When a married man comes out later in life, positive reactions can be heartening. Often entirely missing from this narrative though is the woman’s voice.
Megan Holgate couldn’t quite believe where she was. It was the height of the Aids crisis and she was in the waiting room of an inner-city STI clinic, frequented by those most at risk of HIV: gay men, injecting drug users, sex workers. Not, as she had been, a monogamous married businesswoman. She had felt “too ashamed” to ask her doctor for the HIV test. A positive result, back then, would have been a death sentence. In the clinic a friendly gay counsellor asked Megan to step into his room and asked her if everything was OK. No, she said. No, it absolutely was not.
“That’s when I lost the plot,” Megan, now 52, tells me as we sit in a gastrobar on a rainy Sydney evening. “This poor gay guy was the target for all my built-up anger.” Megan threw her chair across the room at the petrified counsellor, first screaming, then crying, then sobbing, until – now outside Sydney’s Albion Street clinic – she vomited on the street. People gave her a cautious, wide berth. Her worried dad was on his way to pick up his distraught daughter, now lying in the gutter, covered in her own tears and vomit. “At that moment, a homeless man I’d stepped over on the way in reached out to gently check in on me,” Megan says, crying.
She softened; it was the first tender moment she’d experienced in a period of terrifying isolation. “I’ve never forgotten him,” Megan says. As her dad pulled up she opened her purse, fat with notes, and pushed them all into the bewildered man’s hands before being whisked home.
Megan is one of a potentially dying breed of women: those who married closeted gay men. As countries such as Australia and Britain progress towards LGBTQI equality, it’s a social phenomenon that could vaporise within a generation.
When a married man comes out later in life, positive reactions can be heartening. Rainbow garlands are unfurled. People applaud his bravery. They empathise with his struggle. They marvel at how he came through it and celebrate that he can finally be himself. They express gratitude we live in more enlightened times.
Often entirely missing from this narrative though is the woman’s voice.
She has had to face her marriage breakdown and potential infidelity and wrestle with feelings that her relationship was a sham. Then there’s the judgment of others who, sometimes openly, say surely she must have suspected – how naive can a person be? Occasionally she is blamed for being the person holding the man back from who he truly is or wants to be.
Just one service in Australia specifically exists to help these women: the Women Partners of Bisexual Men service, run by the Leichhardt Women’s Centre in Sydney. It’s believed to be one of the only government-funded services of its kind in the world. To mark its 25th anniversary, the service is releasing a new book, There’s Something I Have To Tell You, featuring 20 stories from the women’s perspective. One hundred women of all ages and backgrounds use the service, comprising group support and specialised individual counselling.
One woman, Annabel, flies to Sydney from Melbourne fortnightly especially for the peer group sessions. “A few times I was in foetal position bawling and had drank too much wine,” she says. “So I was extremely grateful for the group.”
Roxanne McMurray has been running the support service for 19 years. Daily she hears “heartbreaking stories” like Megan’s.
She says women present with depression, anxiety, sleeplessness, high blood pressure, eating issues and fears their children will be bullied. “Some women contact the service before their husband is even aware they know he’s gay,” she says. “Some women found out because they were diagnosed with HIV or another STI. And yes, some women say the group saved their lives; they were suicidal when they contacted us.”
Megan says a service like this would have been a “lifesaver”. She suffered a nervous breakdown after discovering her husband’s secret. “If I didn’t have our daughter, Lucy, I can understand how you’d be suicidal after that level of deception,” she says.
Steven, Megan’s husband, had been a high-flying, jet-setting schmoozer who rose from a socially conservative family in Sydney’s western suburbs to be a financial director on a seven-figure salary.
He first met Megan, his second wife, when she was 22 and he was 26. After their first date, he sent four dozen roses to her work. “It was OTT but I was swept away,” Megan says. “I grew up with real Aussie blokes – this was something I’d never experienced.”
After their wedding, when the couple were living in Hong Kong for work, Steven pushed her to have a baby, even though she wasn’t entirely happy in the relationship. Never once did she suspect he was gay. “We had a pretty normal healthy sex life, it’s not like it was once a year. If I had a dollar for everyone who asked: are you sure you didn’t know?” she says, sighing.
Eight weeks after their daughter Lucy was born, the relationship nosedived. “I thought he was having an affair, and created a big fight to get it out of him,” she says. “Finally he said, ‘I’m not attracted to you, I have some feelings towards men. I’m not gay but really confused and I think I need you to move back to Australia so I can work myself out.’”
Through tears, Megan describes her world collapsing. “I was a woman deranged,” she says. “I was devastated, yet somehow also relieved the problem wasn’t me, as he’d often made me feel.”
On the plane home, she took stock. “In 24 hours I lost my husband, marriage, home, friends, support group, career. And I had an eight-week-old baby.”
She later discovered her husband was on a flight the next day to the Caribbean with his male lover. “He was a pathological liar,” Megan says. “I was so angry – I could understand how a woman could kill her husband.”
A year later, Megan realised she needed to let go of the anger when she collapsed with internal bleeding caused by a stress-related ulcer. “I decided to stop hating him,” she says.
Steven got a new boyfriend, who Megan adored. “He was a beautiful man, and wonderful to my daughter Lucy,” she says.
Both Steven and his partner died of Aids-related illnesses.
