Married Man Seeks Aforementioned for Discreet Play

Photo: Charles Cohen

The homo sitting across from me would similar to tell me his proper name, simply doing then is against his rules. He could tell me a faux name, he says, though non the one he typically uses when coming together a man in the middle of the day, since he has been using the same fake name for so long that it is about existent. Revealing it now would open him up to the potential of recognition, and, frankly, just imagining a scenario like that makes him wonder why he agreed to meet in the first place. He knows how he comes across. So shifty and paranoid. But he is non atoning. Because when you live two separate lives, as he does, and when yous have been maintaining these two divide lives for twenty years, as he has, coming beyond every bit shifty and paranoid is something of an inevitability.

I will call him William Dockett, for clarity'due south sake. Over the by few weeks, William and I have been e-mailing regularly. This is what I know about him: I know that he is in his early on forties and that he lives and works in Manhattan, earning effectually $200,000 annually in a job he wishes he was more passionate about. I know that he is a registered Democrat who grew up in a nearby suburb. I know that he has been married a decade and that he is the father of a small kid. And I know—here his life gets complicated—that when he is at work, and things are slow, he goes to Craigslist and, with a familiar mixture of guilt and resignation and excitement, clicks on the "men meeting men" department of the personals.

It is hard to fathom, the notion of a gay man living a closeted life in New York Metropolis in 2007. The life of someone like William—who responded to a posting I placed on Craigslist identifying myself equally a writer trying to understand the psyche of a still-closeted human being—seems at the very least anachronistic. Typically, the "cupboard" brings to mind small towns, intensely religious communities, and, at the well-nigh cosmopolitan level, the lives of Jim McGreevey and Marker Foley: gay men operating in a earth so inherently duplicitous that their choosing to lead a shadow life follows, sadly, a certain logic. And yet the affair nigh want—frustratingly, thrillingly—is that few things are so resistant to reason and categorization. "I used to think I was bi, only now I really believe that I am gay and just was not in the right situation," William wrote to me in an early message. "I call up I similar a item kind of guy and when I went out looking I never plant him, and so I gravitated toward women. I found what I liked on the Internet, but I was already married."

We are meeting at a pub in the Westward Village, desolate at this midday 60 minutes, a location chosen because it is far removed, geographically and psychically, from where William lives and works. He is, as he refers to himself online, "average looking," medium height, clean shaven, a piffling stocky but in decent shape. He's wearing dark tapered slacks, a well-ironed stake-bluish shirt, cuff links, and a pinkish tie that is flashy but by no means flamboyant, knotted half-English style. For weeks he has resisted the idea of talking in person. "I'one thousand sorry," he wrote, "but my life is a mess right now." And later: "Why am I even talking to yous?" Once he agreed to meet, he warned me, "You're going to be disappointed. I've had to become very expert at revealing very little."

He was not exaggerating. My questions are answered curtly, almost inaudibly. No, he is not religious. No, he was not raised in a religious or bigoted household. No, he does not think being attracted to men is "incorrect." No, it's not that simple. This much he will allow: "This is non the life I was meant to live. I don't know what that life is, what it looks like, but I know information technology's not this. But I don't recall most people are living the life they think they were meant to live, so I don't feel that bad." I walk away from the lunch thinking that the most telling thing about the entire exchange is how footling William is willing to tell. His paranoia is palpable, clearly consuming. Whatever the reason he decided to come across me in the first place—vanity, a want to tell a few of his secrets, peradventure fifty-fifty a subconscious wish to be discovered—I feel sure that he will not wish to meet again.

But later on that afternoon he sends me an electronic mail: "I think I want to go along talking to you. I don't know why, only I do."

