HAPPY ANNIVERSARY -  On Bonnie’s sixth anniversary, she wrote this emotional letter to her ex-husband, Michael, discussing her hopes and dreams on their wedding day. Those dreams fell apart as their marriage unraveled.

COME OUT TO YOUR WIFE - This article is Bonnie’s plea to gay men to be honest with their wives about their homosexuality, regardless of the consequences after the truth is revealed. When this article was originally printed, hundreds of men called Bonnie for help in telling their wives the truth.

WHY NOT TO GET MARRIED IF YOU’RE GAY - This controversial article was Bonnie’s first "Straight Talk" column. It discusses the various reasons why gay people get married, and talks common sense about why they shouldn’t.

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY

BY BONNIE KAYE

This column was written in September, 1984. Although many years have passed, I think people can still understand the feelings.

This week marked the anniversary of my marriage which took place six years ago. For the past two years, I have been separated from my gay husband. In remembrance of the occasion, this is an open letter to him and to all of the other gay husbands in similar situations.

Dear Michael,

This week is our six-year anniversary. Ironically, it is almost two years to the day since we separated and went our different ways. Although I try not to dwell on the horrors of the past, it is hard not to think about them sometimes, particularly on our special day. Six years ago when I walked down the aisle hand in hand with you to the music of "Sunrise, Sunset," my head was filled with dreams about the little girl we would someday carry and our little boy at play. Of course, while I was conjuring up these images in my mind, you, as their father, were an integral part of that picture. It was never my intention to be a single mother raising our two children.

I am sure that you had more fears than I did on that day because you were about to enter a world that was foreign to you. From your earliest exploits into sexuality, you were quite aware of your sexual preference for men. You had run the gamut in the gay world, living life in the "fast lane" for many years before we met. On that day, I suppose you were worried about how long you would be able to switch sides. And I guess you calmed your fears by figuring out that when you could no longer suppress your gay needs, you could at least juggle all the ends so I wouldn’t find out.

The truth is, you did a good job of it for a while. For a long time I really believed that the increasing problems in our marriage were my fault. As you began to pull away from me in the bedroom, I started to doubt myself as a woman. And you continued to feed into those doubts instead of being honest. Then I started catching you in lies. The secretive phone calls, the unexplained missing hours, and the unexpected business appointments. But when I caught you in a lie, you lied your way out of it causing me to doubt myself even more. You saturated our marriage with outsiders hoping that if our life was complicated enough, there wouldn’t be a chance to focus on our problem-rather, your problem.

You rejoiced at the birth of our daughter a year and a half later because you said it was a partial fulfillment of your lifelong dream-having children. For a few months after her birth, I really believed that we were becoming a cohesive family for the first time and naively put those nagging suspicions in the back of my mind. But it didn’t take long for the big pull to return, and once again, everything other than my feelings were a priority in your life. By this time I was getting closer to the truth no matter how cleverly you kept trying to throw me off the track. And on that monumental night when the truth smacked us both in the face head on, you continued to deny it and claimed that I was making a big deal out of nothing. But by that time, it was too late. You slipped and said five or six words too many that caused my world to come crashing down around me.

I was suffering and felt like I was coming apart piece by piece. You refused to allow me to go for professional help and threatened to divorce me if I did. I knew you were resisting because you didn’t want anyone to know your secret, but it was at my expense. When I begged you to go for help with me, you told me that the solution to your "little" problem was to have another baby. If only you had a son, these feelings would go away. And I, who knew virtually nothing about homosexuality other than the fact it was destroying our marriage, needed to believe you. I loved you more than anything in the world and was desperate for us to become the American dream.

We were blessed with a son the following year whom I counted on to be our own personal messiah. He would save our marriage-he would make your problem go away. After all, your ultimate lifetime dream, a son, your namesake, had become a reality. Of course, having a son didn’t do the trick, just like having a wife could never make you what you were not. Our communication deteriorated even further, and by this time, you were out doing your own thing and leaving little clues around, like a criminal who wanted to get caught. I knew the reason for our declining marriage, but you couldn’t find the strength within yourself to be honest with me. When a couple lives a lie, there is not much to talk about because how do you distinguish the truths from the falsehoods? During our four years together, you continued to shift the failure of our relationship to me-if only I was more supportive, if only I was more attractive, if only I wasn’t so pushy in the bedroom, if only I was more understanding.

