Between the late 1980s and the mid-2000s, newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times occasionally ran stories about gay men who were married to women. These often had a somewhat lurid air—Could your husband be secretly gay? Might he give you AIDS?—along with a humanitarian curiosity about the fact that it was still rather common for closeted gay men to marry women. When the media reported on these “lavender marriages,” it was with a whiff of scandal and, toward the few who openly acknowledged being in such an arrangement, a dose of skepticism.
I know this because I read them all, along with every personal essay I could find in every obscure digital magazine about gay men and women trying to have sex with each other. (Emphasis on the trying.) I was hesitating on the edge of my fundamentalist, evangelical upbringing and of my looming marriage to my fiancée, whom I had haltingly told that I “used to think I was gay,” or possibly—I forget the exact words—that I had “struggled with my sexuality.” I gave a similarly terse account to our pastor in New York, who encouraged me to have dinner with an “ex-gay” member of the congregation. The man suggested a diner in Greenwich Village, where he confirmed my deepest fears and most groundless prejudices about gay culture: that it was empty, alienating, and no place for someone like me. Despite his exile from the gay community, he confessed that his sexual attractions hadn’t changed; he couldn’t marry a woman, but he hoped I could.
This is how I had landed on the concept of the “lavender marriage.” I had given up my illusions that I might eventually become straight. I had accepted the unanimous verdict of psychology and even of evangelical ex-gay organizations, which in the early 2010s were backing away from “sexual orientation change efforts” (SOCE) even as they continued to promote mixed-orientation marriage. None of my spiritual counselors, even those who ostensibly didn’t believe in SOCE, seemed as concerned as I was that I might be headed for disaster. My mother remembers believing my official narrative that I’d had crushes on boys in the past but now was in love with my fiancée, even though the agonizing emails I sent her intellectualizing my decision suggested I hadn’t convinced myself. My sister recalls her saying, “I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry him.”
My thoughts circled in excruciating loops of anxiety and grief at the prospect of a life without desire. But the alternatives I imagined—losing my family, being cast into an alienating subculture that didn’t share my values, devastating my fiancée—seemed, in the moment, worse. And I did love her, in every way I could: she was smart and kind, a funny writer, gentle in a way that simultaneously made me feel safe and want to shelter her from the world. I tried to magnify those feelings enough to cover what was unmistakably absent. On the program for our wedding ceremony, I placed a quote from the film director Stephen Daldry, who no one but me was likely to know was gay, about his marriage to his longtime friend Lucy Sexton. This hidden-in-plain-sight backstory turned the otherwise platitudinous sentiment into both a prayer and, I now think, a silent protest: “To marry your best friend is one of the great gifts of life.”
●
Measured against the abyss I feared as I approached the altar, my lavender marriage perhaps couldn’t help but be a pleasant surprise. After the sort of fumbling starts familiar to all former virgins, my wife and I gradually grew comfortable with each other’s bodies and learned to please each other. Throughout the decade we were together, sex became a confirmation of our emotional intimacy, a dimension of our relationship that was positive enough to gradually attenuate the apocalyptic emotions I had struggled to repress in the months before our wedding. Cozy domestic intimacy suited me: for the first time in my life, I felt I was facing the world with someone on my side.
With the accumulation of time and the perfection of habit, it grew easier to disguise from myself the strenuous mental effort it took to hold the old fears at bay. I carefully revised my archive of memory, accentuating my prepubescent crushes on girls and the female college friends I had reported to my mother as marriage prospects. I studiously avoided old journals and emails, and forgot the handwritten draft of the yearning homoerotic novel I’d written in high school, now yellowing in a closet. I poured my libidinal energies into graduate study and political activism. I first trained my new arsenal of poststructuralist philosophy on my residual religious epistemology, then deployed it to invent my own private, boutique queer theory—the real thing was one of my many mental no-go zones—from, as the kids say these days, “first principles.”
