Greetings from New Jersey, The Landfill of Enchantment, that fairyland of Super Fund sites and Tony Soprano.
On August 12th our chief executive, Governor James McGreevey, convened a press conference and, after a few introductory sentences, announced that he was “A Gay American”. Many people were stunned by this revelation, many others pretended to be stunned. Within minutes of McGreevey’s blowing the hinges off his closet the talk radio callers from Woodbridge, where McGreevey had been mayor, began dishing the dirt. There were tales of McGreevey frequenting gay trysting places and of frantic late-night efforts to rescue McGreevey from compromising gay entanglements.
The news conference was a Jersey classic, a twisted redux of the 50s B-movie Creature from the Black Lagoon, with McGreevey casting himself in the role of the tender but misunderstood Creature. There he was, looking forlorn, as though he had just emerged from one of Jersey’s legendary swamps: “Throughout my life,” the Guv intoned, “I have grappled with my own identity, who I am. As a young child, I often felt ambivalent about myself, in fact confused,” and “…from my early days in school until the present day, I acknowledged some feelings, a certain sense that separated me from others.” By “others” McGreevey meant normal male humans. In short, James McGreevey admitted to having been sexually attracted to other males since childhood.
“In this, the 47th year of my life, it is arguably too late to have this discussion. But it is here, and it is now. At a point in every person’s life, one has to look deeply into the mirror of one’s soul and decide one’s unique truth in the world, not as we may want to see it or hope to see it, but as it is.” It was all sentimental self-serving window dressing. McGreevey’s disclosure was not the consequence of any moral evolution; his homosexual playmate was about to splatter the lurid details of their protracted sex romp across the front pages of every newspaper in America.
The press conference was a salvage operation. As a stealth homosexual, McGreevey had managed to infiltrate the highest public office in New Jersey. As a secret gay he had championed New Jersey’s Domestic Partnership Act, which had moved New Jersey homosexuals one giant step closer to their ultimate goal of full-blown gay marriage. It was McGreevey who had proclaimed this legislation “a great victory.”
“My truth,” announced the governor, “is that, I am a gay American.” Now it was the turn of the “gay community” to cushion McGreevey’s fall from grace. McGreevey made the cover of The Advocate, America’s foremost gay publication, with the subtitle “The Secrets of Jim McGreevey.” A gush of articles followed. Most Advocate authors echoed the sentiment of openly gay Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank: “The governor made a mistake and did inappropriate things driven by frustrations of the closet and not having the emotional and physical outlets that all human beings need.” Please note the way responsibility for McGreevey’s behavior has been shifted onto the shoulders of the larger American culture, of the way McGreevey’s profoundly destructive and immoral behavior is soft-pedaled as “a mistake” and merely “inappropriate.” Forgetting your car keys is a mistake; acknowledging homosexual feelings since childhood and then duping two love-struck women into sham marriages for the purpose of promoting a political career is immoral. Gays who behave in this calculating manner are trash and there are millions of them. Their deceitfulness erodes the integrity of marriage.
The closest any of the Advocate’s gay scribblers have come to acknowledging the pain that gays inflict on countless straight spouses is Chad Graham’s recollection of an interview that Arianna Huffington had with ABC’s Nightline host Ted Kopple. Ted had asked Arianna about her former husband’s admission that he was a homosexual. Arianna replied that “It was two years after our divorce, but it was no less painful. And as I was watching the press conference today my thoughts did go to Mrs. McGreevey, as she was standing there in a much more public way than what happened to me.” Chad simply quotes Arianna and then concludes that “McGreevey deserves our compassion.” The wife’s pain is ignored. He makes a plea for all gays to come out of the closet: “…who knows? Maybe next time we’ll have an openly gay man or lesbian who is elected governor. McGreevey’s admission will help clear the way for the A-list leading men and women of Hollywood to finally come out. Let’s face it, very few people would be shocked at the usual suspects who continue to remain in the closet.”
He has reason for optimism. There are nearly 300 openly gay elected public officials now serving in the United States, among them the representatives Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and Jim Kolbe of Arizona. Former Massachusetts congressman Gerry Stubbs came out on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1983. Stubbs won five more terms in the Tenth Congressional District. U.S. representative Mark Foley of Florida lives openly with a male partner. He is a five-term Republican congressman. There are places across America where being openly gay does not spell the end of a political career.
Having said that, it should be added that most people give the highest status to traditional social arrangements. Most people want their elected servants, the ones to whom they grant legislative, executive and judicial powers, to be committed to the preservation of those social institutions that were created to nurture traditional family life. Male leaders are expected to be men, to be exemplars of masculine virtue, to be living vessels of chivalry, to care deeply about the welfare of families and women and children. Voters will tend to equate the homosexual’s lack of masculine virtue with a diminished commitment to the defense of traditional institutions. In other words, normal straight men will usually garner the most favor from traditional voters, all other things being equal. Therefore, homosexuals will always have an incentive to indulge in self-serving deceptions. This is true of non-political gays as well. The damage that their falsehoods cause is beyond estimation; women and children are their primary victims. James McGreevey is a textbook study in callous manipulation. His hurried coming out was a calculated piece of political stagecraft designed to divert public attention away from his years of political corruption.
The gay press and the Internet bloggers were uniformly dismissive of Mrs. McGreevey. Had her gaydar broken down? What was her first clue, they wondered aloud, his leather underwear or the undigested bits of corn adhering to his genitalia?
