At long last, President Obama is taking action on his campaign promise to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  On Tuesday, February 2 he and Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike  Mullen will appear before Congress and reveal the plan they have for fully integrating homosexuals into the armed forces.  The president is expected to issue an executive order halting the dismissal of service members who are gay when they are outed by a third party.

What does this have to do with straight spouses?

It means that those of us who are married to closeted homosexuals serving in the armed forces no longer need to ignore our own needs for counseling, disclosure, or medical testing for fear of the secret being discovered.  For families of closeted service members, disclosure means losing valuable income and benefits.  It means that a straight spouse cannot be blamed for ruining their spouse’s career and the family finances if they get help for themselves.

Oh good.  After tomorrow, we can talk.  About ourselves.  About our families.
Is Congress listening?  Maybe, we’ll see.

The Straight Spouse Network is the pre-eminent support group in the entire world for heterosexual husbands,  wives, and ex spouses of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered people.  Like it or not, we are family.  We are a peer to peer support group that functions in complete confidentiality.  We also are a resource for counselors and therapists who work with families to resolve the issues that are presented when a closeted spouse comes out, or when a straight spouse discovers that their husband or wife has a same sex attraction.

In the days ahead, the straight spouses and families of closeted members of the military will be needing help to make the adjustment to life outside the closet.  The Straight Spouse Network is here to provide that direct assistance to them, and to be resource for those family services professionals who will be working with them.

Holidays are wonderful times for families to get together and renew relationships, celebrate traditions, and share the latest news.  For straight spouses undergoing the stresses of divorce, or the recent discovery that a spouse is gay, those same holidays can be awkward and painful.  It can hurt to see traditions discarded, or to be excluded from family gatherings, or be told that the spouse has to be excluded or included.

Some new dilemmas for straight spouses include basic things, like “whose house are we going to for dinner and who will be there” to “telling the kids mom is gay” before or after the holiday, to a lack of money to keep up all the traditions.  They can be as complicated as “will Daddy bring the boyfriend to Grandma’s this year” or taking the kids shopping to buy a present for Mom’s girlfriend.  A straight spouse might feel a rush of anger at seeing an expensive present that was lavished on a boyfriend or girlfriend, that was never considered for them, or seeing the gay couple take the trip of a lifetime that the spouse had thought would be a special second honeymoon.

Then there are always the friends and relatives who have their own opinions about things – and express them loudly.  That could mean saying negative things about the gay spouse in front of the children, or a tentative hint around the kitchen table that “you can still be married, just live together like brother and sister”.  It can be the brother in law who keeps asking “ya want me to fix his car?” or the cousin who just CANNOT believe that this is true, and YOU must be mistaken.  Add to this family stew a gay spouse who is worried that nothing will be the same “because I’m gay and nobody accepts that”,  and your happy holidays turn into an occasion of dread.

How about those friends who are determined to be fair and friendly and invite you both to a party?  You venture out, and find your spouse there with a date – and the group of friends is affirming “coming out” but ignoring how devastating this is to you.  Isn’t it funny how the rules for divorcing heterosexual couples don’t apply to us?

The best advice we have for the holidays is to view them as an opportunity for new traditions affirming you and your values. Accept that things will be different.  The first year it is a discovery process, finding what works and what doesn’t.  After that, it does get easier.

Don’t be afraid to set boundaries with friends and relatives, and establish what is appropriate and what is not.  Tell the brother in law to fix YOUR car since you need help.  Tell the cousin that believe it or not, it’s true and you’re not discussing it right now. Tell the person who wants you to stay married that you can’t.  It really is not possible to ignore a gay spouse’s sexual activity, no matter how discreet.  It is different.  And if you are staying together, you are making your own rules.  Just don’t totally alienate people who truly love you.  Remember, they are struggling to understand what has happened, and want to know how to help you.

Holidays can be a bridge that we cross from an old life to a new one.  Sometimes it is a painful bridge, but we do get there!  The important thing is to keep going.

Tracy Lawanda

We’d like to thank Tracy Lawanda for her excellent interview of Amity Buxton on her blog Aword4U. The interview was featured on BlogtalkRadio.  Amity appears approximately 10 minutes into the show. This is a Christian show, and Tracy asked a lot of great questions of Amity. Much of the discussion centers around truth in marriage.

Amity tells the story of her own marriage, and also of the history of the straight spouse network. What is interesting in this interview is that they discuss a variety of situations, such as marriages that stay together, the number of men who seek support after learning their wives are lesbians, and how others can support the straight spouse. Some of the more difficult questions concern straight women who blame themselves for their husband’s homosexuality, and that homosexuals cannot change their orientation. Learning to figure out who you are, and what you value, and finding the support of those who have gone before you in this situation is vital to healing and moving forward. This discussion is very frank, and covers many of the questions that people have about how a straight person can wind up being married to a gay person in the first place.