Clearly distraught, Megan stops the interview as she describes watching the men become paraplegic, then die. “Such a waste. Me and my daughter are so sad,” she says. Lucy, now 24, hid at school the fact her dad was gay. “Now she’d be the coolest kid in school,” Megan says. “They’d go shopping; they’d have a ball.”
But she admits to hoping for a deathbed confession. “I always dreamed I’d finally get the truth. Why marry me? I don’t believe in bisexuality, I think he was gay,” she says. “When you love someone and you know you’re gay, you don’t marry them. That’s wrong, to me.”
Megan’s experience chimes with many of the moving stories in the new book, which aims to increase the reach of the Women Partners of Bisexual Men service – it will be sent to counsellors, family relationship services and lawyers across Australia.
Common themes emerge from their 20 stories. More than once the phrase appears that “he stole my life”. One woman, Beth, describes the discovery as “17 years stolen from me”.
The physical impact of the sheer shock on these women is confronting. Lucy’s hair fell out, she had tremors and experienced dramatic weight loss. “Everyone was telling me how great I looked!” she writes. “I kept thinking: I’m dying. The only man who’d ever been attracted to me actually hadn’t been, so all those horrible thoughts I’d felt about myself were actually true.”
Some describe feeling like widows; the men they knew were apparitions. And many of the men, emboldened by the sense of freedom and fresh excitement afforded them by discovering the gay scene, completely transformed.
Amal describes the impact it had on her children. “My sons’ friends would come over and ask, is your dad gay? The way he walked, sat, smiled, dressed – all changed.” Many times the women are left questioning: who is he; did I ever really know him?
Those who were gaslighted describe relief that they weren’t, after all, going mad for suspecting. Others, convinced the problem was their own inadequacy, describe similar complex relief. But that relief is often accompanied by anger.
Several women, half-jokingly, discuss hiring hitmen. When Amal discovered her husband had been bringing his secret boyfriend of five years to the house – even to sit at family dinners under the guise of a friend – she “called him a disgusting creature”, she writes. “They’re manipulative because they’re ashamed of who they are, but the woman pays the price.”
The insensitivity of celebrating the man’s coming out is something many women grapple with. “I get angry because everyone’s said to him how fantastic, aren’t you courageous, what a hero,” writes Beth. “I wanted to beat the living shit out of him for what he did to our family. There were no repercussions for him. My anger was mind-blowing.”
Similarly, Patricia took issue with the blokes who took her husband out for a beer so they didn’t look homophobic. “If he’d shot me, would they take him out for a beer?” she asks. “That’s what it felt like.”
Other people’s positive reactions to the coming out can cause unintended pain, such as in Lucy’s case. Her husband’s parents responded by saying he would always be their son. “That hit me hard,” she admits. “I realised yes, he’d always be their son. But I wouldn’t be their daughter any more.”
Some reactions are more surprising. Service manager Roxanne says a post-disclosure honeymoon period can happen, and sex begins again because it brings back emotional intimacy. Such was the case for Madeleine. “Interestingly, after it came out, we had a brief spurt of sex together. The first time it happened, I cried. It had been eight years.”
Just like many gay men do, their wives can go through denial periods, Roxanne says, believing they can work things out. For some like Val, they make a conscious or practical decision to stay; her husband was 72 when she found out.
Pam, whose main concern upon discovering was protecting her husband from losing his friends, also concedes she’ll probably stay with him. For her, it’s all about sacrificing one thing to get something else – in this case, a continuing family for her children. “I know my husband is gay, he can’t stop himself from being with men, it’s impossible. I’m realistic. We talk a lot.”
Elizabeth is reflective on how she ended up with her husband. “There’s a stereotype that closeted men seek out a certain type of woman because we have qualities of acceptance, tolerance, understanding, empathy – but even if it’s true, you don’t want to feel like you’re gullible,” she writes. She even picked him up from his first date with a man. Her anger wasn’t at him, but at his family and culture for not letting him be who he should have been in the first place: “It was like he didn’t know how to be gay.”
Roxanne remembers, as Australia’s marriage equality postal vote was happening, clients contacting the service asking: have you done it yet, have you voted? I ask her if any were no voters, given their experiences. “Absolutely not,” she says. “They were enthusiastic about creating a new world – so no other woman would go through what they did.”
Megan Holgate relates to that. She remembers being unable to go to Mardi Gras one year her colleagues invited her, as the sight of two men kissing was just too distressing. Today she cheers such affection: “I think, go for it. You’ve met someone you love; that’s what makes the world go round.”
Roxanne challenges me when I put it to her that this could soon be a social phenomenon of the past. “I think that’s a long way off,” she says. “People still go to beats [public places where gay men meet discretely for sex]. People still have private parts of themselves which don’t always coexist honestly with their public life.”
On that point, I recall the book’s most poignant line. It comes from Lucy, who – in her acute distress – did the most intrusive thing a person can do to invade another’s privacy: she found and read her husband’s teenage diary. She knew it wasn’t right, but was desperate for explanations.
“The way he described the boys: ‘he’s very handsome’, ‘he’s very muscular’. He probably didn’t know he was gay at the time,” she writes.
“It broke my heart to read the diary of a sweet young boy on the verge of making the wrong choice.
“And that choice was me.”
CREDIT :: Gary Nunn @ The Guardian
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