Photo: Charles Cohen

When it comes to creating and preserving multiple identities, there is no medium more efficient than the Internet. Technology has fabricated it, logistically at to the lowest degree, easier than ever to have an active gay life without coming out—even as society has grown increasingly tolerant. What in past eras required a shady and intimidating trip to a bathhouse or rest terminate can now be bundled while sitting at your desk at work. Sites like Craigslist and gay.com and manhunt.net—forth with destinations like "Bimarried Men in NYC," a Yahoo group to which William belongs—brand it possible to tailor isolated affairs to whatsoever specifications yous desire. (On whatever given day searching these sites, I found about 1,000 married, closeted New Yorkers online—certainly a fraction of the truthful population since almost men in the cupboard don't identify themselves as such, even online.) Say you desire to meet someone between the ages of 35 and 50, preferably dark-haired, for half an hour in midtown, between the hours of one and 2 in the afternoon—a few clicks of the mouse and y'all'll take numerous options. Or, as William puts it to me in an instant message: "Without Craigslist I would probably just be a normal married guy who occasionally flirted on the subway. LOL."

He is at work as he writes me this, simultaneously scanning the ads on Craigslist. "I should be running errands right now," he messages me. "Female parent'southward 24-hour interval is this weekend." He needs to find something for all the mothers in his life—his own, his wife's, and his married woman—since they are all having brunch on Sunday. But instead he finds himself fatigued to the personals. He forwards me those that grab his eye, those he thinks I'll find "interesting"—those that will help me understand that a life similar his is not entirely unique.

Subject line: "… married, just out to wife." Text: Married guy, professional at the office right now. Hoping to meet another guy in the same situation for safe, discreet play. Limited experience here. I'thousand a nice looking guy, fit, healthy, and merely needing to occasionally explore this interest. This is compelling, William says, specially the mention of "safe" play. (William is hypervigilant nearly safe sex; He often suggests to a prospect that they "practice something dangerous," and if the man agrees, William rules him out.) Still, he opts not to reply to the ad. The poster sounds like a potential emotional wreck, which, William has learned, can lead to unexpected problems. A year agone, for case, he met a human in his late twenties who lived in the East Village. After they had been together twice, he asked to borrow $500, and issued a threat when William refused: Pay or exist outed to your family unit. "He said he had a plan that could hack into computers through someone's e-mail account. I was pretty certain he was lying—if you're going to blackmail someone, you accept to hint that you really have something that could destroy them, and he never did that." Still, for a few weeks, William made certain to go dwelling before his wife, looking through the mail and checking with the doorman to come across if anyone had been by. "It was the ultimate nightmare," he says. "Keeping my shit together wasn't easy."

Bailiwick line: "MM looking for other MM for side romance." Text: Are y'all tired of playing games? I am. I'one thousand looking for other married men who have always wanted to exist with another man. Looking for someone in the same situation that can keep their domicile life at home simply still have a dissever life with me. Much ameliorate, says William. A similar situation, with like needs, his tone blunt without beingness vulgar, a rarity in the world of gay online personals. But what well-nigh this one? Discipline line: "BiMWM like to course a group of regular BiMWM." Text: 45 bi married stocky hairy ital hither. would dearest to grade a group of Bi married guys only … want a group where there are no judgments and we can hang and let our hair down in a safe discreet way. He decides to respond: gay married in the metropolis here. i can't host, just i'k interested …

The procedure is never elementary. William can only meet men in the centre of the day, and he needs for whomever he's coming together to be able to "host." For this reason, most of his online flirtations brainstorm and end in virtual space. It was 2 months ago that he last met someone in person, a man in his mid-thirties, in boondocks on business and staying in a corporate flat. Since William refuses to mail pictures online, he prefers to see men in public offset—usually at a Starbucks or a park—to make sure the chemistry is there. But in this case, there wasn't time for that. "We decided that if nosotros weren't into each other, at that place'd be no hard feelings," William says. When he arrived at the flat, they made modest talk for a few minutes ("How long are you lot in town?" "Two more days.") and in one case it was adamant that they were both interested in going through with things, they discussed what they were comfortable with sexually. An 60 minutes after, William was back at piece of work. "The whole thing was very awkward," he says. "That'due south often the case."