According to Lori Kennedy, the wife of Rahway Mayor James Kennedy, when she arrived at Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion in Princeton, the governor’s wife was in tears. “My heart ached for her,” Kennedy told the Newark Star Ledger, “She did not know before that, that he was gay. And if you saw her that night, when she found out, you’d know that. She was totally shocked.” A New York Magazine article described Mrs. McGreevey as “oddly smiling” at her husband’s coming-out news conference. Lori Kennedy says that the governor’s wife’s decision to be at the conference was made at the last minute. “I was on the phone with her right afterward. She was upset. She was trying to be brave. She wasn’t thinking. It [the smile] was just a reaction.” And “The whole thing was so surreal. I can tell you she wasn’t happy. She was in shock.” (N.Y. Daily News 8/19/04).
The notion that Dina Matos McGreevey might be the innocent victim of her gay husband’s deceit did not sit well with homosexuals who were eager to portray the governor as the hapless victim of rampant homophobia. The first order of business of gay propagandists is to make gays look good; to do that they had to trash the gay governor’s wife. Said writer Michael Musto: “She must have known! Everyone else, from reporters to Web posters, had buzzed about the supposed liason for years, so how could she not have gotten the memo?. . .I bet the McGreeveys have a de-lovely, we-know-what-it’s-about situation and enjoy sharing a home base, even more so when power is tasted. . .Maybe this is the marriage of the future – one completely open in its duplicity.” (Village Voice 8/17/04). Mr.Musto goes on to suggest that the first Mrs. McGreevey, now Kari Schutz, had “clearly” been visited by a “checkbook wielding angel” who persuaded her to insist that she had not known her former husband was a homosexual. Mr.Musto considers his hunches to be proof enough that both of James McGreevey’s wives got what they deserved.
Radio talk-show hosts in the New Jersey-New York metropolitan area were uniformly clueless about the social implications of mixed-orientation marriage; they avoided the subject altogether or took the position that sexuality was a private matter without broader social implications. “I don’t care what people do in their bedroom,” said Sean Hannity of WABC (770 AM). “This is about corruption…” Jim Gerhart of WKXW (101.5 FM) and Bob Grant of WOR (710AM) were asked by callers why they had refused to allow callers to talk about long-standing rumors that James McGreevey was gay. “The fact he’s gay is irrelevant,” said Gerhart, “No one cares about that.” Said Bob Grant, “I didn’t want callers to go there because homosexuality isn’t a reason McGreevey should go.”
Rush Limbaugh provided McGreevey with the softest cushion: “I can’t help feeling empathy and actual sympathy for him,” said Limbaugh. “It’s not an easy way to have lived. A lot of people will try to use him now for their own gains, but in the middle is Jim McGreevey, who has to try to find happiness – and it won’t be easy. He’s a messed-up guy obviously.” Is Limbaugh on pain killers again? How about feeling some of Mrs. McGreevey’s pain? How about a little empathy and sympathy for her? What about her happiness? None of these pundits see James McGreevey for what he truly is, the perfect poster boy for an unacknowledged public health menace: gays who marry. Fraudulent mixed-orientation marriages threaten the emotional, moral and bodily health of millions of straight spouses, most of them women.
How Gays Harm Women: A Public Health Epidemic
James McGreevey could rely on his wife to be at his side for every important photo-op, usually holding their young daughter. Dina Matos McGreevey stood silently by his side again as he revealed that he was “a gay American.” With those words the whole world understood James McGreevey’s marriage to a normal woman had been a sham; he had used his wife and daughter as props in a political stage play; the wife was now understood to be what gays call a “beard,” a female human fashion accessory used to bolster a bogus presentation by a gay guy of himself as a genuine man.
Usually the exploitation of a beard is harmless enough, as women, witting and unwitting, accompany gay men to parties, public events and family affairs. Everyone has a good time and no harm is done. But when an unsuspecting woman is gulled into what she believes to be the sacrament of marriage by a crypto-homosexual whose true purpose is to create a public charade to further his selfish ambitions, then the consequences are tragic.
At this moment the number of straight spouses in America who are married to homosexuals and the “other gendered” probably exceeds four million. About one in every five male homosexual will marry an unsuspecting woman. This is a modest estimate based on 1987 census figures which pegged the number of males over the age of 18 at 85,850,000 and the number of over-18 females at 93,773,000 and then factored in the incidence of homosexuality and the percentage of married gay males. According to Alan P. Bell and Martin Weinberg, authors of Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women, between 18 and 35 percent of lesbians form marriages with unsuspecting straight men. So as many as one of every three lesbians may also marry an unsuspecting straight man.
These numbers represent an unacknowledged public health epidemic: millions of phony exploitive marriages that are corroding the souls of millions of straight spouses, and the millions more children of these sham marriages, as things go haywire within the marriage for reasons the straight spouse cannot understand. Worst yet, almost a hundred and forty thousand straight spouses may have discovered the truth about their gay spouses only after being handed a positive diagnosis of a fatal HIV infection. I made this extrapolation based on Bonnie Kaye’s statement that over 70 of the two thousand wives of homosexuals whom she had counseled between 1983 and 1985 had contracted AIDS from their husbands. Bonnie Kaye is the founder of the national network Spouses of Gays. If 70 of every 2,000 wives of gays have contracted AIDS, then 140,000 of four million wives of gays might also have contracted AIDS from their philandering gay husbands. We are forced to conclude that fraudulent mixed-orientation marriages have produced a medical and mental health epidemic in America that almost everyone is studiously ignoring. The wives are too ashamed to draw attention to themselves as victims; the “gay community” is eager to hush up its nasty wholesale exploitation of normal humans; even the tough-talking conservatives, such as Limbaugh, Hannity and Grant, would rather avoid the subject, lest they appear insensitive to gays. Surely someone must have come to grips with this grotesque distortion of our nation’s moral matrix. Who would that person be?
