When Opposites No Longer Attract: Inspiring Stories Of Eight Men and Women Who Left Straight Marriages and Came Out as Gay

Twenty-five years ago, I was barely conscious that the gay world existed. Today, after having been married for more than a decade to a woman and having fathered children who still live with me, I know that I am a gay man. I’ve come out and now identify myself as gay. I decided to write this book because I run into a lot of men who are just like me as I used to be—married to a woman, often with children, and dabbling in having sex with other men. After starting to write this book, I decided to include the stories of women as well, primarily because I noticed that the lesbians I know who had been married to men handled the transition to homosexuality more gracefully and with more integrity than my male friends and I did. The idea for this book occurred to me one night a few years ago at a bar on Pittsburgh’s South Side. I was with four friends. We met there every week to watch Will & Grace. As we drank our beer, I realized that we were five gay men, all divorced from women we had loved, and among us, we had fourteen children. Even though I had met plenty of married men on gay sites on-line, up until that night I had considered myself an anomaly. I had lived life as a heterosexual man and didn’t realize I was gay until after I was married and had children. Before that night at the bar, I had been vaguely aware that my friends and I were meeting a lot of married men—men in straight marriages—in gay bars and other venues in which these supposedly straight men were looking to hook up with other men. That night in the South Side, it hit me that I was not an anomaly. There is something happening in American culture. People are questioning their sexual orientation. They are questioning whether they are who they thought they were. Right then, I decided to write this book. I would write the book I wish I had been able to read years ago when I was married to a woman and had young children and was starting to question whether I might be gay. – Michael Testa, Author