Straight Spouses - The Other Victims of "Ex-Gay" Programs

The preceding post took a second look at Robert Spitzer's recanting of his infamous 2003 study.  Having read the study and better yet a number of the reviews, one has to wonder how and why Spitzer ever believed anything that those in "ex-gay" ministries said.  Especially given the virulent anti-gay positions of these organizations, the fact that some of the study participants made their livelihood by claiming to be "ex-gay", and the - in my opinion -  extreme psychological problems of many who had been brainwashed and traumatized by religious doctrine from their youth.  It is fortunate that Spitzer finally has rendered the study worthless except in the hands of the most dishonest of the Christofascists such as those at PFOX and NARTH.   The victims of "reparative therapy" and "praying away the gay" are many.  But the victims extend beyond the men and women who submitted to the witch doctor like ex-gay therapy.  There is another large pool of victims who the Christofascists and "ex-gays for pay" care nothing about: the straight spouses of gays who in self-denial marry and try to conform to the demands of church and society.  In my own case, I will always feel some level of guilt for deceiving my former wife even though I was deceiving myself as well.  I have three wonderful children that I don't regret, but my former wife deserved better.  All of the straight spouses deserve better.  Yet the charlatans of the ex-gay industry continue to victimize on a large scale.  Two posts here and here on Andres Sullivan's blog brought these other victims to mind.  Here are some highlights:

A reader writes:

Andrew, I've been reading your blog for about three years and feel like you're someone who can understand how I'm feeling right now. My ex-husband and father of my two oldest sons passed away of kidney cancer last November. We had been divorced since 1984 and hadn't spoken for the last ten years.

The gay marriage debate lately has had me thinking about him again and feeling so sad. How he tried so hard to fit into the mold society demanded and how much emotional pain and turmoil caused to all our families when he couldn't.

I always thought gays should be allowed to marry but didn't think it affected me personally. Now I know better. This is why we, as a society, must love and accept everybody the way they are and not the way we demand they be. I can't regret loving him because of the wonderful sons we have. I only regret not being the one he could trust with the truth of his life.

I'm crying now writing this. It's been 38 years since we married, 28 since we divorced and six months since he died, and I am still trying to finally have some closure.

This is the flipside of the social conservative debate. One of the great threats to successful marriage in this country is the way in which fundamentalism and homophobia coax gay people into straight relationships which are, at root, based on a lie. The human pain and wreckage this causes - to both gays and straights, and especially children - is immense. Yet so many on the right seem not to care or even notice. They just want us to disappear. It was so much easier when we didn't so obviously, you know, exist.

A reader provides the flipside experience of this post:

There are so many of these straight spouses of closeted gays out there still and they are the very real, and often ignored, collateral damage of anti-gay rights campaigns.  I was one of them once - a closeted lesbian married to a man. I'm not sure I'll ever completely let go of the shame I have about marrying someone while I knew stuffed way deep down, but could not accept, that I am a lesbian. Did I love him? I did. Passionately, though fleetingly. We too lasted 10 years before neither of us could take the distance my secret knowledge created between us.

Another writes:

I haven't been following the Dish like I'd prefer as I've ended my last semester of seminary, but I caught your post and the commentary at the end: "One of the great threats to successful marriage in this country is the way in which fundamentalism and homophobia coax gay people into straight relationships which are, at root, based on a lie." That struck a chord with me.  When I got to college and started sleeping around with guys, I still saw myself middle-aged and married to a woman with children. I was living and knowing one thing, but my fundamentalism and internalized homophobia made me plan to keep living a lie. Guys I hooked up were planning weddings sometimes. At least one of those has ended in a divorce. My experience of the ex-gay garbage was far more threatening to a potential marriage to a woman than my ability to marry my fiance.

The Christofascists say that homosexuality is a sin.  I would argue that what they cause to happen to countless gays and countless straight spouses is by far and away the bigger sin.   And as Andrew and his readers note, the "godly Christians" don't give a damn about the harm they cause.  In their quest to stamp out anything that demonstrates that their "inerrant Bible" is horrifically flawed they care nothing about others.  It's all about themselves and their intense desire to avoid having to think beyond what they were told as children in soul destroying Sunday school lessons.