A Victim of Gay Deceit Offers Help
The “go to” person for information about the exploitation of women by homosexuals is Amity Pierce Buxton, the author of The Other Side of the Closet: The Coming-Out Crisis for Straight Spouses. Ms. Buxton, now 75, was married to a gay male for 25 years. Since 1986 she has run the Straight Spouse Network, an international organization for the heterosexual spouses of homosexuals and the self-described “transgendered”. In the weeks since Jim McGreevey popped out of his closet, Ms. Buxton has been caught up in a media whirlwind.
Way back in 1984, Ms. Buxton and two other straight spouses were invited to speak to a gathering of gay fathers in a church basement in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco. Bill Jones, a long-time member of Gay Fathers of San Francisco, recalled hearing Amity Buxton speak: “She spoke about how unattractive she felt, how much pain she was still going through. I choked up thinking about it now. She represented to gay men in the audience the wives they’ve left, and many didn’t realize, until that moment, how mush anger and pain and bitterness their wives had gone through.”
Since Jim McGreevey’s coming-out press conference, requests for information from the Straight Spouse Network (www.ssnetwk.org) have increased from three a day to an average of 20 per day. Three out of five callers is a straight wife and the number of straight husbands is increasing. They want to make contact with someone who understands their pain and confusion. “I want someone who understands what I’m going through. I was married to a man for 16 years who I thought was committed. Now I feel it’s all a lie. I feel betrayed and deceived and it really hurts. I’m embarrassed to tell,” lamented a typical caller who, in fact, had been betrayed and deceived by a sly and selfish homosexual whom she mistook for a man. The truth is that gay males are not men with odd proclivities, they are male humans with proclivities so odd as to preclude the possibility that they could ever comport with our culture’s definition of a man.
If we imagine a normal marriage to be a healthy social organism, then any marriage that includes a homosexual spouse can rightly be called a diseased marriage. The dictionary defines the word disease as “an abnormal condition of an organism, especially as a consequence of infection, inherent weakness or environmental stress, that impairs normal functioning.” Clearly these mixed-orientation marriages suffer from an inherent weakness by virtue of the gay spouse’s lack of total commitment to his wife’s complementary otherness, her essential femininity. The conflicted erotic loyalties of the gay spouse will always create an “environmental stress” within a mixed-orientation household. The indwelling homosexual proclivities of the crypto-gay spouse can easily be likened to a destructive infection of the marriage organism. The dictionary further defines a disease vector as “an organism that carries pathogens from one host to another” which pretty much describes the roll of the stealth-homosexual husband who brings sexually-transmitted diseases home from the promiscuous gay demimonde to his marriage bed. And so, from both a physical and a mental health perspective, homosexual spouses are a public health menace.
In a Newark Star Ledger interview, Ms. Buxton was asked if some gays marry a straight partner as a prop to advance their careers, to which she replied, “Yes, though maybe not consciously. Politicians, people in corporations, anyone in the public eye know how important it is to have a spouse and family.” She’s downplaying this motivation. In truth, almost all of us are “in the public eye” of our families and neighbors. That’s why creating a gay-marriage privilege would not solve the epidemic of mixed-orientation marriages; a gay marriage could never create the desired illusion of normalcy, it would simply be a parody of a normal marriage. Two gay guys will always be one wife short of the desired family portrait.
When the interviewer noted that mixed-orientation marriage do not seem to be confined to any one culture, Buxton responded, “This is across the board. We get calls from India. We get calls from Asians and Hispanics. We have a ‘Spouses of Color’ section in our network so that African-American wives and girlfriends have some place to go.”
The interview concluded with Ms. Buxton being asked what advice she would offer straight spouses whose partner had just popped out of the closet. She replies: “Your [homosexual] wife or husband is in liberation. You are in shock. Let things settle down. You can’t make any good decisions for a year or two. The burden is off his shoulders and onto the [straight] spouse. She goes into the closet. This poor spouse [Dina Matos McGreevey] cannot go into the closet.”
The Agony of the Wives
I was so taken by Amity Pierce Buxton that I purchased a copy of The Other Side of the Closet and read it carefully. It’s a compelling document. In the first paragraph of the introduction we are introduced to “Hanna”, a 35-year-old mother of three children whom Ms. Buxton describes as “a cheerful and capable woman who tried to hold her marriage together for two years while caring for her three children under the age of twelve and keeping secret her husband’s two arrests for sex acts in public men’s restrooms.” In paragraph two we are told of the millions of women and men in America who are married to homosexuals. “Only a few are aware of their partner’s sexual orientation when they marry,” says Amity Buxton. In paragraph three we learn that “Interviews with hundreds of women and men from coast to coast attest to the devastation that the three words, ‘I am gay’, uttered by a marriage partner, can have on his or her straight spouse.” Said Ms. Buxton, “The way out is a long, wrenching struggle marked by denial, anger, grief, illness, and sometimes suicide attempts.”