Two years have passed since the day we said goodbye, and I have learned much since that time. I now know that I was in no way responsible for your return to homosexuality during our marriage. You are gay, and even if you were able to suppress your needs temporarily, it is normal for you to return to the lifestyle that was yours long before you met me. Only after our separation were you able to be honest with me. You recently claimed that you couldn’t tell me the truth before we were married because chances are I wouldn’t have married you. If you really loved me, I should at least have had that option. But what hurts even more were those hundreds of days after our marriage when you refused to confirm my suspicions causing me to lose faith in myself. I started questioning my judgment about everything, including my ability to be a good wife to you and mother to our children. I never felt worthy enough which drained me of my self-esteem as a human being.

They say that time heals all wounds. Time and distance healed some of mine, but there are scars that will be left for years to come. Today we are closer than when we were living together. You have come to terms with yourself, and I have learned to accept you and your homosexuality. I can’t live with you because no matter how accepting I have become of your world, I can never accept it as part of a marriage. However, there is a bond that strengthens as time moves on-the bond of friendship. So even though our years will be spent apart, at least when we walk our children down the aisle, it will be hand in hand, just as we did six years ago. Happy Anniversary.

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Over the last fifteen years, I have worked with thousands of straight wives who learned at some point during their marriage that their husbands are gay. Through the years, members of the gay community have criticized me for taking a position that I maintain to be moral, ethical, and necessary. These words of conscience need to be heard by those of you who are gay or bisexual men married to heterosexual women. It is about truth, honesty, and commitment towards the person who should be the primary focus in your life. To put it quite simply - COME OUT TO YOUR WIFE. This plea is not being made out of sheer emotionalism, but rather from common sense, logic, and a sense of fair play.

Marriage is the highest form of commitment a man can make with a woman. It supersedes all prior relationships and goes beyond friendship. The person you marry lives with you on a day-to-day basis and shares your life-the good times and bad, during sickness and health, through your moments of glory and depths of despair. It is a relationship built on trust and honesty towards each other. That is not to say that every move in a marriage must be explained. Sooner or later we all fall into the trap of making up "little white lies;" however, hiding your homosexuality is not exactly keeping a little secret when it plays such a big role in your life. It is living a lie. You are living a double life in two separate worlds, and the twain will never meet. There is another side of you that is totally hidden from the person who has so much trust in you and relies on you for basic honesty.

There is another issue that must be mentioned. If you identify yourself as gay or bisexual, then chances are you are participating in some kind of sexual activity outside your marriage. Justify it as you may, but this is infidelity. I have often heard the standard excuses from gay husbands stating that they don’t consider gay sexual encounters as cheating because it is not sex with another woman. But as the saying goes, a rose by any other name is still a rose, and a sex partner, regardless of the gender, is still an act of infidelity.

I am certainly not making a value judgment about the nature of your sexuality. In fact, no one would be more delighted than I, the former wife of a gay man, if people could learn to come to terms with themselves. If you are gay and have the need to be part of the gay world, I am all for it, but not at the expense of your wife who is sitting at home worrying day in and day out about what is wrong with her. From the wives of gay men I have spoken to and counseled, there was one common overriding feeling-the torture of not knowing what the problem in the marriage was. While the gay husband may think he is juggling his life around to please everyone, his wife increasingly senses that there is something dramatically wrong with the marriage, and yet she cannot put her finger on the problem. She feels a pull, often alienation, and keeps asking herself where she is going wrong. She finds herself buying every aid available to be "more of a woman," never realizing that the problem is she is not a man.

And what about the gay husband? You are suffering too, but in a different way. You often are feeling guilty. Most times when you have moments of intimacy with your wife, which you find diminishing as time passes, your body is with her, but you mind is with someone else. You are functioning and performing, but starting to resent your wife for putting you in a position to feel pushed to do something that is becoming more and more uncomfortable for you. You have to keep inventing excuses of why you are not in the mood and hoping that she will love you enough to believe them, even when she knows they are lies. You have to live in a state of hiding, hoping that no one you know will bump into you when you’re out being yourself in fear of their revealing this information to your wife. It can’t be easy living with this kind of a lie.

