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I'm sure that some of you who know us -- and probably some who don't, as well -- have been asking yourselves recently, "Just how is it that someone who's been happily married for a decade and has three kids can suddenly up and decide that he's gay?" And undoubtedly, not far behind that comes the related question, "Why is Joy staying with him now that he has?"
Well, I don't know that it's possible to answer those questions in any way that will really make sense to anyone who isn't us, but maybe if I just tell our story, things'll be at least a bit more comprehensible.
First and foremost, I didn't "decide" to be gay. It wasn't a decision. It was a realization. It still seems a bit strange even to me, but the truth is that I've been gay all my life; I just didn't know it. At a very young age, I so completely internalized the message that being gay was "wrong," that I wasn't able to admit, even to myself, that I was.
For the first 25 years of my life, so far as I can recall, I never once doubted that I was straight. Looking back, there were a lot of clues that I really wasn't, and it was not at all unusual for people who met me to assume initially that I wasn't. But I never doubted it myself.
It was only after I left the Air Force in 1988 that the internal programming, so to speak, began to break down. It was while living for a few years in California that I first began to consciously realize that I might not be quite as straight as I'd always assumed. But nothing came of it. In June of 1991, before I had a chance to really experiment with other possibilities, I moved to Omaha.
Only a few days after arriving in Omaha, I met Joy. A year later, we were married.
Early in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Ford Prefect asks Arthur Dent, "How long have we known each other?" Arthur responds, "Er, about five years, maybe six. Most of it seemed to make some kind of sense at the time." That's sort of how I look back, now, at the first nine years of my life with Joy. I was happy; I had the life I thought I wanted. But eventually, due to a variety of factors (both economic and personal), a mild depression settled in, which contributed to a growing "wanderlust." Eventually, my curiosity about my own sexuality, which I'd all but ignored for a decade, came back to prominence.
In November of 2001, I had my first (and for a long while, only) set of encounters with another man. I'd expected that they would allow me to finally settle in my mind the question of whether I was straight or bisexual. What I hadn't expected was that they'd open up the "mental floodgates" and eventually allow me to recognize something I'd never even suspected before.
(On a side note, to be blunt, yes, I cheated on Joy. I'm neither proud of nor happy about that fact. What happened shouldn't have happened, but at the same time, while I don't want to sound like I'm trying to make excuses for myself, Joy and I have both come to realize that it was probably inevitable. One way or another, something would eventually have brought an end to my self-delusion, and we'd have found ourselves facing the issues we're now working through. And there really isn't any "good" way for it to have happened. So it's probably just as well that it's done.)
It took a few months, but I finally began to understand what had happened and was happening, and began talking with some close friends. What surprised me most at the time was the complete lack of surprise exhibited by those I "came out" to, whether gay or straight themselves. Apparently, most of my long-term friends had pegged me as a closeted gay long before I knew I was one. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that that really wasn't surprising, after all. There were a lot of things about me and about my life that had never quite "added up" before.
Obviously, the changes in me were affecting my relationship with Joy. I was at the time working a lot of night shifts, and Joy was working normal day hours, so much of the growing strain was masked by the tensions our incompatible schedules created. But I knew there was no way I could keep the truth from her for long, and knew that our relationship could never last if I tried to. The changes in me, and the distance that had grown between us, were already becoming hard to miss. So in April of 2002, I finally made myself tell her exactly what had happened and why.
I was quite nervous, of course. I'd been trying for well over a month to figure out the "right" way and time to tell her, but obviously, there is no "right" way or time. And I was nervous, as well, about what her reaction would be. I didn't really know what I wanted, but I knew that I wanted to remain an active part of the kids' lives, and here I was about to hand her all the ammunition she'd need, if she chose to use it, to make sure that I wouldn't.
Needless to say, Joy already knew that something was going on, even though she didn't know what. She assumed when I told her we needed to talk that I was getting ready to ask for a divorce.
I won't even pretend to understand everything she felt when I told her, "I'm gay." For a long while, I thought I could imagine what she must have gone through, but I've since realized that there's no way I can ever really understand. All I know for sure is that I hurt her more that day than I've ever hurt anyone else in my life.
Even through the initial shock and anger, though, she was firm in her belief -- as we both still are -- that the kids need us to stay together as a family. And so we determined to find a way to work things out.
The next sixteen months were interesting, to say the least. We still loved each other, though the nature of that love obviously changed quite a bit. (The last time we were physically intimate was on our tenth anniversary. I think I was hoping that I could somehow put things back the way they'd been, but the attempt was doomed to failure.) In many respects, our day-to-day lives didn't really change at all; on a deeper level, though, I doubt either of us could have imagined a few years earlier just how much our lives would change.
In late July of 2003, Joy told me that she'd been reading a book about straight spouses, The Other Side of the Closet, and that it had been helping her to understand and cope with the challenges we were facing. She also mentioned that she'd found and joined an online support group for wives of gay and bisexual husbands, and suggested that I might want to look for something comparable. While I'm not as involved even now with online support groups as she's been, I've joined a few, and they've been of some use.
For over a year, Joy and I had been existing in a sort of stasis. We'd known our situation wasn't stable in the long term, but Joy hadn't yet been able to articulate her needs, and I'd been hesitant to do anything that would further disturb the status quo. Finally, though, we were starting to move forward again.
