One hour into "Brokeback Mountain," Amy Jo Remmele began to cry, and
not just for the woman on-screen, standing in a doorway in Riverton,
Wyo., watching her husband embrace a man.
"When I saw that look in her eyes, I thought, 'Oh, yeah.' Even
though I never saw my husband with another man, I knew exactly how that
woman would have felt," said Mrs. Remmele, a respiratory therapist in
rural Minnesota.
On June 1, 2000, Mrs. Remmele, then 31, discovered her husband's profile on the Web site gay.com.
The couple stayed up all that night weeping and talking. Soon
afterward, 10 days before she gave birth to her second child, Mrs.
Remmele's husband went off to spend a couple of nights with his new
boyfriend. "I tried to talk him out of it, and he left anyway," Mrs.
Remmele said. "I was devastated." Three months later the couple
divorced.
Mrs. Remmele — now married to a farmer who raises
cattle, corn and soybeans — is one of an estimated 1.7 million to 3.4
million American women who once were or are now married to men who have
sex with men.
The estimate derives from "The Social Organization of Sexuality," a
1990 study, that found that 3.9 percent of American men who had ever
been married had had sex with men in the previous five years. The lead
author, Edward O. Laumann, a sociologist at the University of Chicago,
estimated that 2 to 4 percent of ever-married American women had
knowingly or unknowingly been in what are now called mixed-orientation
marriages.
Such marriages are not just artifacts of the closeted
1950's. In the 16th century, Queen Anne of Denmark had eight children
with King James I of England, known not only for the King James Bible,
but also for his devotion to male favorites, one of whom he called "my
sweet child and wife."
Other women include Constance Wilde, Phyllis Gates, Linda Porter, Renata Blauel and Dina Matos McGreevey, wed respectively to Oscar Wilde, Rock Hudson, Cole Porter, Elton John and James E. McGreevey, the former governor of New Jersey.
Despite their shock and their anger, many women, especially those
criticized by gay husbands for being too sexually demanding, are
relieved to understand what was wrong.
The remaining third of
those she has studied try to preserve their marriages, Dr. Buxton said.
Half of those stay married for three years or more. More than 600 such
couples belong to online support groups.
In a 2001 study,
published in The Journal of Bisexuality, of 137 still-married gay and
bisexual men and their wives, Dr. Buxton found that most lived in
suburbs and medium-size cities and had been married for 11 to 30 years.
Only tiny percentages lived in rural areas, where family privacy may be
harder to maintain.
The survival of even a small minority of
these marriages calls into question the conceptual shoe boxes into
which human partnerships, affection, attraction, commitment and
sexuality are often jammed. Describing their permutations and
combinations turns out to be much more complicated than checking a box
on a form labeled "gay," "bisexual" or "straight."
"Brokeback
Mountain" should prompt social conservatives to ponder whether it is
good family policy to encourage gay men to live lives that are
traditional yet untrue. Would honest gay marriages be less destructive
than deceitful straight ones? I think so. Many disagree. Even if they
oppose it, however, seeing this film may give heterosexual marriage
proponents a better insight into why so many Americans advocate
homosexual marriage.
"Brokeback" also concerns homophobic
violence. The October 1998 beating death of gay college student Matthew
Shepard in Laramie, Wyo., the July 1999 fatal baseball-bat attack on
gay Army Pvt. Barry Winchell, and the non-lethal assault on gay soldier
Kyle Lawson last October, among other incidents, should remind
filmgoers that this grave matter was not buried on the Great Plains
decades ago.