A generous one in five gay males manages to gull some woman into a fraudulent marriage. Once married, these stealth gays begin responding to their gay impulses and begin having clandestine gay sex, often the quick and anonymous kind in public places. Laud Humphreys, author of The Tearoom Trade: Anonymous Sex in Public Places, discovered that married gay males made up 54% of his study population. Closeted gays may continue masquerading as normal husbands for years, often neglecting and harshly criticizing their unsuspecting wives. Lesbians, by contrast, typically seek one specific lesbian lover. Once they admit their homosexuality, most lesbian wives quickly depart to be with that lover. Gay males are more likely to continue their exploitation of their straight spouses, thereby further damaging the spouse’s sexuality and doing damage to the traditional marriage form. Trust and integrity between the marriage partners disintegrates; the belief system that forms the moral foundation of a marriage is corroded by the continuing presence of a homosexual spouse in the household. The straight spouse may experience depression, illness or a complete emotional breakdown.
Amity Buxton estimates that two or more years are needed to resolve the psychological disruption caused by the revelation gayness and at least three years to build a new life, “and far longer to look dispassionately at the coming-out crisis.” But why bother even attempting to view one’s victimizer dispassionately? Many straight spouses express open hatred for the sly homosexuals who selfishly exploited them and ruined their lives. This is a perfectly normal response to victimization. As Amity Buxton herself reminds us, the victimized straight spouses “…have suddenly become the non-preferred sex partners and often feel rejected as women and men. As [gay] partners celebrate their true sexual orientation and their courageous honesty in disclosing it, spouses feel bereft of their marital mates – causing confusion and anger.” She adds that “…most spouses gradually realize that the hidden sexual disparity has already harmed their sexual functioning and self-image. This is particularly true for spouses of gay or lesbian partners who have little or no erotic attraction to them. The rage many feel can persist for years.”
Multiply this rage by millions of aggrieved straight spouses and you have a vast reservoir of anti-gay sentiment rooted in firsthand experience with gays. If you add on the millions of males whose lives have been forever diminished by firsthand contact with predatory homosexuals, of whom the victims of the Catholic priesthood sex scandals were only a small sampling, and you can see clearly that vague notions of societal “homophobia” are unnecessary to explain the occasional random burst of hostility toward some gay person. The collective behavior of the so-called “gay community” is quite sufficient to maintain a large and constant reservoir of anti-gay emotion. This reservoir will dry up only after gays have mustered the decency to stop marrying straight folks and managed to keep their hands to themselves. It should be added that no spokesperson for the gay subculture has ever acknowledged that gays just might be creating their own worst enemies.
The heart of The Other Side of the Closet is a series of personal narratives, most of them written by straight spouses. All of the names are pseudonyms. The very first personal history is given by “Moira”, who spent years in a ruined marriage with a manipulative homosexual. Now that it’s over, she says, “I don’t believe in love or marriage. That makes me sad because I was raised to be married and have kids.” She adds that “marriage has no value now.” Her years of being exploited by an abusive gay led to this insight: “It finally dawned on me how terribly used I’d been. Tim needed the marriage and the kids for his respectability and then set out to make me divorce him. He’d used me the entire marriage – half of my life, my adult youth. My anger came pouring out. He didn’t think twice about using me, a woman – the very type he didn’t want around – as a shield. He has no right to take a woman as a wife and mother for his children just so he can look straight!”
She concludes: “My deep rage persists to this day, five years later. Anger is my only connection to Tim’s gayness…Someday, if the occasion arises, he’ll receive my wrath. When he does the issue won’t be the Catholic Church’s homophobia…the issue will be what he did to me – not asking me, not telling me before we married, not giving me a choice.”
Many gay husbands subject their wives to constant criticism and ridicule as a way of managing their wives’ natural sexual desires. “Some gay husbands are terrified by their wives’ sexual desire and interest in sexual exploration,” explains Jane Vennard, founder of the National Task Force on Spouses of Gays and Lesbians. “That’s why they criticize the women’s sexuality, making them feel ‘wrong’ to want sex.”
As the gay husband continues to tear down his wife’s self-esteem, lovemaking decreases. The wife’s tattered self-image is reinforced every time she attempts to seduce her husband and fails. Now feeling sexually inadequate, and silently ashamed, the innocent wife suppresses her natural desire to have a healthful sexual relationship with her husband.
Lesbian wives often lay a similar line of crap on their husbands, accusing them of not understanding a woman’s needs or how to give a woman pleasure. Not surprisingly the husbands of these pseudo-women often, wrongly, come to believe that they lack sexual prowess.
Only after the sexually abnormal spouse pops out of the closet does the normal spouse realize that his (her) spouse’s odd sexual proclivities were the true cause of the couple’s lackluster sex life. How could full sexual intimacy ever be achieved when the husband could only embrace his wife while fantasizing about other gays? Without this intimacy the full emotional and spiritual potential of a true marriage could never be realized.
While the gay deceiver seeks out other homosexuals with whom to find sexual satisfaction, the straight spouse usually does not. As Amity Buxton says, “In retrospect many spouses see their incomplete sexual experiences as a violation of their right to sexual pleasure. As one angry wife said, ‘I was just a way for my husband to masturbate!’”
Many gay husbands make matters worse by insisting that it was the wife’s sexual inadequacy that drove him to have sex with other males. Some wives actually accept this line of nonsense; so eager are they not to blame their husbands that they are willing to cast the blame on themselves. Wives married to gays for more than a few years may believe that their sexuality has been irreparably damaged. Says Amity Buxton, “Some feel exploited, used as a sex machine for child bearing until it no longer served that purpose.” Noting that “even the most sympathetic wife may erupt in anger” and that “outrage may begin to outweigh compassion,” Ms. Buxton tells us that “Many [wives] then feel an urge to fight back. This is a natural reaction and a positive step toward recovery.”