In some respects, Joy actually became more anxious for me to start making connections within the gay community than I was myself. It wasn't that she was trying to push me away, of course; rather, it was a simple matter of practicality. She'd really begun to consider the question of who she was, and had realized that I needed to do the same. We couldn't really decide who we were as a family, after all, until the more fundamental questions of who we were as individuals were a bit more settled.
Over the next few months, we began to come to terms with the essentials of our new life. We became members of the Omaha chapter of PFLAG ("Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays"), and met a few people whose situations were, in some way, similar to ours. But while I'd been "out" to those with whom I work for quite some time, and Joy had shared her story with a few close friends, in a larger sense, we were still "hiding." Those outside of our immediate circle knew nothing; we'd deliberately not told our families or more casual acquaintances.
It was in September that that changed. Joy told me one morning that she'd finally realized why she was still having trouble dealing with things, even though she'd by then come to accept the reality of our situation and the changes in our life. She is (as I am, when you get right down to it) an "in your face" sort of person; she's never particularly cared what people think of her, and has never been one to hide who she is or to pretend to be anything other than who she is. And yet, for the past year and a half, that was exactly what she'd been doing.
We realized then that we had to stop hiding. We are who we are, our relationship is what it is, and we have to deal with life accordingly.
So we began contacting various family members and friends to let them know what had been going on, and in many cases, to explain why we hadn't been much in contact for a while. Not all of the conversations went as well as we could have hoped, of course. Some folk were perplexed by Joy's decision to stay. Others just didn't understand why we weren't willing to keep pretending to be a "normal" family and continuing to hide our true nature. A few simply couldn't comprehend the fact that I'd suddenly "decided" to be gay. (All of which, of course, brings us back to why I'm writing this account in the first place.) But none of the conversations went really badly, either; at least, no one disowned us!
October 11, 2003, was "National 'Coming Out' Day." By then we'd already spoken with most of our friends and relatives, anyway, so I took the opportunity to post an "open letter" on our family Web site. We were officially "out" as a mixed-orientation couple.
Though we had originally intended to wait a few years before telling our kids, we decided to go ahead and "come out" to them immediately, as well. They're not really old enough to understand some of the specifics, but since we're becoming more open and more active in the GLBT ("gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender") community, we realized that it would be hard to hide things from them for long. We also figured that it would probably be easier for them to understand the nature of our relationship when they're older if it's something that they grow up knowing about instead of something that comes as a surprise. So we told them. We also joined a local group of gay and lesbian couples with children, largely so that they can meet other children in similar situations.
In point of fact, they've taken it all rather well. Cassandra seems to understand more already than we'd expected her to, and has no trouble with any of it; she was a bit upset when we replaced our queen-size bed with a pair of twin beds, but more because it made "group snuggling" difficult than because of the change in our relationship that it represented. And all three kids seem to like the idea of maybe having "extra daddies" some day.
It goes without saying that we're staying together in part because of the kids. Obviously, we both still love them, they love both of us, and they need for us to continue being a family. But that's not the only reason we're still together.
Though our relationship has changed a great deal, Joy and I still love each other. We've always had a strong friendship, and a great deal of respect for each other, and we still do. In some ways, we feel almost more like siblings than like a husband and wife these days, but saying that doesn't really explain things very well. Our relationship was never primarily about sex, though, and so the loss of sex didn't destroy it. It just forced some changes. The relationship has evolved in ways neither of us could have anticipated, and become something that's actually a bit difficult to describe, but it's just as strong now as it's ever been, if not in fact even stronger.
The life we're living now isn't one that either of us expected even just a few years ago ever to be living. It's not one that either of us would likely have chosen, had the choice been ours to make. But it's the one we have, and we're going to make the most of it.
And make no mistake; I'm well aware of just how lucky I am. Of the millions of mixed-orientation couples in the United States, only a handful survive post-disclosure. And many of those that do survive, do so only by hiding or ignoring "the gay thing." Joy is a rare and exceptional woman. The fact that she's not only accepted the changes in our life, but has actually embraced them, is astonishing. And I will forever be grateful to her.
Of course, it took us a while to get to where we are, and our journey is by no means at its end. We both have goals for the future. I'd like to become more active in the local GLBT community, and to be perfectly honest, I'd like to find someone in addition to Joy to share that involvement with. For her own part, Joy has been taking steps to start a local support group for straight spouses, and is also looking toward starting a chapter of COLAGE ("Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere") here in Omaha.
But wherever our journey ultimately leads us, we've both already managed to learn a lot more about ourselves and about each other along the way. We're both much happier now with who we are, individually and as a couple, than we've been in a long time. And now that we're "out," we can just be who we are, no matter who is watching or listening.
And there you have it. That's how it is that I "up and decided to be gay," and why it is that Joy's still with me. If you can understand, great. If you can't, well, meaning no insult, when all is said and done, it's our life, not yours. The only people who really need to understand it, are Joy and I.
-- Darryl C. Burgdorf (February 2004)
(If you're interested in more general information about mixed-orientation marriages, two excellent books are The Other Side of the Closet: The Coming-Out Crisis for Straight Spouses and Families by Dr. Amity Pierce Buxton and Just Tell the Truth: Questions Families Ask When Gay Married Men Come Out by Dr. Terry L. Norman. Joy and I found both to be extremely helpful and informative.)