Gallery Carre
Irritating Neologism: ‘Brokeback Marriages’
Mar 8th, 2024 by Viviane
Many Couples Must Negotiate Terms of ‘Brokeback’ Marriages (NYT):
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.
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Despite the unfortunate pop-culture headline, I was surprised at the evenhandedness of this articl. Though the frustrating thing about this article is that is made two assumptions: 1) that only men enter into a “traditional marraige” when other feelings are in the mix and, bigger, 2) there is the assumption that men who do enter such marriages are hiding/denying their true gayness. I know for me that is not the case at all. There is truth in my bisexuality. There may be some partners who can’t live with and accept this dual attraction and thus the marriage fails. However, they didn’t go far enough to explore those that do survive and how.