Renegotiating Identity in Unscripted Territory: The Predicament of Queer Men in Heterosexual Marriages

Abstract

Most queer men in mixed-orientation marriages initially expect to have a traditional, monogamous heterosexual marriage. When they later confront the conflict between their same-sex desires and their marriage, they reopen fundamental identity questions. These queer spouses share with other people who come out in adulthood the problems of renegotiating identity in adulthood and achieving a queer identity in a heteronormative culture. In addition, their attempt to reformulate adult identity is made problematic by the fact that they often cannot make sense of their experience in terms of dominant cultural scripts about love, desire, and commitment. Specifically, the essentialist script for understanding sexual desire and the monogamy script for understanding love and commitment put the queer man's straight marriage and his same-sex desires in contradiction: to have a coherent identity, one or the other must be denied. Queer spouses can overcome this contradiction by entering “unscripted territory” and constructing new ways of understanding their desires and relations. Therapists can be of help to queer spouses by providing an “unscripted space,” giving emotional support for the difficulty of “not knowing,” and questioning assumptions derived from dominant scripts.