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I never thought that I’d have much in common with a Liberal Democrat MP or his wife. But when Mark Oaten was forced to resign from the party leadership race in January this year after a scandal about gay prostitutes, I found myself in the surprising position of feeling a huge amount of sympathy, especially for his wife.
Nobody knows how many British men in heterosexual relationships are actually gay or bisexual, but it’s likely to be significant. And if we did know, it might well rock our heterosexual, marriage-centred society to the core.
I was due to get married recently. I thought that I’d finally found the right man. One of the best things about him was that he seemed really happy with his life: he loved his job, had normal hobbies that he was passionate about, had a normal family, was solvent, had never married so had no baggage. He was even tall and handsome. So what was the catch? For there was one. And it was a big one.
Six short days before 50 friends and I were due to fly to France for the wedding, I found out what that catch was. You have to imagine how ordinary this scene was and so how surreal what happened was . . .
It’s Friday night, we’ve just finished dinner in a restaurant and are about to ramble smugly home for our last weekend as boyfriend and girlfriend. Mr Normal stood up and said he was running to the loo before we left. As he got up and walked away from the table, he dropped a business card on the floor. I reached under the table to pick it up and noticed something scrawled across the back — the name of a sauna parlour and a telephone number.
It’s odd how your brain works in these situations — you think of everything except the obvious answer. I picked up his mobile, which was lying on the table, and scanned through the list of dialled calls and there it was . . . at half past six yesterday morning.
He came back to the table. I asked him what the number was. He said he didn’t know. I knew then that it was serious but I still didn’t realise how serious. I began to think about pre-wedding hookers (worse than pre-wedding jitters). But after a long and painful argument outside on the street he suddenly stopped, became dead calm, said he was going to tell me and that it was bad. And it was. “It’s a gay sauna I visited when I went to Liverpool,” he said.
Liverpool was yesterday, so eight days before our wedding he’d got up at 6am to go to have sex with faceless men? I couldn’t feel anything. I was freefalling, beyond shock, but before I could get my head around that bombshell he lobbed another: “And for the past two years I’ve been going to a place near the office called Pink Fountain.” Pink Fountain? How could you go anywhere called Pink Fountain? “Where is it?” I asked pointlessly.
“In one of the old market towns, one stop down the motorway.” He loves history.
“When do you go?” “Lunchtimes.” It’s funny how you never think that people will cheat on you during their lunchbreak.
Several desperate hours later I sat alone in my bed and began the task of texting everyone due to fly to France, telling them that the wedding was cancelled. It was nearly 5am on Saturday by the time I’d finished, but even so calls started coming in.
Fast-forward a couple of months and I’m exhausted — exhausted with explaining, and answering prurient questions (not that I blame people for their curiosity). Most of all, I’m exhausted trying to understand what he’s trying to tell me. We’ve fitted three years of talking into these short foggy weeks, but I don’t understand any better than I did on that Friday night. After a year and a half together I feel I hardly know this man at all. He is adamant that he’s not gay, concedes that he might be bisexual but says that he doesn’t need it in his life and wants only me. He has just started seeing a therapist, who thinks that it’s probably not a matter of homosexuality, but a sexual compulsion motivated by a fear of intimacy and women.
He has a whole list of bad experiences, starting with a bullying mother who made him withdraw into himself as a child and ending with his last big relationship, in which his girlfriend manipulated his kindness and kept control of the relationship by using sex as a weapon.
These experiences, he insists, have increased his fear of women and sent him running into the arms of strange blokes. It started about three years ago when, he says, his previous girlfriend started withholding sex: he’d begun looking at straight internet porn, then gay, then chat rooms, then female prostitutes and, finally, about two years ago, a gay sauna. When I asked “Why a gay sauna, why not prostitutes?” he said: “Because you have to be civilised with a prostitute, say hello and stuff. In a gay sauna you pay your money at the door, it’s anonymous and you don’t have to speak to anyone. It’s sex without emotion.”
