Like many others, I applauded Jason Collins’ brave decision to come out as gay. I can’t imagine what it would be like to hide my true identity for 12 years, as the the NBA veteran did. As broad-minded and accepting as many of us have become, many are still not as accepting of LGBT people and so it still is a brave announcement,
Keeping his true identity secret forced Collins to be a liar — a good one at that:
“You get so used to wearing a mask. You get used to telling half-truths, telling lies, telling stories about making up fictitious girlfriends or whatever it is.”
But Collins had more than fictitious girlfriends; he had a real one, one to whom he had been engaged, as he mentioned in his Sports Illustrated article:
“I thought I had to live a certain way. I thought I needed to marry a woman and raise kids with her. I kept telling myself the sky was red, but I always knew it was blue.”
I appreciate that Collins felt conflicted; at the same time, I can’t help thinking about his former fiancee and girlfriend of seven years, former WNBA player Carolyn Moos. Moos says she had no idea he was gay and had no idea why he broke off their engagement in 2009, about a month before their planned wedding date. In fact, she only found out that he was gay just days before Collins announced it to the public.
She has handled his revelation quite gracefully. While she says she wishes him the best and seems to genuinely care for him, she’s understandably a bit shocked:
“It’s very emotional for me as a woman to have invested 8 years in my dream to have a husband, soul mate, and best friend in him. So this is all hard to understand.”
Moos is now 34, and age that can be complicated if a woman wishes to become a mother. And Moos has said she wants kids:
“I definitely want to have children and I definitely want to be married and that was the hardest part. I think as women, we do have goals and timetables, but I think when you’re writing a dream and a life-long script with somebody who you truly believed you’re going to wake up to for the rest of your life — that’s not easy to let go of. But I think with time and information, you can have a prospective on it. It’s all processing.”
She is now freezing her eggs.
Her situation reminds me of the recent HuffPost discussion with comedian and HuffPost blogger Juliet Jeske, who was unknowingly married for seven years to a gay man:
“My ex lied to me for years, and pretty much had a secret identity for years. The amount of broken trust there was, was so great that there’s no way that I could just say, ‘Oh well, we’ll have a messed-up hybrid marriage that doesn’t make sense, filled with lies, deception, broken promises.”
Like Collins, who thought he had to “live a certain way,” Jeske’s former husband married her because he wanted a traditional life. (If that alone isn’t an argument for marriage for same-sex couples, I don’t know what else is!)
There may be as many as 2 million lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people who have married someone of the opposite sex; who knows how many came out before they married, like Collins and Moos.
It’s hard to not want to celebrate someone finding the strength to live an authentic life. But as Collins is being hailed by everyone from Oprah to Obama, what about Moos? She was basically blindsided by someone who lied to her (while also lying to himself and everyone else), leading the Straight Spouse Network to declare that they are proud of her. Her side of the now-celebrated coming-out story is more about dealing with deception:
“The script of the inspirational coming out story of struggle is somehow not so noble when there’s a character in that story who was deceived, and used – often for many years. We know it is complicated. We also know that our stories, our lives, make many people uncomfortable. Who cares, some say. You had to know, others say. Other reactions from friends, acquaintances, family, public might be less kind.”
How does that impact the betrayed person? Hugely, according to Kiri Blakeley, author of Can’t Think Straight: A Memoir of Mixed-Up Love who wrote about the coming out of J. Crew’s president and creative director Jenna Lyons:
“The gob-smacking emotional shock of your spouse announcing that he or she is gay (or discovering it in some way), can even result in post-traumatic stress disorder. Anxiety attacks, depression, sleep disorders, flashbacks, and difficulty trusting people are common symptoms of PTSD and of finding out a spouse is gay. Some straight spouses have spoken of deep changes to their personality or habits: Developing tastes for foods they never liked before or losing interest in formerly favorite activities. The brain, trying to deal with major emotional trauma, can alter its neural pathways, creating, essentially, a different person.”
Is there a lesson here? Should we be super-wary of anyone we date? Would it be true that we “had to know” if our boy/girlfriend, finance, spouses isn’t straight? Or should we come right out and ask, “Are you gay?” if we suspect someone might be gay, as I once did to a man I dated many years ago (He, of course, said no. I still don’t know but I believe I dodged a bullet)?
What has been your experience?
Photo © Keith Frith/Fotolia.com
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