An Interesting column from the
Detroit News (extracts)
Monday, March 22, 2004
Hudson taught painful lesson on marriageBy Deb Price / The Detroit News
In 1955, Hollywood secretary Phyllis Gates was young, in love and living the fantasy of many American women: A handsome movie star had swept her off her feet and married her. Her doting husband pampered her with jewels, lovemaking and talk of children. She rubbed elbows with Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean and Humphrey Bogart.
Yes, the early days of her marriage to Rock Hudson felt idyllic.
But the sweet nothings quickly disappeared, leaving only a bitter nothingness. Hudson became distant and depressed, started arguments just for an excuse to storm out of the house and disappear for hours. When he traveled, he stayed away as long as possible and rarely called home.
Clueless about what was wrong, Gates blamed herself, feared there was another woman and eventually sought psychiatric help. Her therapist helped her comprehend that she’d unwittingly married a gay man — something Hudson never admitted to her — and that she was powerless to make the relationship work.
Gates divorced Hudson after three years. But by then her life was ruined. She never remarried, never had the children she’d longed for, never got over the heartbreak. To this day, she can’t even bring herself to watch TV reruns of her ex-husband’s movies.
…
In a gut-wrenching first-ever interview March 11 on “Larry King Live,” Gates explained her accidental involvement in a gay-straight marriage: “I didn’t see any inkling” that Hudson was gay. She added, “Maybe I was a dope. ... It hurts, terribly. I mean, how can you compete?”
Watching that interview, Amity Buxton heard a painfully familiar story. She, too, had lived through the nightmare of being married to someone of the opposite sexual orientation.
The founder of the Straight Spouse Network (
www.ssnetwk.org), Buxton says she wishes President George W. Bush had seen Rock Hudson’s ex-wife talk about how her life was shattered by having unwittingly married a gay man who felt he had no choice but to try to hide behind a straight spouse.
Unlike many of Bush’s critics, Buxton isn’t afraid his policies will throw her out of work. She fears they’ll overwhelm her with new business.
Pressed to justify his call for amending the Constitution to ban gay people from marrying one another, Bush declared, “Marriage between a man and a woman is the ideal. And the job of the president is to drive policy toward the ideal.”
But Buxton, who for decades has counseled thousands of heterosexuals devastated by having married gay spouses, warns that driving gay people to lie to themselves or to others inevitably leads to sham, mixed-orientation marriages and broken lives.
“The legalization of marriages of same-gender couples would decrease such personal family disasters and increase the number of stable couples contributing to community life,” Buxton wrote Bush recently. “With fewer divorces and more couples staying together, marriage as an institution might begin to heal.”
Buxton sees gay-straight marriages as a “cautionary tale” about what happens when society insists on pretending that everyone ought to marry someone of the opposite sex.
“Homophobia hurts not just gays but straight spouses as well,” says Buxton, who is happily remarried. “The anger, the fear, the grief (of straight-gay divorce) escalate because there is nobody to talk to about it. ... All because people couldn’t be true to themselves.”
der Brucer (who spent 18 years acting "Rock Hudson")
