"Those who have carried on are on a similar agreement to me," says Mark. The vast majority of members are already "out" to their wives. Mark himself is a long-standing member of Gay Married Men, a group that meets in Manchester and has around 50 members who range in age from their 20s to their 50s. The proliferation of support groups on the internet suggests a relatively sizable chunk of Britain's homosexual community are in mixed-sex unions.
But often it's simply the homosexual partner who wants that."Īs long as they don't flaunt what they're doing, they can keep themselves satisfied and maintain their friendship with their wife, albeit by maintaining celibacy They may have deals where they can both have sex with other people. They set rules on whether the homosexual partner can have sex with other people. There's currently no single set of figures available for MOMs in the UK but, according to stats released by the Straight Spouse Network, an organization set up to help the female partners of gay Mormon men in Utah, there are 2 million mixed-orientation marriages in America alone.Īlthough it's far more common for a gay partner to come out after the couple marry than before, this is by no means universal, according to Douglas Chay, a Maryland-based therapist who runs his own practice, Pride Counseling, and describes himself as an MOM specialist.ĭouglas says that "in some cases, before the actual marriage people agree to have what they think of as a non-traditional marriage. And such marriages are far more common than you might think. When psychologists and counsellors talk about mixed-orientation marriages, or MOMs, they are describing unions in which one partner is openly gay, the other straight. Yet for millions of people in mixed-orientation marriages, it's a basic fact of life. In fact, today-after 30 years of marriage-they're still together.Ī gay and a straight person trying to maintain a marriage seems like quite an ordeal to put yourself through. Despite his sexuality, Mark told his wife that he'd never sleep with another man, promising to stay faithful to her for as long as they were married.īut after catching him, his wife didn't walk away. Mark's wife had found a stash of gay porn shortly after they married in their early 20s, and he'd formally come out to her (although not to the rest of the world) at the age of 28. While Mark's affair was a surprise, that it was with a man was not.