Podcast

Guest: Candice Fleszar Smith

SSN contact and group leader Candice Fleszar Smith talks to us about what happens when people call SSN for support. She supports straight spouses in finding their own way through the post-disclosure/discovery maze, whether they choose separation, divorce, or to stay in a mixed orientation marriage. Candice also supports LGBT people seeking to come out to their spouses. She emphasizes that how the LGBT discloses to the straight spouse matters, and can impact the entire relationship, including relationships with the kids, going forward.

Guest: Sarah Irish Nicholson

Today’s episode is the first in a two-part series on mixed orientation marriage and same sex attraction in the LDS church. Guest Sarah Nicholson shares how her husband’s disclosure that he was a gay man may have led to the end of their marriage, but it was actions taken by the LDS church leaders that rocked her faith and led to the end of Sarah’s participation in the church.

Here’s what Sarah realized when her husband came out to her: “I knew that he was a wonderful man, and what I thought I knew about homosexuality changed at that moment, because if that was him, there was no way it could be an intrinsically bad thing…I cried for two things: I cried for the pain that the LGBT individuals go through as members of the LDS church and their struggles, and I cried for the uncertainty of my marriage.”

Guests: Josh and Lolly Weed, Blogger

In today’s special episode, Josh and Lolly Weed talk about how they entered into a Mixed Orientation Marriage thinking their eyes were wide open, thinking they were living in accordance with their faith. They share what happened when they decided to reveal to their community that Josh is a gay man, how their story went viral and was used by religious communities to shame other lesbian and gay people into straight marriages, how they came to decide they needed to divorce in order to live authentically, and where they are with their faith now.

“People in religious communities would use our story as a battering ram against their gay loved ones…like ‘you can do this, see this couple?’” Josh says. “To have a parent with a gay kid [say] ‘Look at this, look at this couple! It seems like they are totally doing this, and you can do it too.’ It was highly pressuring. [Our story] was weaponized. It was devastating.”

Guest: William Dameron, Author

Today on the show, author William Dameron discusses his book, The Lie, in which he gives an unflinching and self-aware account of the impact his closet had on his wife and family. He shares how his lying to hide his sexuality affected his wife: “I could see what my gaslighting was doing to her, it was making her question her value and her beauty. That’s why it was so important when I realized the collateral damage that was happening that I needed to come clean.” His hope in writing the book, is to spare other people from the pain of closets, mixed orientation marriages and divorce. “We are not the first generation of queer people who have found ourselves trapped in a straight marriage,” he writes, “but please god let us be the last.”

Guest: Dan Cartlidge

Dan Cartlidge tells the story of his two marriages, both to gay women. As his first wife pursued sexual relationships with women, he shares the toll her lack of desire for him took on his psyche, to the point that he was willing to sacrifice anything, including his sex life, in order to save his marriage. “You just get beaten down slowly, slowly, slowly. Your psyche just gets chipped away. I was having a hard time calling myself a man, I was so beat down, and so afraid to lose everything that I was willing to make some really stupid sacrifices, and not look out for me.” Dan shares how he recovered over time with the help of others who had been through the same thing, and how the love of his new fiancée helped him heal.

Guest: Michelle Sandoval

Michelle shares her story of growing up with two closeted parents, how the family secrets impacted her sense of reality growing up, how she learned manipulation from watching her parents lie and hide to coverup, and how she grew up attracted to closeted men and men who were unable to connect with her emotionally. Learning the truth at age 51 finally gave her access to her own agency and enabled her to end her search for her truth.

Speaking about her childhood Michelle said, “I always knew that something was wrong, and I always knew everything was filled with shame and anger, and I didn’t know why. Things aren’t honest, things are alluded to, things are gaslighted in all kinds of ways. How do you know what’s true when people are lying to you? How can you make healthy choices with lies? There is true harm being done in showing a person a false life, bringing them into a false narrative. I didn’t know how to judge the truth from fiction, which made it very easy for me to be manipulated, because I didn’t have access to my own agency.”

Guest: Kelly Wilkins, Writer

Kelly talks about the rise and fall of her marriage to a closeted gay man, being used as what she calls his “ambulatory homophobia meat-shield,” and sitting in her office on their first anniversary crying because her husband would not have sex with her. “I remember thinking, this isn’t how this is supposed to be.” She lays out, in stark detail, the psychological warfare, gaslighting and script flipping she was subjected to until the very end, when the truth finally came out. “He would tell me, ‘Maybe I would want to have sex with you more if you weren’t so fat; no one wants to f**k a fat woman.’ You know it was a perfectly good insult to throw out at me since I was already self-conscious,” Kelly says.

“I still bristle when people ask me, how could you not know?” she writes. “Just a tip: don’t ask that. You’re putting the responsibility for disclosure on the wrong damn person and it’s a shitty thing to do.”

Guest: Kristin Levine, Author

Kristin Levine shares her own story of becoming a straight spouse, and how that experience inspired the events in her YA novel, The Jigsaw Jungle, in which a twelve year old girl named Claudia is left clues by her father in a series of jigsaw puzzles as to why he abruptly left the family. Claudia slowly discovers that her father is gay in an intriguing and sometimes maddening process that mirrors the puzzle mixed orientation families solve when they piece together that a loved one is LGBT.

When Kristin’s own marriage ran into trouble, she determined to solve the problem between them by diving into marital relationship courses and insisting on individual therapy. “We need to go to a therapist because something is really wrong and I don’t know what it is,” she told her husband. “I thought maybe this will solve our problems, because I was like ‘there’s no problem I can’t solve if we just worked really, really hard’. I remember walking into the therapist’s office and telling her, ‘I’m really obsessed with this idea that I need to divorce my husband but I’m not exactly sure why’.” Her therapist dismissed her as having mid-marriage doldrums, but as it turned out, her husband was gay, and her mysterious foreboding was accurate after all.

Guest: Kelly Hollimon, Executive Director

Executive Director of the Straight Spouse Network Kelly Hollimon walks us through strategies and tips for getting through the upcoming holidays post discovery or disclosure that a spouse is LGBT. We talk about creating space for yourself when you need it, establishing new traditions with the kids, and yes, canceling Christmas. Because sometimes, you just can’t even!

Kelly also shares her own story of becoming a straight spouse, including when she realized what her relationship was modeling for her children. “That became really important to me that my children were going to think that a good marriage was a roommate situation. I wanted more for my kids.” She also wanted more for herself. “I had all these epiphanies and one of them was that my needs were just important as his needs. So, he may have a need to not have sex… but I have a need to have intimacy, and that’s not less important than his need not to.”