Coming out to my wife

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 01:00:00 +0000

After 15 years of marriage, I drove my wife up to a local mountain, parked on the side of the road, and came clean: I'd been fooling around with men behind her back, and after a lifetime of grappling with my sexuality, had come to accept the fact that I am bisexual.

"Our marriage is over,” I told her. “At the very least it's over in the way it used to be – which is a good thing, because I'm not very happy, and I don't think you are either."

The experimentation had gone on for a couple of years. I’d had relations with half a dozen or so guys (always safe). I had quickly discovered the lively, burgeoning world of secretly bisexual married men – most of whom are in their 40s when they get enough courage to step out. My gay father had always told me how many married guys he'd meet at the bars – and now, I was one of them. When I made the decision to sleep with a guy behind my wife's back, I also decided I’d never tell a living soul about it. Ever. Of this I was certain.

But there I was, spilling everything to her. I thought it would be the end of us. Instead, it was a whole new beginning.

Addicted to a younger man

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve never had much sympathy for addicts. Many years ago, when I discovered that my first significant boyfriend was hooked on cocaine after receiving a call from an emergency room at midnight about an overdose, I broke up with him. My anger, in part, resulted from the thousands of dollars I kept “lending” him, never understanding why he needed the money, the increasing turmoil in his life, and what I perceived as his chronic weakness. After he’d lost his job on Broadway, was evicted from his apartment and disappeared for three days after being on the run from a murderous drug dealer, I walked him to Penn Station at 6 a.m., bought him a one-way ticket home to Virginia, and didn’t leave until I saw the train vanish into the tunnel. And that was the last of our life together in New York.

With such haughtiness I used to dismiss cigarette-smoker friends who would need to leave my dinner parties to huddle on my building’s roof deck in the rain to light up, or partners of friends who would get drunk every time we went to a restaurant. I would dismiss the typical American Wal-Mart shopper, so fat that he or she needs to drive a motorized cart to negotiate the aisles.

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Coming out to my wife

Addicted to a younger man