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Well, there ya go.....it was out. At that very moment I felt both liberated and scared at the same time. I braced myself for the impending onslaught of screaming and god-knows-what-else, but it did not come, which rattled me just a little. At that moment I felt a mix of shame and pride; shame at admitting that I was something I had always been conditioned to believe was wrong and pride at being able to admit the very same thing.
The next day was Sunday and we did not go to church. We had talked until 5:00 in the morning and were exhausted, as you might imagine.
The next week was probably the worst week of my life. To add to what had just happened the past weekend, which I was not sure at that time was a good thing or not, we got a phone call Monday morning that my mother-in-law had been diagnosed with malignant breast cancer. I knew something was terribly wrong when my ex-wife was talking to someone on the phone, but I had no idea how bad it was until she hung up and basically collapsed. In spite of the fact that my then ex-wife and I were in the middle of what was the end of our marriage I still loved my mother-in-law and was sick at hearing the news.
The following week consisted of a series of conversations consisting of her questions and my vague answers; where did you meet, how long have you known him, what does he mean to you and so on. I, of course, was not going to go into detail. What purpose would it serve to give her any details? Why should I give her answers to questions that would only hurt her? Further more, with the added stress of the news of her mother's cancer, I did not want to give her any more reason to be upset beyond what I already had.
JUST when I thought things could NOT get any worse, they did. The company I was working for as on the verge of closing because of a shift in the financial markets and I had been laid off. The separation was amicable and civilized enough, however the fact remains it still happened. I was given a more than fair severance, thanked for my hard work and shown the door. How nice. At the time I though "My god! Even Job eventually got a break! What the hell is going on here??” and thought surely I was heading for a disaster of major proportions, if I was not already there. I was on the verge of suicide a few short months earlier and was afraid that I was approaching that place in my mind again.
The next thirty days turned out to probably be the most significant of my life. During the month of May in 2002 my ex-wife and I talked about a number of things, as I mentioned earlier. All of the discussions got very heated and were painful for both of us, but each for different reasons. It was during this time I began to detach myself from her in my mind as a person to whom I had been married for almost twenty years and see her simply as a person I knew who happened to be the mother of my children. My dad had had once described himself as a "reformed smoker", that is, a person who was once an unapologetic smoker who did not care on whose toes he stepped when he wanted to smoke. He went from being that person to being a someone who could not imagine smoking and was disgusted by it. I was now that person, to some extent, when it came to my life as a straight man in a relationship with a woman. The thought of being with a woman sexually was immediately repulsive to me and I had begun blocking out any memory of having sex with her. If a memory pops up now it seems like a clip from a movie....a scene played out by two unknown actors. I do not see myself doing that. Even the implication by my partner that I must harbour some desire to have sex with a woman simply because I was married for so long makes me angry. I truly do not give a damn what anyone thinks about my sexual orientation simply because I was once married. I know what I want and what I don't. The bottom line is I never liked saving sex with a woman and was able to do it only if I could think of men when I did. This revaluation probably makes me seem like a person who was using my ex-wife as a cover, but the truth is that was never the case. I'm not trying to convince anyone that I loved her the way a straight man should love his wife. I would never try to convince myself of that. I am saying I was doing what I thought I was supposed to do; what "normal" guys did. That is marry and have kids. I always knew I wanted children so I couldn't be gay...right? There had never been any doubt in my mind that I was attracted to men sexually, however I thought it was a flaw in my makeup and I simply needed to press forward and "fix" myself so I would be normal.
Even before I knew what sex was I knew I looked at men and wanted to be near them; to find an excuse to touch them; to be close enough to smell them and to want them to want to be near me, too. This disire was in me from the time I was around six or seven years old. My mom's partner (yes, she's a lesbian and we'll get to that later on) had a cousin named Steve who was drop-dead gorgeous and had a most perfect body. He was built on the thinner side, had a hairy chest, a cute face and that perfect "70s" hair all thick and feathered back. I had a crush on him from the first time I met him and I was no older than eight years old. When I was around ten or eleven he came to live with us for a while (My mom divorced my dad and we moved in with her partner who also divorced her husband for my mom) when he came out to his parents. This was in was the early '70s and newly out gays were often rejected by their families and even thrown out of the house. I realize it still happens, however it was worse back then. In any case, he lived with us for a few months and I followed him around like a puppy dog. One night he had taken a shower before bed and came into the kitchen wearing just some underwear that was basically just a very loosely knit mesh bikini with a patch in the front to cover the genitals. The sides and back were totally mesh (imagine a very lose crochet). When I saw him walk into the kitchen my heart raced and I looked at his hairy chest, followed the trail down his stomach and disappear into his underwear which had a thick patch of hair coming out of the top and sides. Not knowing what I was doing or why I continued to stare I could feel lightening shoot from my chest down to my crotch. I wanted nothing more at that moment than to reach out and rub my fingers thought his hairy chest down to his underwear where I would stick my hands in and play with his balls and cock. This feeling came naturally to me, however I would have never admitted it to anyone if they had asked. I saw him one other time when he was getting dressed and he did not have any underwear on. I couldn't do anything but stare at his cock and balls and I wanted nothing more than to walk over and touch it. Again, that familiar feeling came over me and I felt like lightening had shot from my chest down into my crotch. I had heard guys talk about how their balls felt when they saw a pictures of naked women and this feeling was exactly like that, so I knew something was severely wrong with me and I was scared. I did not want to go to hell and was convinced that I was heading there because of the way I was feeling. This was the beginning of an underlying stress that I would carry with me for the next thirty years.
