Over the past 22 years, the number of people who have said to me, “But you didn’t know he was gay, right?” has increased. Well over a hundred.
And yes, there are some classic ironic elements to the depth of my ignorance. Usually when I tell this story, I try to lean into it the best I can as a way to make people laugh. and than that in myself.
For my first birthday after we started dating, my ex-boyfriend requested a pink Oxford shirt and a tube of Bath & Body Works Sun-Ripe Raspberry Hair Gel. After we broke up, he went back to school and became an interior designer. He loved divas (mainly Faith Hill and Celine Dion when we were together). He carefully ironed all his clothes. All of them. Even his underwear. He had an alphabetical VHS catalog of “90210” tapes. Just yesterday he texted me to let me know that the second song on Taylor Swift’s album is titled “Elizabeth Taylor,” which to be fair, he did more than that because I’m as obsessed with Elizabeth Taylor as he’s ever been with her, but I get it. To be clear, I know plenty of straight men who are interested in all of these things, and even more gay men who aren’t interested in any of them, but if you’re looking for signs that I’ve missed, these aren’t do not have the current.
The irony deepens when you consider that the night before he left me, I was dressed like this: Liza Minnelli annual halstead halloween Historically Queer Chicago Parade boys town The neighborhood we lived in at the time. We were there with 5 of our closest friends, all gay men.
After years of finding more inspiration and depth in the study of literature than in most churches I had ever attended, I had begun a long process of deconstructing myself from the conservative faith in which I had been raised. In Queer Theory, my friends and I jokingly referred to it as “doing a Ph.D. with a man.”
Honestly, I think there are a hundred reasons why I earned that degree, but even though it took me 20 years to write about that time, I still don’t know which one was truest. Was I trying to accelerate deconstruction? Was I trying to understand my ex-husband? Was I trying to change him through that understanding? All valid speculation, but the fact remains. Despite my expertise in sexual identity theory, I did not learn until several years into our marriage that my first husband was gay and in love with another person.
What people assume when they assume I knew about my ex-husband’s sexuality varies, but here’s a short list of some things I’ve heard.
You must have known he was gay since you never had sex (We had sex all the time).
Gay men who are only attracted to men are generally disgusted by women’s bodies. (see above).
Everyone always knows from childhood whether they are gay, straight, bi, or one of dozens of other possibilities. (No, it’s not).
The topic of my doctoral thesis on queer theory was the 19th century American poet Walt Whitmanits most famous quotation This is probably “Am I contradicting myself? / Well, then I am contradicting myself / (I am large and I contain many)”.
For a little Judy Garland-looking kid who was committed to the dualistic absolutes of good and evil, heaven and hell, beautiful and plain, saved and damned, I can’t overstate how attached I was to that beautiful gray complexity of Whitman. The shrug it evoked in me, the bird it flipped over to the soul-killing need for strict ideological purity.
And thanks in large part to Whitman, in large part to Boys Town, to the boys I met in Boys Town, to the beautiful, beloved boy I first married, I learned that I could reject everything black and white that I had been raised with, and my ex-husband and I learned that we could free each other from the hell that our marriage had gradually become for both of us. After we were released from prison, we didn’t make it to heaven, but every day since then has gotten better for both of us.
Source: BuzzFeed – LGBTQ – www.buzzfeed.com