Photo: Charles Cohen

In an ideal globe, William tells me, he would not spend so much time like this—fourth dimension when his boss and office mate call up he is working—scrolling through these postings, or sending instant letters (mostly flirtatious, less often introspective) to men he has slept with in the by, men he hopes to sleep with in the futurity, men he has never met yet considers some of his closest friends. In an ideal world, William would perchance not even be married—but, more than practically speaking, given the present circumstances, William would like to have one man in his life, someone he saw regularly, someone he met up with in the middle of dragging days like this, someone who, whether married or closeted or openly gay, would respect the inherent limitations of his situation. But could this really happen? He has footling hope. People you meet online, he says, have a trend to vanish so quickly information technology'due south almost similar they never existed in the first place. "Sometimes it tin exist keen," he says. "Merely when information technology'due south not, that'southward when I notice myself doubting this whole life."

FROM AN INSTANT-MESSAGE EXCHANGE WITH WILLIAM:

Me: How well do y'all think your married woman knows you? Is she the person you're closest with?
Him: She knows everything but this.
Me: Would you consider your keeping this a hole-and-corner—from her and everyone— a selfish act?
Him: No. Information technology doesn't brand their lives meliorate to know. I know you don't empathize this only I don't think the truth, in this instance, is really going to make anyone experience better. Honesty is not always such a great thing. Look at the McGreeveys.
Me: What does that hateful?
Him: She'due south not happy to know the truth.
Me: Merely the reason all of it happened in the first identify is that he lied and was forced to come out.
Him: You lot are not going to convince me that the truth always sets you complimentary.

Information technology was in college, the summer going into his sophomore twelvemonth, when William had his get-go sexual experience with a man. "It'due south kind of funny the way it happened," William tells me. He had decided to stay on campus at the New England school he attended to earn actress credits. Needing a place to live, he responded to an advert in a free local weekly: someone with a two-bedroom looking for a roommate. When William rang the buzzer, he was greeted by a confident, amiable guy in his mid-twenties with shaggy dark hair and a quick grinning. The apartment turned out not to be a ii-bedroom, but a one-chamber with a corner of the living room cordoned off. "The guy makes this point to show me his sleeping accommodation, saying that I could use information technology whenever he'southward out of town, since the other room wasn't really a room," says William. "And then, after a few minutes, he makes a laissez passer at me. Really direct. Just asks if I'd e'er been with a guy and when I said no, he was like, 'Want to?'"

William had considered this before, foggy thoughts that never gained much traction: no explicit fantasies, simply a dim, lingering curiosity. He was never the most self-bodacious guy, just he did okay, dating girls in high schoolhouse, losing his virginity to one the year before. He tells me he had been "satisfied" by women, and he found it quite natural to imagine himself one mean solar day getting married and starting a family—emulating, in many respects, the life of his parents, who are happily (if distantly) married to this day. "The whole thing was so surreal," he says of what happened in the apartment. "We didn't do very much. Just kind of made out and fooled around with our clothes off. The whole time I'1000 thinking, Does he exercise this all the fourth dimension? Is this his thing? Some kind of bait and switch?" The guy was coincidental, calm, experienced. Subsequently they got dressed, he asked William to call if he had any questions about the place. William knew he wouldn't. "I never felt like I didn't have control, but there was something creepy about information technology," he says. "Non what we did—information technology wasn't similar I felt shame or disgust or anything like that. Simply the circumstances creeped me out. I didn't tell anyone. It was another ii years until it happened once more."

He was doing a summer internship at a large office then, mainly filing and answering phones. Ane night during the last week of the summer, the interns went out for drinks, had four beers each. A Cerise Sox game was on television, bottom of the fifth. "Wanna catch the rest of the game at my apartment?" asked one of the guys, a handsome 22-twelvemonth-old in his first year of police force schoolhouse. Later, sitting on the burrow, he reached over William to catch the remote, or at least pretended to take hold of the remote, and their legs touched, and suddenly his hand was running upwardly William's thigh, and they kissed. What followed was sweet and corny and bumbling and intimate. William would have liked it to happen once more, but a few days later they both left boondocks without exchanging numbers, and that was that. Again, he told no 1.

Habits are funny things, guided by your actions, yet evolving without your noticing. I inquire if William thinks that he made a decision around then, subconsciously or otherwise, to compartmentalize this part of his life. While clearly intelligent, he can seem chronically balky to self-analysis, and in characteristic grade he answers sardonically: "Maybe something like that happened. I don't know. I think y'all've spent more time asking these questions than I ever have."