The Straight Spouse Network is unique in that we support all straight spouses, male, female, young, old, married, divorced. We come from all walks of life, different religions, cultures, beliefs. Yet, we have this common bond of understanding the process, experience, and unique problems of being married to a gay person who is closeted, living on the down low, and the effect on us and our families.

Our thanks to Amity and to Tracy for spreading the word about the help and support we offer to all straight spouses.

We want to thank David Perry and Comcast Hometown Channel for the wonderful interview he did with Amity Buxton which appeared recently on the program “10 percent”. They discuss gay marriage, and the straight spouse experience.  Amity recounts her moving experience of her first marriage, and the state of closeted denial which her husband maintained.  This led to the founding of the Straight Spouse Network, because there was no support at the time for straight spouses.  It’s an interesting interview, and will give you some perspective on where we come from.

Since those early days, the Straight Spouse Network has developed internationally, while still functioning on a shoestring.  We reach diverse groups of people, with different experiences and solutions for coping, healing, and moving forward.  We use networking and building bridges to reach straight spouses, and offering peer support where none existed before

We’ve said it before – we’ll say it again – we are so grateful to Amity for telling our story, even in those days when there seemed to be no one willing to listen.

It’s a compelling interview.  You should watch it!

Miracles do happen.

Several years ago, a group of straight spouses had been meeting face to face and on line, and got together for food, fun, and fellowship at a home in Massachussetts. They shared stories, a few laughs, and a few recipes. And an idea came about – why not a Straight Spouse Network cookbook, to save these great recipes and share some good things.

After quite a bit more collaboration, involving straight spouses from around the world, that cookbook is a reality – and selling very well. Str8 From the Kitchen is a compilation of over 200 recipes, and some are quite unusual. If you are looking for a good cookbook with recipes for feeding a crowd, hearty soups and stews, tangy salads and appetizers, and of course, decadent desserts, then this is the cookbook for you.

You can also just feel the good times coming from this book, and the wonderful experiences and friendships that have been shared.

You’ll find out how to make enchiladas, albondigas, and ban bao. Make your own granola, wassail, salsa, and saffron sauce. Ever wonder what to do with salmon? Find recipes here.

Learn why fruitcake is a beverage among some straight spouses!

To order, go to our website and click on the “Donate Online” Button at the top left hand corner. Enter your name and address, and the notation that the donation is for the cookbook. The cost inside the USA is $15, including shipping. For international orders, please contact us for shipping rates.

Among str8 spouses, getting healthy is a big interest. Mentally healthy, emotionally healthy, physically healthy. It’s part of healing.

Some of us go on diets, some take up exercise. Some of us who have been exercising all along set new goals for ourselves. Choosing a healthy way to release energy, build strength and endurance, release endorphins has a lot of benefit for us. We find we do have control over some part of our lives – an often ignored part of our lives – ourselves.

Healing and moving forward for ourselves and our families is not an easy task. It can take years to accomplish. But we do it.

For some, getting on the path to healing means getting out of the way of abuse first. All the focus on forgiveness, healing, moving forward does no good if you keep getting rewounded. Being safe – emotionally and physically – is very important for building the strength necessary for healing. That means setting and maintaining healthy boundaries, distancing ourselves from our gay spouses, exes, and soon to be exes, and building our own separate life, centered around our needs and those of our families. Co parenting and custody issues concerning children can sometimes make this necessary distancing impossible, especially where abuse is involved. That’s where the support of family and friends is very important, affirming the good and healthy things you do for yourself and family.

Reclaiming old friendships, making new friends, and planning on time to enjoy social events, company, fun, laughter, and new celebrations are all great ways to help us heal and move forward. For some, a renewed emphasis on spirituality, religion, or a new direction in faith leads to a centered wholeness that heals the spirit. For others, it’s a new job, new residence, new city. Renewal is also part of healing.

Amidst the lingering anger we experience, we often mourn the relationship, marriage, and lifestyle we lost. We thought we were going to grow old with our spouses in a stable marriage – and it was not truly stable, and for some of us not truly a marriage. We develop issues with trusting others and ourselves, nottrusting our senses and expections, even though others may just take some things for granted.Working through anger and depression involves acknowledging how we feel, and giving ourselves permission to feel and express it. For some of us, it takes years to learn how to do this, and let it go. For most of us, the hurt and anger comes back in ways that we least expect it. Building a happy, healthy lifestyle with friends, interests, activities that suit us is absolutely vital for keeping us from self destruction.

For straight ex-wives of gay men, harsh feelings and bad memories come up at the strangest times.

We lose weight, and buy new clothes. We try a new hair color, get a makeover. Then the memory comes back of the last time we bought something new,attractive, sexy – the memory of a husband not noticing, and then telling us it just didn’t make us look special, sexy, attractive. Or the memory of a husband recoiling and demanding to know why we were spending money and behaving foolishly.

For some of us, the weight came right back on. The sleek new clothes went into the closet, along with our own heterosexual female sexual expression.