It wasn’t really from first principles, of course; it had strange roots in my childhood theology. Traditionalist Christians reject—or in my family’s case, do not even have access to—the concept of sexual orientation. In my grandparents’ folk wisdom, homosexuality was simply underdeveloped masculinity, a condition that could be remedied by sending a boy to work with cattle or buying him a subscription to Playboy. In my parents’ more prudish evangelicalism, homosexual lust is just a variety of lust; the heterosexual variety was just as sinful if it led a teenage boy to masturbation or premarital sex, though it’s not hard to imagine which would have caused greater scandal. It didn’t even really occur to me that I could be gay because my sexuality was entirely hypothetical, and one could not be what one did not do. Even for my parents, gay was something on the news, something distant and evil, almost incomprehensible, something the politicians we campaigned for were trying to stop.
Armed with French theory, my adult self transformed this denial of sexual orientation into a progressive rejection of all categories and binaries. My life, I decided, deconstructed the shallow, deterministic notion of sexual orientation by demonstrating the fluidity of sexual desire and latent bisexuality in everyone. Gradually, my attractions to men became not jolts of distress but satisfying reminders of my invisible challenge to everyone’s categories, including those of the hectoring gay rights movement I still detested with the last vestige of my world of right-wing grievance. Don’t tell me how the fuck I was born. I had discovered a radical power to create my own reality, even if it had curiously landed me exactly where the fundamentalists had always wanted me. Maybe they’d been right, sort of, for the wrong reasons.
It started to seem that the world was going my way. Polling showed LGBT identification spiking among younger Americans, with the largest percentages identifying as bisexual. It was the era of the ambiguously queer: culturally hip straight guys started painting their nails, dressing in androgynous fashions, identifying as he/they, and calling themselves things like “pansexual.” But a depressive angst was rolling in, darkened by the pandemic and the looming academic job market. My wife and I were talking about where we’d end up; I pictured what it would be like to move to somewhere like Mississippi and buy a house and a car. She wanted to live closer to her family. Now in my thirties, I was gripped by a powerful sense that my next move would lock in the rest of my life. The weight of nursing a private “queerness” I had never truly experienced, in a world that seemed eager to celebrate it, began to crush me with its absurdity.
To my surprise, my wife had long harbored the same anxieties, and suggested of her own accord that I settle the matter by getting some actual experience. After my first few hookups with men, I elatedly told myself it wasn’t some categorically different beast. At a certain level, sex was just sex. Sleeping with random men, who were intrigued by my story and gracious toward my inexperience, didn’t make me love my wife any less. On the contrary, the honesty it had taken us to arrive at the point of experimenting with our relationship this way had ignited an almost intoxicating new intimacy. That, too, felt like part of a broader social evolution. The world was new, I thought; the pandemic was ending, the old gay-rights paradigm was over, and now maybe I could be married to a woman and still be queer, sleeping with men on the side. But this almost hysterical optimism burned out fast, for the stubborn reasons my gut had sensed from the beginning. I was no more than situationally or incidentally bisexual, and it made no sense to have a primary partner who categorically wasn’t my type. To be honest, I didn’t want to have to use terms like “primary partner”; I didn’t want an open marriage or polyamory. I had always wanted the same thing: to be actually, stupidly, uncomplicatedly attracted to the person I loved, to a man.
It wasn’t sex with men, exactly, that did in my lavender marriage. It was a systematic awakening, the carefully compartmentalized parts becoming a whole, the coming back online of all the emotional circuitry I had dismantled in order to survive. It was the instant vaporization of an exquisitely wrought emotional enclosure, a reasoned and argued identity that now proved unable to withstand even a hint of real want and the courage it sparked. I’m not going to lie anymore, I wrote down as a kind of line in the sand, especially not to myself. When she asked if I would still choose to marry her if I could go back now, I had to give the answer I had known for a long time. Though in doing so I triggered the very event I had dreaded for a decade, though it would prove every bit as wrenching as I had feared, I now saw that it was nothing compared to what it had cost me to forestall it.
I was on the couch one afternoon next to a guy I had slept with; we were so close together that I couldn’t see his face, but his leg was extended in front of us, touching mine all the way to our feet. It was a position I’d been in so many times with her, the sort of contact I loved with the same body parts. Except his had some different quality, not a specific physical attribute—not hardness or body hair—but something closer to an aura or charge, something I can only call himness. I was not just myself there, then, I was all the past versions of me that had been awakened and agonized by himness, which I now saw I could have not just in my imagination or once in a while for an hour or two, but as a part of my everyday world. I felt suddenly ashamed of everything I had never been able to feel for her, the love and sympathy and attachment I had been unable to give for the simple, irrational, categorical reason that she wasn’t a he.