Later on schoolhouse, William moved to New York along with his college friends, most of whom were pursuing careers in finance. They got apartments on the Upper East Side and entry-level jobs and, like most people in their twenties, focused on going out more than they focused on their careers. Some nights they went to clubs: Limelight, Palladium, the Tunnel. Other nights they hopped around the preppy brass-and-woods bars lining upper Beginning Avenue. Close equally they were, William couldn't imagine telling his friends near his interest in men. "No one was gay, no one even knew anyone who was gay," he says. "It'due south non that I was scared of being judged, but of being seen differently. Like if my friends were all going out to a bar to hit on girls, mayhap I wouldn't be invited. For lack of a improve illustration, it'southward like with actors, when you detect out someone playing a straight role is gay. Yous don't await at him the same mode. I approximate that's e'er been my greatest fear."

Six months into living in the metropolis, William decided to become to his first gay bar and ventured into Chelsea after hanging out with his friends. "It took some backbone, merely I had been drinking, which helped," he tells me. "I put a baseball cap on and so I could hide under the bill if needed. I don't remember the first place I went to—it'due south long gone—only I remember the 2d was Rawhide. The music was booming, it seemed to exist hopping. But I was way besides shy to talk to anyone and left alone. Information technology but wasn't a scene I was totally comfortable in. To this day I can count the number of times I've been in a gay bar on one hand."

It was around and so that he noticed the ads in the back of The Village Voice. A number y'all'd dial, free for the first ten minutes, to arrange a date. On ane level information technology was the most sordid matter he'd ever considered, but at the same time the simplicity and anonymity were enormously highly-seasoned. "It was kind of like Craigslist before the Internet," says William. "You'd call up and get connected to other guys looking to claw up." The phone lines quickly became a regular function of his life. At first he used them only for phone sexual practice, simply soon he started meeting men in person. He met a Park Avenue diet guru who later died a well-publicized death. He met numerous married men. He met numerous openly gay men. He slept with a human being from Connecticut in an hourly hotel in Times Square—"I call back he paid because I was too paranoid to use my credit card"—a place so repugnant he swore he would never do something similar that once more. He met a motion-picture show producer who lived in L.A. but owned a loft in Chelsea, and who "weirdly" liked the idea that William was in the closet, still used to mock him for being and then paranoid. ("He'd always invite me to parties. He'd say, 'Give me a break, you don't know anyone, and everyone's gay.' ") Whenever William met a man, even someone he ended up seeing repeatedly, he used the aforementioned imitation name—"simply something generic"—that he uses today. It was a whole reality unto itself: the "otherness" of it so farthermost every bit to barely seem like the complicated lie it was becoming. "I would go out with my friends," he recalls, "and become home at two or iii in the morning and recollect the line. For a number of years that was my life."

Shortly he was pushing 30, that pestering age when you take to acknowledge your adolescence is officially over, when people start pressuring yous, fifty-fifty indirectly, to settle down, and and so you start convincing yourself that, yes, settling down is what y'all sincerely want. One night he was set on a date through friends with a woman I'll telephone call Lisa. This was not an unusual event in itself. He had dated numerous women, though the relationships tended to end after a few months. What was unlike about Lisa? "I'k not adept at explaining information technology," says William. "You know how love is. Information technology doesn't really brand sense. It's complicated and simple. I loved her." The attraction, he says, was firsthand and visceral and, though he continued to see men, he could imagine, or convinced himself he could, a monogamous life with her. Soon his parents started making remarks. "All your friends are married—when's it your plow?" his mother got in the addiction of saying, one-half-joking, half-serious, the mode mothers can be. After a year and half, William asked Lisa to be his married woman.

"Did you believe," I inquire, "that was the stop of your life with men?"

"I did," he says. "I honestly did."

