the exception rather than the rule. Over 90% of these marriages end in disaster. The straight spouse (male or female) is always devastated by the revelation. They can’t understand it and are in constant fear that their spouse will find someone “more sexually compatible” and leave them. Thoughts of suicide are not uncommon. Often they find out because their spouse has a same-sex affair. The normal reaction when you discover your partner is seeing someone else is inflated by the discovery at the same time that the partner is not who you thought they were. This is often fatal to the relationship. Even when there isn’t an affair, the feeling of betrayal is still there. They have just discovered that the person they married has been “living a lie”. Current statistics indicate that 85% of couples in a mixed-orientation marriage do not even try to stay together when the gay partner comes out of the closet. Out of the 15% who try, half still fail to keep a viable relationship.

When kids are involved, it can be even worse. Any divorce can be devastating to the children and acrimonious divorces are particularly bad. The gay parent will love their children, just like any other parent would, but if the child blames their gay mother/father for the breakup of the marriage then that love is not always reciprocated. With the sense of betrayal the straight spouse feels, these divorces are often bitter.

Someone asked me once what I thought about the idea of a gay person getting married just to have children. While I can appreciate the desire to be a parent – my two boys are the centre of my life – this is not the way to do it. It is incredible selfish and cruel to the partner who is effectively being used and abused. Find another way of becoming a parent that doesn’t involve causing this much pain to someone.

On a final personal note, I hope that mixed-orientation marriages, such as mine, are a cultural phenomenon that is dying. I believe they are caused because of the lack of open acceptance of GLBT in the society in which my generation grew up. The success of my marriage so far looks like it is the exception rather than the rule, but both of us are working hard to keep it successful. The vast majority of mixed-orientation marriages fail and fail miserably, hurting many people, especially when children are involved. If I could have been more confident in myself when I was younger, my life would have been very different. Almost certainly I would not have married.

Having said that, I once said to my wife that we can’t regret the things that could have been, we just have to celebrate the things we have.

I’m now off to continue my celebration.

Graeme

October, 2004