●
I started seeing “MY HUSBAND IS GAY!” videos in the early 2020s when my TikTok algorithm, with its typical eerie prescience, decided to remind me that I was in a lavender marriage. A few years later, social media content would set the gears of the trend-story factory in motion. The New York Times’s Vows section (as well as the podcast edition of its Modern Love column) profiled Samantha Greenstone and Jacob Hoff, a pair of actors who met at a callback for Fiddler on the Roof and decided to get married after an “energy healer” told Greenstone she and Hoff shared “a spiritual umbilical cord.” The Washington Post followed the next year, attempting to turn Greenstone and Hoff into a broader trend (“small but growing”) without even attempting to marshal hard evidence. None of the downstream coverage did much better in that department. Greenstone and Hoff were profiled on ABC’s Nightline and by NBC’s Today. Business Insider registered the impossibility of knowing whether lavender marriage content really reflects a real-world trend, but reported that it had nonetheless “captured the imagination of Zoomers.” Vice claimed that lavender marriages are “rising in popularity again,” but quoted only an “expert” from a queer dating app speculating about social media content.
As plausible as the cultural context has made it, the current lavender-marriage trend is, perhaps even more than most trend narratives these days, probably fake. Which is to say that there is no empirical evidence that lavender marriages are actually on the rise. There are, rather, a handful of couples in lavender marriages supporting themselves by making content about their life choices, and even more journalists, driven by the same scramble to monetize attention, building trend stories around them. Still, a trend story that gets this much attention surely holds up some kind of mirror to society even if it is, on some level, bogus. How did we get to a place where we want to celebrate lavender marriages?
One part of the answer seems to lie in the claim that such marriages are “unconventional,” and therefore that to honestly embrace them is courageous. The gay therapist Joe Kort, who has been quoted in mixed-orientation marriage stories for two decades now, acknowledges that the number of couples who knowingly enter mixed-orientation marriages is small, and that even today, it’s more common for one spouse to come out after getting married. Still, he warns his clients that the main challenge of being in a mixed-orientation marriage is the “stigma”: “I tell them, ‘Be careful who you’re telling, because you’re not going to get a lot of support for this,’” he told the Washington Post. “It’s almost like they have to go into the closet as a couple.” If straight marriage is the new frontier of queerness, then the incomprehension of people clinging to traditional categories, perhaps people who think sexual orientation matters, might be the new homophobia.
This new approach to lavender marriage might also be a reach for progressive answers to the perception that right-wing creators are ahead of the game in connecting with young people disillusioned by the modern dating landscape. In a time of downward economic mobility and conservative cultural retrenchment, the lavender marriage can be a form of resistance. As opposed to “conventional romance,” the dating-app expert told Vice, “queerplatonic relationships” emphasize “strong emotional bonds without romantic expectations.” Guardian columnist Emma Beddington agreed. “Unlike the lavender marriages of the 1930s,” she gushed in 2025, couples like Greenfield and Hoff were “cracking open what marriage can be and … in our age of submissive tradwives, book bans and narrowly defined, exclusionary ‘Christian’ values reframing empathy as sinful, I find that enormously exciting.”
Inconveniently for Beddington, however, traditionalist Christians are thrilled about lavender marriages. Beaten back for a few years by high-profile scandals, the politics of marriage equality, and a wave of state-level conversion therapy bans, “ex-gay” organizations have seized on the new popularity of sexual fluidity to reconstitute themselves as gentler, less politicized champions of mixed-orientation marriage. The queer sex researcher Lisa Diamond, known for her book Sexual Fluidity, is a de rigueur citation in the new conversion therapy and has attracted attention from figures like Preston Sprinkle, who package conservative theology in a conciliatory tone without changing the substance. Though some of them still do, “trad” Christians scarcely even need to claim sexual orientation can be changed since gay people can now choose who they’re attracted to, or if they can’t, can still express their queerness by marrying straight people. As Kort told the Post, “Gay men are able to have sex with a woman if that’s his person.”
