EL CERRITO, Calif.
What about the wife?
The question has nagged Amity Pierce Buxton for decades, even more so now. New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey (father of two, twice married) recently announced that he is "a gay American." Virginia Rep. Edward L. Schrock (a married father of one) ended his reelection campaign last week amid claims that he is gay.
Amity Buxton founded the Straight Spouse Network in 1986, three years after her husband of 25 years came out to her.
(Randi Lynn Beach For The Washington Post)
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Neither of their respective wives, Dina Matos McGreevey and Judith Adnee Crawford, is talking.
"Who could blame them?" says Buxton.
She speaks from experience. Buxton, 75, was married to a gay man for 25 years. Since 1986, she's run the Straight Spouse Network, an international organization for heterosexual partners of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. Emotions, the years not withstanding, are still vivid. First comes shock, then pain and rejection, a maddening feeling that the world has turned upside down.
Gradually, reality sets in.
The image is indelible: Dina McGreevey, in a periwinkle blue suit, a string of white pearls around her neck, stood by her husband, held his hand before and after a very private moment on a very public stage wearing a frozen smile. You wonder, had she known? If so, for how long? Is she staying with him?
"You have to understand that when a married person comes out, it's no longer an individual event," says Buxton. "When a married person comes out, it's a family matter."
The weeks since the McGreevey story broke have been a media whirl for Buxton. She's catching up, though. Or, perhaps, times are catching up with her. Gay spouses trace back to the days of the Greeks and Romans; to the marriages of Oscar and Constance Wilde, Cole and Linda Porter, Rock Hudson and Phyllis Gates; to Buxton's own marriage to John in June 1958.
What's different now is that gay spouses are coming out and their partners are having to reorient their lives. Buxton is helping them do that. She runs the Straight Spouse Network from a spare bedroom that's become a sea of paperwork; her operating budget is about $50,000, most of it from donations. Checks arrive daily in the mail.
Gay husbands and lesbian wives who come out "have no clue what's happening to their straight spouse," says Buxton, the author of "The Other Side of the Closet." "They're absorbed in their own struggles, absorbed in their own liberation, when at the same time their spouses are dealing with this shattering moment."
Buxton gives voice to straight spouses who are forced to deal with a new reality.
"I knew something was going on with him. I just wasn't sure what it was. I'd ask him, jokingly, 'Why do you duck?' 'Why don't you kiss me anymore?' " she says. "So, when he came out with it, things started to make sense. I remember thinking, 'I can make it can work.' The typical wife, right? Thinking she can make it work."