I am not insensitive. I know how difficult it is to go to the one person in your life who probably means more to you than anyone else in the world and tell her something this explosive. I know you are taking a big chance and there is a lot at risk here. You are taking a chance of losing your wife, your children, and your security. But let’s be honest. You are losing them anyway. Once your wife feels the pull, she is going to start to drift emotionally and mentally. If she can’t be happy, your children won’t be happy. Somewhere down the line, the family structure will break down, even if no one but you knows the real reason why. And, at that point, it will be your fault because you didn’t have the guts to do the right thing while you had the chance.

No wife likes hearing the kind of news that you are going to tell her, and it is going to be a rough road ahead to bring things back to a natural course, if it can ever be brought back. But there are relationships that are working out once the news is out. A sense of friendship and understanding can develop once honesty is on the table, perhaps not under the same roof, but throughout life. This is the most important factor when you are raising a family.

Coming out is a gamble that can go either way, but almost every major decision in life is a gamble. And when you consider what the stakes are here, hopefully you’ll realize it’s a chance you have to take.

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WHY NOT TO GET MARRIED IF YOU’RE GAY

If you are a gay man reading this and are considering marriage somewhere down the road, let me beg of you--not ask, but beg--DON'T! I am quite aware of the reasons that gay men have for getting married, but trust me...no matter how legitimate and idealistic these reasons may seem, you will in almost all cases be sorry in the end. This may sound like a strong generalization, but it is backed up with solid testimonies by the overwhelming majority of people who find themselves in this situation.

As a woman who found herself quite surprisingly (or shall I say shockingly) married to a gay man, I can attest to the pain and anguish that all of the parties in this kind of marriage suffer--the straight wife, the gay husband, the children and relatives. Even couples that may be aware of the husband’s homosexuality prior to marriage end up unhappy because of the lack of understanding on the straight wife’s part about what homosexuality is.

I have come to learn why gay men want to marry and would like to share some of the most common reasons with you. First, we are living in a far more liberal society than 20 years ago, but it is still a basically homophobic one in spite of all the breakthroughs. In most quarters, homosexuality is still viewed as a distortion or perversion, and realistically speaking, this attitude will be around longer than we will be. Because of this, many gay people who feel out of place in the gay world have the need to feel they "belong" in the heterosexual one--and what better way than to marry? They are convinced that marriage will be a miraculous "cure" as if homosexuality is a "disease" that can go away. This is not the case. What does happen in almost every marriage is that the husband goes through years of torture trying to be part of a world in which he can never feel totally comfortable. The frustrations that come about from the suppression of his sexuality or the lies that he needs to keep covering compel him to resent his wife and children. He views his family as a mirror, reflecting his guilt of living this lie.

Another frequent reason stated as a rationale for marriage is the need to have children. I feel this is the most absurd and selfish reason of all. What it essentially means is that the wife is being used as a breeding farm to produce offspring. Eventually, when the marriage falls apart, the wife usually ends up raising the children. Often, she not able to deal with the homosexual world or her anger from the failed marriage and attempts to thwart a relationship between the children and their gay father, leading to more misery on everyone's part, especially the child's. No doubt, there are some gay men who are ideal parents-in some cases better than their wives are. But there has to be another way to bring children into your life that will not be at the expense of an innocent bystander. Adoption is a viable alternative that should be considered.

Often gay men who wed claim that they were not aware of or in denial of their sexuality at the time of their marriages. However, it seems that in almost all of these instances, the person knew that there was something different about his sexuality for a long period of time. The most logical answer for someone in this position is to give yourself time to know who you really are and to come to terms with your true sexual orientation before running off to the alter. And, if you are still insistent on marrying even when there is a "past" or doubt in your mind about the present, then it is of utmost importance to tell your straight partner the truth--regardless of the consequences that may follow. She must be given the option of going into a marriage without blinders on.

If the woman still wants to get married after learning this fact, it is vitally important for both of you to go for some kind of counseling with either professionals or support groups who can explain the realities and drawbacks of the situation.

If all of this sounds discouraging, well, it is meant to be. But better to be disappointed now than devastated for a lifetime.

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