Buxton, who has a doctorate in education, wrote the self-help bible on the subject, ''The Other Side of the Closet: The Coming-Out Crisis for Straight Spouses and Families'' (John Wiley & Sons, 1991). There are now 65 around the country, and five overseas in addition to the online forums and chat rooms. Buxton, who was married for 25 years to a gay man, began organizing face-to-face support groups for straight spouses in the late 1980's. In the five days after the McGreevey press conference, the daily traffic reached 1,187.ĭr. On a normal day, according to Amity Pierce Buxton, the network's 75-year-old founder, about 300 people visit the site, which has a public forum and several subscriber-only chat rooms. The Web site has been a very popular place since Mr. Many of them have flocked to the Web site of the Straight Spouse Network, a support group for people whose spouses turn out to be gay or lesbian. McGreevey's indecipherable half smile touched a nerve among others who have had similar experiences. McGreevey has known that her husband of four years is gay, although a report in The Star-Ledger of Newark this week quoted a friend of hers, Lori Kennedy, as saying that she learned only three days before his speech. McGreevey of New Jersey and Dina Matos McGreevey, stood before a national television audience as he revealed that he is gay.
More often than not, these experts say, the gay partner has an inkling before marriage but is determined to make a go of what he or she believes society considers a ''normal'' life.Īnd more often than not, these experts explain, man and wife truly love each other, enough that a fraction of these marriages never break up because the spouses redesign the relationship and live as if friends or siblings. ''Anyone can search the Internet and discover a lot about their spouse.''ĭenial has historically been easier to sustain in marriages involving a closeted gay spouse, marriage counselors and therapists say, because of the ambiguities of sexual orientation.
Sheenah Hankin, a psychotherapist in New York City. ''The age of privacy is over and with it the ability to sustain denial,'' said Dr. That means, counselors and lawyers say, that for the growing numbers of spouses conducting clandestine lives online, the risk of disclosure is higher than ever before. But an e-mail discussing condom use for the purposes of safe sex is far more difficult to justify. Mental health professionals and matrimonial lawyers say that many marriages, involving both heterosexuals and homosexuals, are collapsing under the weight of documentary evidence left behind on computers, just as computer records are increasingly tripping up business leaders, employees and others who forget that these are communications not easily denied.Ī condom found in a gym bag can be explained away relatively easily: the guy in the next locker must have dropped it. But in the age of the Internet, the blinders can be yanked off with the flick of a finger. Once women like Jennifer might have spent decades in the limbo of ignorance or denial, while their husbands explored their sexual orientation and lived furtive double lives. (Her husband confirmed her account but asked that their last names not be used to protect his identity.) ''Had it not been for what I found on the computer, I might still be in my unhappy marriage,'' she said. Jennifer doubts he would have come clean on his own, at least not so quickly.
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But when they talked later, her husband confessed to having a series of one-night stands with men from the time he was 16, she said. ''There was no concrete evidence he had cheated he could have been curious or whatever,'' Jennifer said. The sheer volume of what she had found was convincing, although circumstantial. In the darkened room, lighted only by the computer screen, she got down to business, opening each and every Web site and taking copious notes for the confrontation that would follow. She remembers a dizzying rush of emotion and then feeling numb. But suddenly that seemed an inescapable conclusion. Jennifer, now 29, had never suspected that her husband was gay. But it also solved a mystery: why marriage to her childhood sweetheart had been so unsatisfying. What she found there - 30 gay pornography sites and chat rooms - astounded her. JENNIFER's infant son was tucked in for the night and her husband was at work when she logged onto her home computer in Port Huron, Mich., looking for the forgotten name of a travel Web site she had used earlier in the day.Ī few simple keystrokes, nothing geeky, took her to the history box on the Internet browser, a listing of recently visited Web sites.