After separation or divorce from a gay husband, we start to date again. We THINK the new guy is straight. He’s attractive, attentive, romantic – and the experience is very different from what we had in our marriages. And we wonder: am I missing something here? Is this real? Can I trust him – and my feelings? Sometimes we remember what our courtship with our gay husbands was like – we remember the mixed signals, the lack of response to our own sexy touches, kisses, setting the mood with music and lighting, unbuttoning a few buttons, wearing a short or slit skirt – we remember how we didn’t know what that was about then, but we know now. We remember we thought then that he was just being “uptight”, or “reserved” or “naïve” or even that he was respecting us by being “good”. Or we thought it was us – not being good enough. After all, we were in love, attracted to these men. It was outside our experience to think that anything in their behavior was related to being gay.

The memory comes back – and the anger, pain, self doubt. Even if we’re all past that, even if our new relationships are so different.

We think – “I should have known then”. And we ask ourselves the question “Is there something I don’t know now?” Some of us don’t know just how good we are – or were – or could have been. The older we are, the longer our marriages lasted, the more faithful we were, the more difficult it can be to move forward with dating someone new, starting a new relationship. So much of the ongoing supression of our own heterosexuality in our marriages has had an effect on our health, lifestyle, and appearance.

Part of recovering from marriage to a gay husband and reclaiming our own sexuality is to look in the mirror, accentuate the positive, discard the negative, and affirm for ourselves what we know is healthy, attractive, and gorgeous about us in the present. So go ahead. Lose the weight again. Go back to the gym. Buy the new clothes that are just a bit more daring than before. Try the new hair color. Fix your teeth, see your doctor, and if you’re inclined, see your plastic surgeon. It’s not crazy, selfish, frivolous or a waste of money to be a happy, healthy heterosexual female who enjoys being as attractive as she can be.

The profound anger and sense of loss won’t go away – it is a part of us. We can be healthy by acknowledging it, and balancing our new lives with the people, decisions, and things that fill us with happiness, self love, and satisfaction. When we do those things, our lives become filled with pleasant surprises.

     By Amity Buxton

It’s time to go back to the beginning, I think, to clarify why straight spouses need to be heard in the current conversations about social justice swirling around us. It is not because they are overlooked, which they are. Rather, straight spouses want desperately to share their wide lens on what happens to their families when their husbands or wives come out. Every family member — they, their gay or lesbian partners, and their children — is hurt by antigay sentiments and action, such as constitutional amendments and laws that limit legal marriage to that of a man and women.

Up to two million gay men and lesbians in the United States have followed the traditional idea that marriage is limited to a man and a woman and have entered a presumably heterosexual marriage usually without the straight spouse’s knowledge of their sexual orientation and often without the gay or lesbian spouse’s acknowledgment or realization. They marry because they truly love their fiancés and want to raise a family and also to meet societal expectations. Their faith communities, families, and society in general expect that marriage will occur in almost everyone’s life and that it would, of course, be with someone of the opposite gender. While many gay men and lesbians now do not feel a need to follow the traditional pattern, a number still do. So, don’t stop reading

Once they marry a straight person, most lesbians and gay men struggle to suppress or deny their same-sex attraction and become totally involved in the marriage and parenthood. However neither prayer nor practice changes their sexual orientation. For most, their internal struggle escalates, often reaching severe depression, until something happens to change the pattern. The children finish school and leave home, or they meet someone socially or at work, or the Internet invites them to explore and — poof! — their same-sex attractions are ignited or they unexpectedly fall in love. When they disclose (or are discovered), that they are really gay or lesbian, their straight wives or husbands are devastated, their children confused. Though some couples manage to stay married, because of their long history, love and close friendship, the good of the family, or the difficulty of separating, most divorce – and their children lose a two-parent home.

I lived that experience, watching my gay husband suffer without knowing why until he came out. As I then met and studied straight spouses across the country, I saw that they, like their gay and lesbian mates, were stigmatized, too, and so were their children. I saw, too, that their issues and those of their families were ignored and not understood, as they tried to protect their gay spouses and children from rejection in their churches or synagogues, jobs, schools or communities. That’s why I founded the Straight Spouse Network in 1991 to provide confidential personal support for straight men and women who faced this unforeseen family crisis for which they were not prepared.

Given these scenarios that repeat themselves across the country, the rationale for legalizing one man-one woman marriage as the only marriage form and a way to bring stability to the community is sabotaged by the reality of the family crises experienced by mixed-orientation couples. Neither spouse entering those marriages has high odds of fulfilling his or her hope of creating a lasting relationship and family. No children born to them can be sure their two parents will stay together.

Revealing the devastating impact on families of couples married under the one-man/one-woman societal imperative is the reason why straight spouses want their voices heard by proponents of laws designed to exclude gay and lesbian couples from marrying. Avoiding the perpetuation of this kind of harm to families is reason enough to pass laws that enable gay men and lesbians, no less than other adults, to marry any person to whom they wish to commit their lives and love, regardless of gender. Only then can the hopes of all spouses and families in the United States have the greatest possible chance of being fulfilled.