AN E-MAIL FROM WILLIAM:

It must seem similar I have 2 lives, only in reality I think I have 3. One is the life that most people know me for, the other is the life you are interested in, and the third is probably the real me … I was looking in the mirror over the weekend, and idea who am I actually and how did I become here? It's sort of cliché but if I had a soundtrack it would be Talking Heads "One time in a Lifetime." Perhaps that song is even somewhat symbolic, like that existent me is somewhere lost in the 80s, because that'south where the 2 other me'due south took over. You asked about going to college and coming into yourself. I think I did make some realizations, but always took the easy path. I didn't have the courage to make whatsoever existent changes … I enjoyed my life too much, so I pushed the me interested in men down. I kept on taking the piece of cake path "letting the days become by—h2o flowing secret". I exercise sometimes ask myself … "how did I go here?" Now I feel totally committed, possibly even trapped into continuing this life.

After he proposed to Lisa, William ready well-nigh actively dismantling his other life. He had multiple e-mail service addresses registered under imitation names, which he canceled, forth with his online profiles. He removed the instant-message "buddies" he knew primarily for flings and flirtation. "I only stopped," he tells me, "like a habit you would stop cold turkey." He informed a handful of online acquaintances—the ones he considered friends—that he was moving in with a woman he loved. One of his closest friends, an openly gay man William had never met, was worried. Would he ever hear from William again? "I told him not to worry," says William. "I said we would be in touch on. We still are." Others were harsher in their reactions. "They told me it couldn't piece of work, that I was crazy," William recalls. "I told them that if they didn't like it they could stop talking to me."

William and Lisa bought an apartment together in a modern building uptown, a place with an extra room that would exist perfect as a nursery. Somewhen they would take a child, just in these early days, when they were free of responsibleness, they traveled frequently and went out a lot, eating at the restaurants reviewed that week in the Times. They were seen by their friends, William imagines, every bit stable, loving, a good match. Sexually, he says, they had excellent chemistry; even now that the sex has become "routine," he still considers it skilful "for a married couple." When I tell him that I notice this hard to understand—how does a man who considers himself gay have what he calls a "healthy" sex life with a woman?—he seems to detect the question unsophisticated. "I have ever liked beingness with women, and sexually I savour them also," he says. "Maybe I was deluding myself, but I just felt like she was the one."

For a year and a half, she was. This changed the solar day William received an e-mail from a man in Washington, D.C., whom he had been with in the by: I'm in boondocks for the weekend. Wanna play? William didn't answer. The man wrote him again. This still your e-mail? The next day, during his lunch break, William met the man at his midtown hotel. "How've you been?" the human being asked. William didn't mention that he had gotten married. He didn't mention that his life had drastically changed in whatever style, and, in a sense, he did non feel similar he was lying. This life had not inverse.

ANOTHER INSTANT-MESSAGE Commutation:

Me: Is there less guilt now than there used to be?
Him: Non really, e'er the same. I rationalize a lot, I guess.
Me: What'south the rationalization?
Him: If I didn't do this from time to time I would virtually likely get crazy. It's like a release.
Me: Practice you e'er worry about your wife detecting something? That you lot scent dissimilar, for instance?
Him: Of course. I check for smells. I stay away from guys that use a lot of cologne.
Me: And what exercise you mean when yous say you do things to make upwards for information technology?
Him: Extra time hither and there. Surprise gifts.
Me: Have y'all ever thought it would be easier—in the long run—if you just allowed it to fall autonomously, and could and so reconstruct things in a manner that involved less secrecy and guilt?
Him: Sure, someday.

The more I talk to William, the more I am unnerved at how passive he is about his life. To hear him tell it, the whole state of affairs but kind of … happened. Took shape. Gained momentum. Another life. As if there were never any alternatives.

"Await, it'south not that I don't understand that what I'm doing is wrong," William tells me during one of our last conversations. "Obviously, this isn't what I signed upward for when I got married. Every day I'm lying to my wife. Simply at this point …" He stops for a moment, considering. "I remember I need this in order to be—perchance not a good married man, but to function in the marriage the way I practice." Again he pauses, and when he speaks next he brings up, for the first time in the months that we've been talking, how being a begetter factors into his thinking. "I know that if nosotros didn't have a kid that my other life would accept just taken over," he says. "Lying would take been too much, especially if there was something missing in our spousal relationship." He'd seen friends' marriages crumble when conception proved impossible, and he imagined that kind of stress might end his relationship likewise. "Just we were happy when she got pregnant," he says. "And we're happy now. I'thou not always happy—I'g rarely happy, to be honest—simply we're happy." William genuinely seems to run into his misery as disconnected from his marriage, as if one life does non affect the other even when the same person is living both.

