Resources

If you are in a marriage with a partner who has unresolved sexual orientation issues or turns out to be gay, reach out today to someone who can provide emotional support.
Visit the Straight Spouse Network at their website: straightspouse.org, find a support group (a list by state is available here), read relevant books, and confide in someone you can trust.

Suggested books from the straight spouse perspective:

  • The Straight Spouse: A Memoir by Vivian Fransen (Open Door Publications; 2017): After her husband reveals his same-sex yearnings, a young woman struggles to save her marriage from falling apart and learns some hard lessons about “letting go” and moving forward.
  • Now Everyone Will Know: The Perfect Husband, His Shattering Secret, My Rediscovered Life {A Memoir} by Maggie Kneip (Garden Street Books; 2015): A woman embraces the truth about her husband after nearly 25 years of struggling “to protect herself and her children from stigma.”
  • Secrets and Lies: Surviving the Truths That Change Our Lives by Jane Isay (Doubleday; 2014): Features true stories about people who discover “family secrets, offering lessons and insights for those who are hiding the truth and for those who discover what has long been hidden”; the opening chapter is about the author’s experience when, after 15 years of marriage, her husband revealed the truth about his homosexuality.
  • A Box of Darkness: The Story of a Marriage by Sally Rider Brady (St. Martin’s Press; 2009): After sorting through papers in a box that revealed her husband of
    46 years had desired the love of other men, this author—a widow in her first year of mourning—shares her reflections “as she unravels the dark and unexpected web he had left behind.”
  • A Pebble In His Shoe: The Diary Of A Straight Spouse by Dr. Francine Barbetta (Xlibris; 2008): Based on Francine’s diary, this book traces the disturbing events of “Francine, an eternal optimist, and Frank, a dedicated husband and father with a pain too deep to ignore any longer,” as they “travel the painful path of a straight spouse and a homosexual husband.”
  • Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage by Dina Matos McGreevey (Hachette Books; 2007) and The Confession by James E. McGreevey (Regan; 2006): These two high-profile books pique the interest of readers who crave behind-the-scenes details about the marriage between New Jersey’s First Lady and a New Jersey Governor and their public scandal.
  • Pretzel Logic by Lisa Rogak (Williams Hill; 1999): Written by The New York Times best-selling author of more than 40 books who discovered in 1997, two years into her marriage, that she was married to a man who was gay, this novel is the story of a couple whose marriage breaks up due to the husband’s coming-out.
  • The Other Side of the Closet: The Coming-Out Crisis for Straight Spouses and Families by Amity Pierce Buxton (Wiley; 1994): This groundbreaking book chronicles how “having a spouse or parent disclose his or her same-sex attraction is a shattering experience fraught with pain, confusion, anger, and a profound loss of self-esteem” and provides personal narratives from initial trauma to eventual transformation, based on the author’s eight years of research including interviews with 1,000 straight spouses and children and her own personal experience as a straight spouse who founded the Straight Spouse Network.

“If I had one wish, it would be that gay men would stop marrying straight women so books like mine and Vivian’s would become history books. Unfortunately, I continue to have women join my support group who are in their 20s and 30s so the need for memoirs of this type are in demand.”—Francine Barbetta, PsyD, author of A Pebble In His Shoe: The Diary Of A Straight Spouse; website: drbarbetta.com