Usually the outed gay spouse is so preoccupied with his own “liberation” that he ignores the pain and confusion of his devastated wife. Giving her any sympathy at this time would be tantamount to admitting their callous exploitation, and so the normal wife is left in isolation, which only increases her suffering. The best course of action for the wife is to understand that homosexuality is an irreversible orientation and that there is no hope of ever changing their gay husbands. The wife should immediately absolve herself of any lingering doubts about her essential femininity and understand that the distance between her desire for a sexual complement, and her gay husband’s desire for a sexual clone, is unbridgeable. Anger is also an appropriate response – let it out. The lying gay husband may have had no choice in his sexual orientation, but every gay has total control over his choice to marry or not marry an unsuspecting woman. Gays who marry innocent straight spouses are a menace to the moral matrix of our civilization, to the institution of marriage which is a fundamental support of our culture; the very existence of millions of these gay scam artists weakens the institution of marriage itself. It wouldn’t be a stretch to think of them as termites, hard at work weakening the framework and foundation of marriage.
Any woman who has had sexual contact with a gay male should immediately make an appointment for HIV-antibody testing. The gay husband should be tested, as should all of his gay sex partners. Gay sex is one of the least healthy practices a human can indulge in; dozens of diseases that are rarely transmitted sexually between heterosexuals are commonly transmitted sexually between gay males, so testing should include more than a hunt for the HIV virus. Testing may never be complete because of the typical gay’s penchant for anonymous sex with total strangers in public places such as toilets, parks and playgrounds.
Lesbian wives usually depart soon after disclosing their true sexual identity. The ethos of the lesbian demimonde is drenched in the hateful rhetoric of radical identity feminists, such as Catherine McKinnon, who preach that even the most tender sex between a husband and a wife is rape. This rhetorical nonsense gives lesbian wives all the cover they need to abandon their marriages while posing as “the real victim.”
Sadly, it is most often the abused straight wives who seek to hold their sham marriages together. Lots of homosexual husbands also cling to their carefully constructed “cover.” Many wives are trapped by the fear of seeing their families disintegrate and their financial support yanked from beneath their feet. Many of these wives have become emotionally dependent on the men who have betrayed them. In almost all of these marriage parodies it is the wife who makes all the emotional adjustments to accommodate the peculiar desires of her homosexual husband. In almost every case the wife has only prolonged her pain and postponed an inevitable divorce by only a few years, by which time she has lost even more of her dignity.
The words of a woman who endured the pain caused by a gay husband are more telling than my polemics. In Amity Buxton’s book she includes the diary entries of a woman called “Carol.” Here are a few random entries: “I cannot, try as I may, compete with another man. I can be gorgeous and intelligent but if Dave wants a man, nothing I do can change that. I might as well be a frog.” Here’s a perfectly normal woman likening herself to an amphibian because she mistakenly married a heterosexual impersonator. Later she notes that her husband is “not wearing his wedding band anymore. I guess he thinks that he can’t be totally gay if he wears a symbol of heterosexual marriage. It hurts!” Her husband is also committing blatant adultery; her husband is an immoral jerk.
As her husband sinks deeper into the gay demimonde, she notes that her husband “had his hair cut and, boy, does he look gay! He’s going through an adolescence of sorts, ‘boy crazy’ and more than ever caring how he looks. I feel threatened, not as needed.” She reflects that “Sometimes I think it might almost have been easier, but not better, if Dave had died. Then there would be one grieving period, not something new each month.” But when a woman is married to a homosexual who is impersonating a man, the slights and degradations never end. To maintain such a sham marriage the wife must toss her feminine virtue into the dumpster and become a shrunken caricature of her former self. She must endure a kind of spiritual death. Ms. Buxton adds that “Despite sincere efforts, the sexual disparity, competition for the partner’s attention or unconventional, and for some, immoral arrangements eventually become intolerable for most [straight] spouses.”
Wives of gays must suffer the fear and embarrassment of waiting for the results of AIDS testing. Every gay husband has risked catching this disease and dozens of others. Amity Buxton tells us of one pregnant wife who became so distraught while waiting for her homosexual husband’s test results that she had an abortion. The test result was negative.
The price straights pay for remaining attached to gays is high indeed. Ms. Buxton observes that “For the majority of couples, however, marital sex doesn’t last. Gradually the gay partner’s sexual motivation and desire may shift as he or she follows the typical candy store syndrome, seeking varied experiences in gay bars, baths and meeting places. At home, sex often becomes infrequent and then stops, despite increases after gay encounters.” In short, gays are cognitive and emotional aliens; their alien folkways make them utterly unsuitable as traditional marriage partners.
What self-respecting woman wants to manage her gay husband’s social calendar, cooking for the Gay Pride events or hiring a lawyer to handle her husband’s latest arrest for another indecency violation? Eventually, such women internalize the alien gay perspectives and become “the spouse of a gay,” their dream of a full flowering womanhood having withered to nothing.
It’s Time to Get Angry
In chapter three of The Other Side of the Closet, Amity Buxton loses her grip and lapses into a contradiction. After advising straight spouses on the healthful effects of getting in touch with their righteous anger, she then says that “It is imperative that the straight parent keep her or his personal pain from negatively influencing the children against the gay or bisexual parent.” Imperative? Why is it imperative? Every one of these stealth gays is a self-serving, cowardly, calculating creep who has poisoned the spiritual life of every member of his family. If honesty is truly a virtue, then the injured straight spouse should not conceal her pain from her children. Every member of the family has been diminished by the fraudulence of the posturing gay poseur. That fact should be made crystal clear to the children and to every other family member, including the gay spouses’s family members who probably had more than a hint that their boy was “different” but concealed their suspicions from the wife. The suffering of the wife is often the consequence of a conspiracy of silence by the gay guy’s entire family. If the gay husband spent his teenage years mincing about the house wearing a silk kimono and satin pumps, then his family had a moral obligation to mention that fact to the wife sometime before her wedding day. Angry wives have sued the family members of gay spouses for their conspiracy to defraud her. Under the circumstances, a nasty lawsuit seems downright therapeutic.
