Jul 22, 2005  |  By: ELIZABETH WEILL-GREENBERG  | COMMENTS     

WHEN I FOUND out my boyfriend of four years was gay I felt a mixture of relief, disbelief and incredible guilt. He was the first person I went to with a personal crisis. But he struggled with his anguish and guilt alone.

I learned that he had been with men during our relationship after I confessed to cheating on him. He told me he had been unfaithful too, also with men. Strangely, the significance of that didn’t sink in at first. He insisted he wasn’t gay; he was bisexual.

I believed him when he said he wanted to stay together. Until that point our relationship had felt close to perfect; breaking up was not something I ever considered. I saw our indiscretions as harmless, a need for sowing our wild oats.

So we both continued having affairs. We convinced ourselves this deceitful arrangement could work. But, of course, it couldn’t.

We finally admitted to each other that we needed to break up when I fell in love with another man. We had become best friends and roommates — not lovers.

But even after we split he still would not acknowledge being gay. There was no Jim McGreevey-style news conference and definitive declaration that he is a “gay American.” This grayness infuriated me. I wanted to understand how our relationship had deteriorated. If he was gay, then our problems made sense.

I kept expecting a meteor of revelation to hit us. He’d come out and admit our relationship had been a lie.

But there’s the catch: Our relationship hadn’t been a lie. He had been in love with me and, for years, sexually attracted to women. I once felt so desperate for answers I actually Googled: “I’m gay but I like having sex with women.”

Results: None.

OFTEN MEN WHO come out to their girlfriends or wives are seen as liars who want the comforts and acceptance of a “straight” life. Author Terry McMillan filed for divorce from her husband, Jonathan Plummer, who inspired the 1996 novel “How Stella Got Her Groove Back.” Recently, McMillan publicly accused Plummer, who is gay and from Jamaica, of marrying her to gain U.S. citizenship.

“One of the biggest myths is they did it as a cover,” says “Alex,” a member of the D.C. chapter of the Gay Married Men Association.

He is married to a woman and they have three children. Alex told his wife he was bisexual before they got married but over the years his attraction to men has grown. Despite this, he tries to remain monogamous with his wife and they still have an active sex life with each other.

Even though Alex’s wife knows about his desire for men and his past affairs, they want to stay together.

“Many men find themselves in their 20s, 30s and 40s realizing, ‘My sexuality isn’t what I thought it was,’” Alex says.

That was the case for Philadelphia resident Joanne Fleisher, a social worker who now counsels women coming out in marriage and is writing a book on the subject, “Living Two Lives: Married to a Man and In Love with a Woman,” due out this fall.

“I had no suspicion or inkling of being gay,” says Fleisher, who described herself as “boy crazy” when she was growing up. Toward the last few years of her mostly happy, 12-year marriage she fell in love with a close female friend.

Fleisher and her husband, who had two children together, went into therapy to try to save the marriage but soon realized they needed to divorce.

The burden of a woman’s decision to stay or leave the marriage can be devastating. “[Women] feel every decision is the final decision,” she says. However, “flip-flopping is a part of the process.” Often women and their husbands will negotiate different arrangements to keep the marriage together.

“This is a tremendous ethical dilemma,” Fleisher says. “It’s very different from other women coming out because the decision involved is no longer a question of personal happiness. It, ultimately, will have a serious impact on the people that she loves.”

That sense of responsibility is certainly not limited to women. When Vince, a member of D.C.’s Gay Married Men Association, acknowledged to himself that he is gay, he became severely depressed and even contemplated suicide. Vince asked that only his first name be used.

Vince said he successfully suppressed his attraction to men for most of his life. He was taught growing up in Tennessee ...