One hour into Brokeback Mountain, Amy Jo Remmele began to cry, and not just for the woman
on-screen who was standing in a doorway in
Riverton, Wyo., watching her husband embrace a
man.
"When I saw that look in her eyes, I thought,
'Oh, yeah.' Even though I never saw my husband
with another man, I knew exactly how that woman
would have felt," says Remmele, a respiratory
therapist in rural Minnesota.
On June 1, 2000, Remmele, then 31, discovered
her husband's profile on the Web site gay.com.
The couple stayed up all that night weeping and
talking. Soon afterward, 10 days before she gave
birth to her second child, Remmele's husband
went off to spend a couple of nights with his
new boyfriend. "I tried to talk him out of it,
and he left anyway," Remmele says. "I was
devastated." Three months later, the couple
divorced.
Remmele—now married to a farmer who raises
cattle, corn and soybeans—is one of an
estimated 1.7 million to 3.4 million American
women who once were or are now married to men
who have sex with men.
The estimate derives from "The Social
Organization of Sexuality," a 1990 study that
found that 3.9 percent of American men who had
ever been married had had sex with men in the
previous five years. The lead author, Edward O.
Laumann, a sociologist at the University of
Chicago, estimated that 2 to 4 percent of
ever-married American women had knowingly or
unknowingly been in what are now called
mixed-orientation marriages.
Such marriages are not just artifacts of the
closeted 1950s. In the 16th century, Queen Anne
of Denmark had eight children with King James I
of England, known not only for the King James
Bible, but also for his devotion to male
favorites, one of whom he called "my sweet child
and wife."
Other women include Constance Wilde, Phyllis
Gates, Linda Porter, Renata Blauel and Dina
Matos McGreevey, wed respectively to Oscar
Wilde, Rock Hudson, Cole Porter, Elton John and
James E. McGreevey, the former governor of New
Jersey.
Although precise numbers are impossible to come
by, 10,000 to 20,000 such wives have contacted
online support groups, and increasing numbers of
them are women in their 20s or 30s.
On the whole these are not marriages of
convenience or cynical efforts to create cover.
Gay and bisexual men continue to marry for
complex reasons, many impelled not only by
discrimination, but also by wishful thinking,
the layered ambiguities of sexual love and
authentic affection.
"These men genuinely love their wives," says Joe
Kort, a clinical social worker in Royal Oak, who
has counseled hundreds of gay married men,
including a minority who stay in their
marriages. Many, he says, considered themselves
heterosexual men with homosexual urges that they
hoped to confine to private fantasy life.
"They fall in love with their wives, they have
children, they're on a chemical, romantic high,
and then after about seven years, the high falls
away and their gay identity starts emerging,"
Kort says. "They don't mean any harm."
Neurochemical triggers
Helen Fisher, a research anthropologist at
Rutgers University, says that human partnerships
are shaped by three independent neurochemical
brain-body systems, responsible respectively for
sexual attraction, romantic yearning and
long-term attachment.
"The three systems are very fickle. They can act
together or they can act separately," Fisher
says. This, she says, helps explain why people
can be wildly sexually attracted to those they
have no romantic interest in, and romantically
drawn to -- or permanently attached to -- people
who hold no sexual interest.
"Once the system is triggered, it's so
chemically powerful that you can easily overlook
everything about that person that doesn't work
for you," Fisher says "Even straight people have
fallen in love with people they could never make
a life with," she says.
This is cold comfort to women who lose not only
the men they love, but also their faith in how
to parse reality. "A lot of women feel that they
were just used as covers, but I know in my heart
of hearts he loved me," Remmele says. "You can't
fake the way he used to look at me.
"I had no suspicions whatsoever. He's very
masculine looking. It's not like he had Barbra
Streisand or show tunes on."
Kort, however, says that women should look
deeper. "Straight people rarely marry gay people
accidentally," he wrote in a case study of a
mixed-orientation marriage published last
September in Psychotherapy Networker, a magazine
for which this reporter is the features editor.
Some women, Kort says, find gay men less
judgmental and more flexible, while others
unconsciously seek partnerships that are not
sexually passionate.
But that sort of speculation infuriates Michele
Weiner-Davis, a marriage therapist and author.
"That's psychobabble," Wiener-Davis says. "A lot
of gay people don't know they're gay. So how in
the world are their spouses supposed to have
some sort of 'gaydar'?"
She continues, "Therapists should deal with the
real issues—the shock to her system, that her
husband wasn't who she thought he was and the
impact on her own identity."
In the months after the discovery, Remmele says,
her husband left her alone with the baby on many
evenings as he explored desires he had never
dared to acknowledge. "So many of the gay
spouses, they've denied themselves for so long,
and it's like they're going through
teenage-hood," Remmele says. "I don't know if
they really realize how much they're hurting
their spouse."
Some marriages survive
About two-thirds of the women who contact the
International Straight Spouse Network in El
Cerrito, Calif., eventually divorce, says Amity
Pierce Buxton, 77, a retired school
administrator who founded the group in 1992 and
has been researching the topic since 1986.
Despite their shock and their anger, many women,
especially those criticized by gay husbands for
being too sexually demanding, are relieved to
understand what was wrong.
The remaining third of those she has studied try
to preserve their marriages, Buxton says. Half
of those stay married for three years or more.
More than 600 such couples belong to online
support groups.
In a 2001 study, published in the Journal of
Bisexuality, of 137 still-married gay and
bisexual men and their wives, Buxton found that
most lived in suburbs and medium-size cities and
had been married for 11 to 30 years. Only tiny
percentages lived in rural areas, where family
privacy may be harder to maintain.
The survival of even a small minority of these
marriages calls into question the conceptual
shoe boxes into which human partnerships,
affection, attraction, commitment and sexuality
are often jammed. Describing their permutations
and combinations turns out to be much more
complicated than checking a box on a form
labeled "gay," "bisexual" or "straight."
Paulette Cormack, a teacher who lives in Napa,
Calif., has been married to her husband, Jerry,
a retired city planner, for 36 years. For 34
years, Cormack says, she has known that although
she and her husband are sexually active
together, his erotic desires otherwise focus
almost exclusively on men. "It's not easy, but I
truly do love him," Cormack says.
Jerry Cormack is now involved with another
married gay man, and Paulette Cormack has had
extramarital relationships. Neither has
explicitly discussed this with their son, who is
25.
They remain intensely committed to each other.
Last year, Jerry Cormack nursed his wife through
four months of cancer treatments, eventually
making a fully recovery.
"What is intimacy?" ponders Jerry Cormack, as
the couple sat in a coffeehouse in Berkeley,
Calif., after watching Brokeback Mountain with
others in similar situations.
He adds "I am totally committed on all levels to
Paulette. I felt so intimate with her when I was
caring for her during her cancer treatments—to me, that's a stronger expression of love than
whether I'm having anonymous sex with a man."