The children of “suddenly gay” parents experience insecurities about their own sexual orientation. If Dad can suddenly be a homosexual, then how secure can his children be in the permanence of their own sexual identity? Children of mixed-orientation families may become the targets of school-yard taunting. The child will feel the unwelcome pull of conflicting loyalties to his two parents. On top of all this, the children of gay deceivers must cope with their righteous anger at having been hoodwinked and betrayed, as well as the stress of an impending divorce and separation.
One daughter of a gay man-imitator became so distressed by her father’s revelation that she almost died. The girl had an undetected condition that was triggered by extreme stress; her senses failed one after the other, then her breathing stopped. Then the medics couldn’t detect a heartbeat. She regained consciousness in the hospital. Later she was put under a suicide watch. While describing her father’s stereotypical gay mannerisms when he was drunk (about one of every four homosexuals is an alcoholic), the daughter lamented, “I’m so embarrassed. He isn’t the same person anymore!”
This man impersonator’s cruel deception left his wife with lingering fears about the effects of her husband’s gayness on her daughter’s ability to develop a healthy relationship with a genuine man. The wife also fretted about her own fears of being rejected by some man in her own future. All of this unnecessary pain was inflicted because one homosexual wanted to indulge himself in a bit of hetero impersonation.
There seems to be no limit to how selfish and morally obtuse a gay spouse can become. In the words of one gay husband: “I learned how to lie, to cheat and be devious, not because I was a bad person, but because I feared telling the truth and thereby suffering rejection and loss.” Let’s take a moment to appraise this gem of crystallized gay psychology: He’s too cowardly to tell the truth because he might suffer the discomfort of rejection, so he learns “how to lie, to cheat and be devious” to keep himself comfortable at the expense of other people, but he doesn’t think that he’s a bad person. He has made a mockery of the sacrament of marriage; he has misrepresented himself during the dating period, the period of discovery before marriage during which normal heterosexuals make the most momentous decision of their lives: whom to choose as a lifelong mate. If all of this deceit doesn’t comport with the average person’s definition of “bad”, then what does? Here’s a message from the planet Earth to the Gay Community: screwing up the lives of millions of straight spouses and their children is BAD. It verges on the demonic.
What millions of gays are doing is nothing less than a rolling crime wave against the essential self-hood of millions of normal man and women and children. The heterosexual genders of man and woman are suffering because of their unsuspecting romantic entanglements with the other two genders, gay and lesbian. It’s high time that gays and lesbians stopped using normal men and women as props in their own private psychodramas.
There have always been “marriages of convenience” between fully-informed gays and straights, but to gull an innocent heterosexual into an unrewarding, and ultimately destructive, marriage is simply immoral. It’s a brand of heartless behavior practiced exclusively by homosexuals. No little girl looks forward to her wedding day in the hope of becoming some closeted homosexual’s “beard.” James McGreevey, the “Gay American” governor of New Jersey, has perpetrated this cruel swindle on two unsuspecting women in order to advance his selfish political ambitions. He’s now the poster boy for insufferable gay self-absorption.
Amity Buxton tells us that the straight spouses of gays often find themselves drained of strength from the cumulative effect of dealing with an alien sexuality. “Many have developed severe symptoms from physical ailments to depression. The desolation that they all feel can be overwhelming.” Some of them attempt suicide. Says Ms. Buxton, “Many spouses feel that their sense of identity has been damaged by day-to-day compromises, criticism by the [gay] partner, or their own self-blame. As a working wife in Tucson said, ‘In the process, I lost self-esteem. The scars will never go away.’”
A Dangerous Proposal
Jim McGreevey’s collapsing stage set of a marriage prompted Rabbi Shmuley Boteach to share his thoughts about mixed-orientation marriages. Speaking of those homosexuals who reveal the truth about their sexual preferences after years of marriage and the birth of children, Rabbi Boteach informs us that “In every case, the news was not only devastating to the wives in question, but created lasting anger, even hatred. When a man outs himself as gay, the person who suffers the most is his wife… the truth is that these women suffer enormously. I have had many women crying in my office as they related the pain of discovering that they could never be attractive to their husbands, and how that horrible fact undermined their very identity as women. One woman told me that after her husband revealed to her that he was only able to perform with her sexually by thinking about men, she had thought that night of killing herself.”
To Rabbi Boteach “The most important point is that homosexuality is a religious rather than a moral sin.” He explains that the Bible makes a clear distinction between sins against God (religious sins) and sins against other people (moral sins). He reminds us that the Ten Commandments were written on two tablets, with religious sins, such as not worshipping idols, on one tablet and sins against one’s neighbors, such as theft, written on the other tablet. Adultery is both a religious and a moral sin because it violates a holy covenant on the one hand and it harms another person on the other hand. The rabbi argues that consensual homosexual acts between adults are strictly religious sins and not moral sins. He holds that anyone who calls homosexuality, per se, immoral, must likewise call those who shirk church immoral, when, in fact, they are merely irreligious. Rabbi Boteach believes that if we all remember the distinction between religious and moral sins, then we can find our way to simultaneously safeguard the “sacred covenant of heterosexual marriage” and also end what he calls “homophobia.”