William has never been to a therapist. On one level, he feels he should, that he could use it, but he also thinks he knows exactly what a therapist would say. "Be true to yourself and all that," is how he puts it. I enquire him if he has ever heard of Richard Isay, a psychiatrist who has written at length about gay men, himself included, who take been in straight marriages. Isay believes that most gay men who ally do so as a way of denying their homosexuality. "Every homosexual man who marries," he writes in Becoming Gay: The Journeying to Cocky-Acceptance, "does so, in my clinical experience, because of early self-esteem injury that has acquired him to see homosexuality as bad, sinful or ill." Another of Isay'south theories has a Freudian undercurrent: "Every husband I have seen has needed to echo with his spouse the sense of having been emotionally deprived by his mother. The futile hope of mastering this trauma provides i powerful but unconscious motive for these heterosexual marriages."

Given William's tendency to shun introspection—an instinct I've come to run across as a need, or at least a past-product, of his fear of change—I am not surprised to acquire he doesn't put much stock in these theories. He laughs off the idea that his mother played a role—"If annihilation, she was likewise involved," he says—and again stresses that he has never seen his allure to men equally shameful.

And yet I can't shake the suspicion that these statements are coming from the liberal Democrat inside William, rather than the complicated, inconsistent human he actually is. During an early on conversation, for instance, he mentioned going on a grouping holiday years ago, before he was married, and meeting a gay couple who ran a restaurant in the Berkshires. He found himself envying their life. "I retrieve when the group checked into the hotel, they made a point of request for a single bed," William explained. "I liked how confident they were, that they had this whole life, but that they weren't actually flamboyant about it. They didn't experience the need to advertise it." This "demand to advertise information technology"—the stereotype of the out-and-proud gay human—seems to grate on William. Some other fourth dimension, he tells me that while he hopes some solar day to "live a gay life," he will never "come out." Pregnant what exactly? "I won't be marching in whatever parades," he responds.

Numerous times I ask if he thinks well-nigh the possibility of divorce, and each time, in one style or some other, he finds a way to tell me that the question is naïve, that it doesn't have into business relationship how complicated things are. This may non be the life he wants, or the life he thinks he was meant to live, but he's come to come across information technology every bit unrealistic, the conventionalities that your life should conform to your expectations.

In that location are moments, though, when he thinks about a time when the life he was meant to live really seemed possible. He was in his late twenties, not nonetheless seeing Lisa, and had reached something of a crossroads. He had a job he wasn't sure nigh (though information technology is the aforementioned job he has today) and a life that felt unsustainable (though it is essentially the same life he has today). I day he met a man on the omnibus—"the but time something similar that has ever happened"—who was likewise in the closet. They started dating, and William fell in honey for the first time. "He's the merely one who always knew my real name," he says. "And it was an accident. We were fighting over the check and he saw my credit card. He thought it was funny. He couldn't believe I was that paranoid." The relationship lasted only half-dozen months—his boyfriend was transferred to another city, and they decided it was easier non to stay in touch—simply it had gotten him thinking. "I was unsure of so many things," he says. "I was kind of a careerist, just at the same time my heed was wandering. I wanted to travel and go out more than settle down. I wanted to have a kind of hip and arty life, but I was just a white-collar working stiff. I was actually considering moving to California. I merely liked the thought of a totally different life. At one point I made up my heed to come out—to tell my friends and family unit and so just movement, let it blow over."

But, in the end, he decided the timing wasn't right. A twenty-four hour period became a calendar week, and a calendar week became a twelvemonth, and a year became a decade, and instead of ane totally dissimilar life he plant himself living two.

Married man Seeks Same for Discreet Play