My Husband Hid His Truth For 7 Years Of Our Marriage Until One Night Changed Everything

During the last 22 years, the number of people who’ve said to me, “But you HAD to know he was gay, right?” exceeds a hundred by a good bit. 

And yes, there are some stereotypically ironic elements of the depth of my not-knowing, which I usually do my best to lean into when telling this tale, often as a way of inviting people to laugh with rather than at me. 

For his first birthday after we started dating, my ex requested a pink Oxford shirt and a tube of sun-ripened raspberry hair gel from Bath & Body Works. He went back to school after we split up and became an interior designer. He loved divas (when we were together, it was mostly Faith Hill and Celine Dion). He meticulously ironed ALL his clothes. ALL of them. Even his underwear. He had an alphabetized VHS catalog of “90210” tapes. Just yesterday, he texted me to let me know that the second track on Taylor Swift’s album was titled “Elizabeth Taylor,” which, to be fair, he did more because I’m as obsessed with Elizabeth Taylor as he has ever been with Taylor Swift, but there you have it. To be clear, I’ve known plenty of straight men who are interested in all of these things, and even more gay men who would be interested in none of them, but if you’re looking for signs I missed, they aren’t not present. 

The ironies deepen when you realize that the night before he got outed to me, I was dressed as Liza Minnelli at the annual Halloween on Halsted parade in Chicago’s historically queer Boystown neighborhood, where we lived at the time. We were with five of my closest friends, who were all gay men. 

After years of finding more inspiration and depth in literary studies than in most of the churches I’d attended, I had begun the long process of deconstructing from the conservative faith I was raised in. I was getting my Ph.D. in queer theory, which my friends and I jokingly referred to as “getting a Ph.D. in boys.”

If I’m being honest, there are a hundred different reasons I might have begun that degree, and even after taking 20 years to write about that time, I’m still not sure which one was most true. Was I trying to supercharge my deconstruction? Was I trying to understand my ex-husband? Was I trying to change him through that understanding? All valid guesses, but the fact remains that for all of my supposed expertise in theories of sexual identity, I didn’t realize until several years into our marriage that my first husband was gay and that he’d fallen in love with someone else.

What people assume when they assume I knew about my ex-husband’s sexuality varies from person to person, but here’s a short list of just a couple of things I’ve heard:

You must have known he was gay when you never had sex (we had sex all the time). 

Gay men who are otherwise only attracted to men are universally repelled by women’s bodies (see above).

Everyone always knows from childhood on whether they are gay or straight or bi or any of the dozens of other possibilities (no, they don’t).

The subject of my dissertation in queer theory was 19th century American poet Walt Whitman, whose most famous quote is arguably, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself / (I am large, I contain multitudes).”

For a little Judy Garland-looking kid who grew up in an extremely black-and-white religion devoted to the binary absolutes of right and wrong, heaven and hell, beautiful or plain, saved or damned, it’s impossible to overstate how much I clung to that beautiful gray complexity in Whitman — the shrug of the shoulders it conjured for me, the bird it flipped to the soul-killing need for rigid ideological purity.

And it was largely because of Whitman, largely because of Boystown, because of the boys I met in Boystown, because of the beautiful, beloved boy I married first, that I learned I could reject all that black and white I was raised with, and that my ex-husband and I could release each other from the hell our marriage had gradually become for us both. We didn’t walk into any kind of heaven after we got out, but boy, has each day since been better for us both.