I think the rabbi is a tad naďve. His approach might work well in a close-knit religious community, but in our sprawling, riotously heterodox, continental American culture there is no chance of this approach stopping the runaway steamroller of “gay liberation” and its quest for legitimacy through gay marriage. The greatest obstacle to the rabbi’s modest vision is the psychology of the gay collective; they crave total social acceptance and complete legitimacy. The rabbi’s plan falls short of that. The gay radicals don’t want to hear that homosexuality “is only a religious sin and not a moral one.” They want a complete uncoupling of the words “homosexuality” and “sin.”
I, on the other hand, do not believe that homosexuality, per se, is any sort of sin, except in the original meaning of that word. It’s an ancient Aramaic archery term that means, literally, to miss the mark. Homosexuality is not normal or typical behavior in strictly statistical terms. It is an odd constellation of inclinations arising from odd developmental histories, either genetic, or hormonal, or social, or a random mix of all three. In every traditional culture, ours included, all of the fundamental social institutions have been structured to accommodate and promote culturally defined normal behaviors, such as heterosexual marriage. This promotion is the aim of these institutions; promoting homosexuality would move that aim off target. That would be a sin in the original sense of that word, a literal missing of the mark. Cultures do not sustain themselves by encouraging abnormal behaviors.
At this point the well-meaning rabbi proposes the most grotesque and reckless reason ever offered as a reason to prohibit homosexual wedlock. Here is the rabbi’s reasoning in his own words, “…90 percent of gay men admit to having done so [had sexual relations with a female]. It is for this reason that society should not legalize gay marriage and elevate it to the same plane as heterosexual marriages, because there is then no incentive for these men, who are in essence bisexual, to make an effort to direct their erotic focus toward women and raise their heterosexual attraction above the same-sex one.” He goes on to say that “Even fully heterosexual men must learn sexual discipline within marriage by being monogamous amidst their natural attraction to many women. And there is nothing cruel in encouraging men who have an attraction to both sexes to try and focus their sexual desire on women rather than men.”
The rabbi means well, but this is a formula for tragedy. Marriage in our culture is intended to be a lifetime union of two complementary and totally committed human beings. The last thing any marriage should become is some kind of experiment in behavior modification. Marriage is not some sort of pressure cooker intended to steam out the peculiar sexual proclivities of the husband or wife. Any woman who knowingly marries a man with potentially ruinous behavioral quirks is playing dice with her own happiness. Marrying a man with the intention of perfecting him later is a fool’s game. It’s hard enough to get sloppy husbands to pick up their socks; getting a husband to switch off forever an ingrained eroticized response to a certain kind of sexy male presentation is asking way too much of any wife.
To make matters much worse, in almost every one of these behavior-modification marriages the wife would be completely ignorant of the fact that her husband has another erotic focus. Everyone who is eager to get the gay male “on the right track” will encourage him to marry, but the prospective wife will be kept in the dark by the gay guy’s family and friends lest the truth spoil their game, and perhaps even his rabbi will keep silent in the hope that everything “will turn out all right” if the gay male takes a wife. In hindsight, it’s all a hideous conspiracy to exploit the wife, to jeopardize her happiness and her mental health on the thin hope that somehow her secretly-not-really-heterosexual husband will “snap out of it” and become a contented husband. God save the innocent brides of America from these reckless matchmakers!
In the face of all the evidence, Rabbi Boteach says, “I am not prepared to admit that James McGreevey made a mistake in marrying. Since he did so twice, and had children with both wives, I assume that he was not completely gay and had some actionable attraction to women.” The rabbi assumes way too much. Just because some gay guy gets a woman pregnant while fantasizing about pumping the pool guy is no reason to assume that the gay husband “had some actionable attraction to women.” And what wife wants to settle for “actionable attraction?” Wives deserve passion, not the legal minimum. Saving gays from their gayness is not the proper function of the sacrament of marriage; to exploit the institution of marriage for this purpose is to cheapen marriage itself.
Gays have no ethical reason for marrying unsuspecting women. Every marriage should be a secure place free from erotic confusion. The husband’s sole focus should be his wife’s womanly essence and nothing else. James McGreevey met his first wife on a singles cruise in 1991. My guess is that the single women who booked passage on that cruise were eager to meet men and initiate a romantic relationship that might lead to marriage. How many of those women, do you suppose, imagined that on board that cruise were calculating homosexuals in search of the perfect beard, that one innocent feminine person whom they could exploit to maintain the public fiction that they were genuine men? This idea is downright creepy and far too disturbing for many women to entertain. James McGreevey’s first wife was his first sucker, his first victim. Dina Matos was his second victim. This “gay American’s” two daughters were also stealth-gayboy collateral damage.
More Betrayal
You’d think that an organization with a name like The National Organization for Women would express at least mild concern about the ruinous consequences of millions of stealth homosexuals cruelly exploiting women for their own selfish purposes. The epidemic of sundered marriages, disillusionment, painful partings, loss of self-esteem and depression alone should have produced at least one angry feminist critique of this reprehensible behavior. Well, don’t hold your breath waiting. The time has long since past when the National Organization for Women became a wholly-owned subsidiary of lesbian America. Some NOW members have even been so bold as to proclaim that a woman can’t be a true feminist unless she is a lesbian. Because lesbians are in solidarity with the “gay community” and because NOW won’t cross the lesbians, there now exists a de facto code of silence about the epidemic of destructive mixed-orientation marriages among feminists.
