Ex-spouses of gay men and women speak up for same-sex marriage
Saturday, November 7th, 2009If anyone could have talked himself out of being gay, Kimberly Brooks said it was her husband.
He wanted to be straight; she wanted him to be straight. She once followed his gaze across the beach to another man but quickly dismissed the thought. No, he couldn’t be. Then he started spending more time with one particular friend and an unease pushed Brooks to ask the question that ultimately confirmed her fears: Was that friend gay?
“He said, ‘I don’t know.’ And in that moment, I knew,” said Brooks, a therapist in Falls Church. “That day, the marriage was over.”
As the debate over legalizing same-sex marriage in the District grows louder and more polarized, there is a group whose support for the proposal is both unexpected and personal. They are federal workers and professionals, men and women who share little except that their former spouses tried to live as heterosexuals, only to decide one day they could not.
Many of these former spouses — from those who still feel raw resentment toward their exes to those who’ve reached a mutual understanding — see the legalization of same-sex marriage as a step toward protecting not only homosexuals, but heterosexuals as well. If homosexuality were more accepted, they say, they might have been spared doomed marriages followed by years of self-doubt.
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