He has tried so hard to help me to recover from the blinding blow he struck me. He has taken a serious amount of verbal abuse from me, copious amounts of crying and wailing, says that he has no urge to go back to the sauna and wants to get us back on track. But has he really changed, was it all just a big bad mid-life experiment, is it something that he has any option to change? When you find yourself in such a situation you have to ask yourself some big questions: what is love, what is sex, what is important to you in a relationship? It’s then that you realise how little we really think for ourselves, how much we allow our expectations of life to be fed to us. Something like this challenges everything that you believe about yourself, about other people and about what is truly valuable in life.
Inevitably, one of the things you think about a lot is sex, the meaning of sex, your expectations of sex, what’s normal, and is there such a thing as normal? And, of course, what defines a person as homosexual? The confusing thing about Mr Normal was that he seemed very interested in women — we’d had rows in the past about e-mail and text relationships that he had maintained with other women but I’d never suspected that there were other men, too.
Perhaps I should have listened to my favourite Bing Crosby CD more carefully and not messed with Mr In-between. Was it all, me included, just a cover for a gay man struggling to be straight? He wouldn’t be the first: a survey in the US in 1990 found that 4 per cent of married men have had a homosexual relationship within the past five years and I don’t imagine the figure would be any lower here.
When I went to inquire about an HIV test I asked the doctor whether he met many women in my position. “Oh yes,” he said, trying to be sympathetic. “People like you are ten a penny. In fact, a lot of women forgive it, live with it and I see them only if the condom breaks when they’re having sex with their husbands.”
But even if Mr Normal decides that he is bisexual — or even straight — could I ever forgive his betrayal? A close male friend of mine said I was looking at it wrongly, that it wasn’t about betrayal and forgiveness. “The trouble with women is that they think everything is about them. They love martyring themselves. If their boyfriends cheat on them, they think ‘What’s wrong with me?’ But it has nothing to do with them. Most blokes need a lot of sex, and want a wide variety of sex. When they cheat it’s about them and their weakness, it’s not about you.”
I don’t agree. It is about you, it’s about the fact that your partner goes ahead and does something that he doesn’t need, but wants, knowing full well that if you find out you’ll be devastated. In other words, he doesn’t care about you enough to forgo something for your sake. Regardless of where you fall within the straight-bisexual-gay continuum, I would have said that betrayal is betrayal.
But having talked night and day with this man, I have come to the conclusion that there might be an exception to this rule: the person who is truly in denial. A person in denial can’t betray you, because he doesn’t know what the truth is himself. If he betrays anyone, he betrays himself, and by comparison you’re a minor casualty. Unless you know someone in denial, you probably have no idea of the power it can hold over a person. An alcoholic who is truly in denial does not lie to you when he tells you he does not have a problem with booze, he really believes he hasn’t got one. He’s running away from what he sees as the awful truth of himself so fast that it has become a blur.
And, clearly, a 40-year-old man who suddenly takes up gay sex but maintains that he is heterosexual is not facing up to something in himself. It doesn’t necessarily mean that he is gay; people use sex for all kinds of purposes other than sexual gratification: power, money, self-loathing, self-esteem, inclusion, fear of love, fear of not being loved. But can I, should I, forgive him and wait for him to figure out why he was doing it? We live in selfish times, and forgiveness, it seems, is often equated with weakness. I have felt the caustic judgment of friends who have no experience of a situation like this one, but who have confidently dismissed us both: “He’s obviously gay, and you’re both in denial.” Others take the position that love, sex and sense of self are far more complicated than allowed for in the “three-boxes-fits-all” view of life. They say that if I love him and I ’m able, I should help him through this crisis, regardless of the outcome.
What I do know is that I care deeply for this person: he’s a brilliant, fantastic, special man. I respect enormously his efforts to work his way through this; it’s not an easy path for either of us. But, ultimately, I can’t be with him if he’s gay, and figuring out whether he is could take a very long time. And if, as his shrink says, he is a sex addict, there’s no quick-fix for that either.
Sometimes I think that he must be gay to have done what he’s done; other days I would stake my life on him being straight. But I never doubt his love for me or mine for him. And that’s the dilemma: if I walk away now, I will be walking away from the deepest love I have ever had or ever given — but if I stay, what price will I pay if he is not who he says he is?
The author has used a pseudonym.
Gay sex: the facts