Years ago the “gay community” cynically tried to panic straight America into believing that the AIDS epidemic, the one that they themselves had created with their rampant promiscuity, would soon consume straight America as well. Oprah Winfrey dutifully did her best to needlessly frighten every heterosexual within earshot. It was all a lie. Every epidemiologist in America knew it was a lie. Every study showed that anyone who avoided intravenous drug use and avoided sex with anyone who had indulged in gay sex had virtually no chance of ever contracting AIDS. When an unsuspecting heterosexual woman marries a secretly gay male, however, her chances of contracting AIDS, and dozens of other sexually transmitted diseases, skyrocket upward. The real straight-AIDS epidemic in America is occurring among the millions of unhappy women who were snookered into marrying manly-man impersonators.
Well-meaning folks, such as the hopeful family relations of gays and those clergypersons who believe that gayness is a choice, are not doing the women of America any favors by encouraging gays to marry. Homosexuality is not a taste; a person does not prefer homosexuality in the same sense that he may prefer espresso above decaf. Homosexuality is a constellation of mutually-reinforcing eroticized proclivities. Heterosexuals have their own constellation of mutually-reinforcing eroticized proclivities. That’s why so many straight people have the mistaken notion that “if only” Mister Gay would just try a sexual relationship with a woman he would “see the light.” Every insightful gay person knows better; some are not so insightful, and do try.
The real lifestyle choice that every gay person makes is whether to live a consistently gay life or whether to do something stunningly immoral and marry an unsuspecting heterosexual while posing as a heterosexual. I do not believe that homosexuality, as such, is immoral. Sexual behavior becomes immoral when it becomes exploitive, degrading or anonymous, or when it threatens the moral matrix of the larger community. I am not alone in this opinion. Anti-sodomy laws were a fading fashion long before the Supreme Court’s Lawrence vs. Texas decision; the public preferred to turn a blind eye to what gays did in private. Gays are arrested regularly for indulging is sodomy in public. They are arrested for committing acts of public indecency, for threatening the moral matrix of the larger community with their rude behavior. Heteros are subject to the same constraints.
In my opinion, the most momentous decision any of us will make is the choice of a lifelong companion. It is of the highest importance that each prospective marriage partner has a genuine understanding of the true character of the other. Neither person should be concealing a major liability, such as a humongous debt, a serious medical condition, or a completely alien sexual orientation.
When James McGreevey was finally forced to reveal his true nature, the gay press praised his new-found “honesty.” No one called him a ruthless self-serving scumbag for having brought grief on two wives and two daughters. Their standard line was “she must have known.” The gays unanimously blamed “homophobia” for McGreevey’s cunning impersonations. It was all a pathetic reprise of “The Devil made him do it.”
So, if the gays won’t be honest and the feminists choose to seal their lips, then it falls to traditionalists to defend the virtue of simple honesty and the integrity of the institution of marriage. Homosexuals navigate the human universe using a different pole star and a different internal compass. While the average married man may fantasize about intimacy with women other than his wife, he does not feel alienated from his essential heterosexuality while living with his wife. The married homosexual, on the other hand, must live in a world of fantasy in order to function at all; he’s a caged cat in a room full of canaries, staring out through the bars and living for his moment of liberation. After his clandestine romp, the cat must once again submit to the suffocating confinement of the cage. Ultimately, the cat comes to live for those secret romps. And so it is that every mixed-orientation marriage becomes a mere parody of a true marriage at the expense of an exploited heterosexual spouse who only wanted to have a normal life with a normal person of her (his) complementary gender, a life without surprise venereal infections, without surprise visits from the police, without surprise revelations that one’s spouse is an emotional alien.
It’s usually an innocent wife who suffers from this all-to-common deception. As long as Alpha-male heterosexuality remains the gold standard of genuine manhood, gays will struggle to imitate the outward appearance of genuine manhood with carefully crafted impersonations. After reading all of the case histories in The Other Side of the Closet it’s clear that these gay male exploiters prefer inexperienced women whose “gaydar” has never been turned on. Typically, these women have had little experience with men and found them to be a bit intimidating. These women are sitting ducks for well-groomed suitors who seem so sensitive and who are in no hurry to eroticize the relationship. They seem like such gentlemen.
Today’s newspaper included the syndicated advice column of psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers. The title was “Parents perplexed by metrosexual term.” The parents described their daughter as “a young lawyer with a firm in a big city.” The daughter had come home for “a visit to our small town” and she had brought home with her a male companion. The parents said “The guy spent more time primping in front of the mirror and fussing with his clothes than she did. He even got a manicure with my daughter! When we raised our eyebrows, she laughed and said her boyfriend is a ‘metrosexual’. Does this mean he’s gay or something?”
To this the ever well-meaning Dr. Brothers responded: “No, I don’t think your daughter’s boyfriend is gay – if he had been, I doubt she would have described him as a boyfriend.” Amazing. About one of every five gay males will seek out an inexperienced woman; this young woman from a small town was probably a studious bookworm before she became “a young lawyer” and therefore appears to be an ideal target for this common gay deception, and the boyfriend is broadcasting clear signals of effeminacy in every direction, but somehow Dr. Brothers feels confident in dismissing the parents’ foreboding on the grounds that the inexperienced young lawyer would somehow sense the guy’s true sexual orientation. Given the fact that millions of normal women have been tragically suckered into sham marriages by sly homosexuals, and that thousands of additional women are abused by such deceptions each year, the parents’ concern for their daughter’s well being is well founded. The parents have an acquired sense of what is normal in our culture; it is a dimension of their wisdom acquired from long experience. These parents should not be told to ignore their precious Sixth Sense; they should harken to it as to a fire bell in the night.