The conservative Christian counselor Pieter Valk goes so far as to argue that Gen Z’s sexual fluidity and dating pessimism have created an opening for the gospel of the lavender marriage. To his credit, Valk, who experienced old-school conversion therapy himself, is critical of attempts to revive it with better branding, and even of selective use of research on sexual fluidity like Diamond’s. Still, it all points in a direction that remains broadly unaltered since Tim LaHaye’s early evangelical tract The Unhappy Gays appeared in 1978: Valk hopes that “unencumbered by a sexual identity label,” young people “might discern whether God is calling them to vocational singleness or Christian marriage.”
It’s perhaps no accident, then, that it was so easy for me to synthesize my residual homophobic prejudices with a postmodern allergy to supposedly “essentialist” categories; their shared rejection of sexual identity has made the new queer prophets of fluidity and Christian advocates of the “biblical sexual ethic” into strange bedfellows. Michel Foucault, the Catholic seminarian Urban Hannon wrote in a 2014 essay entitled “Against Heterosexuality,” was an “unexpected ally” in the battle against the concept of sexual orientation; one merely needed to wait for popular culture to catch up with queer theory. Perhaps taking this injunction as a call to action, Stephen Adubato has more recently weaponized Foucault and a host of pre-Stonewall homosexual writers in a kind of postmodern guerilla warfare on modern gay identity. Adubato argues that sexual orientation robs gay men of “agency” while also mystifying their spicy “ontological” position “in conflict with nature” and in “rebellion against the Creator.” This deliberately paradoxical construction expels homosexuals from the moral community while preserving them as a host of fallen angels to sprinkle extra smells and bells on Catholic traditionalism. In what can only generously be termed conservative Christian queer theory we are confronted with the curious figure of a strategic anti-essentialism.
●
That lavender marriages exist and apparently make some people happy shouldn’t surprise us more than any other indication of the world’s teeming diversity. Who are we, pundits of any stripe, to say a man who comes out in his sixties shouldn’t stay married to his wife and continue raising their kids together? All human lives are anomalies shaped by peculiarity and accident, and in judging any one of them by political formulas we risk doing them violence.
But as I learned the hard way, we also risk doing them violence by denying the relevance of categories that give a name to our desire and grant us power to envision a life that nourishes it. It doesn’t follow that, as the gay radical Dennis Altman wrote in 1971, “everyone is gay, everyone is straight,” or in its recent Christian inversion, if no one is straight, no one is gay. Trying to understand myself in that frame—as a teenage evangelical masturbating to gay porn, that homosexuality was something I did, not something I was; as a leftist lavender-married man, masturbating to gay porn, that everyone’s a little bit bi—kept me too long from my current life as a gay man who has found my deepest loves, my most satisfying community relationships and my most exciting intellectual partnerships with other people who share it. My lavender marriage was not, as I strained to assure myself at the time, an experimental form of queer agency; it was the reenactment of an old tragedy that in a better world would not have survived the twentieth century. It was indication that there are still places in which and people for whom such seemingly basic acts as understanding oneself as gay, coming out and insisting on relationships with people of the same gender are—and perhaps always will be—a daunting existential challenge.
My lavender marriage may have been survivable, even workable, but it was still what one called such things in the not-so-distant homophobic past: an arrangement. It was, above all, a logical arrangement into which I reasoned myself prior to any fleshly experience, despite a visceral sense that I was betraying my deepest desires. To do so was perhaps not an unusual move for someone steeped in evangelical fundamentalism, conditioned to understand desire as at best a secondary matter, more likely than not a danger and a hindrance to a life of Christian duty. Because human desire is fallen, it must be contained, mastered and redirected in accordance with a predetermined divine design. One hears this echoed today by advocates of mixed-orientation marriage like Valk, who inveigh against “romance idolatry” even among Christians who properly desire the opposite gender: “God has never promised us romance or sex or said that either are necessary to meet our intimacy needs.”
Such notions might strike the modern secular ear as strange and off-putting, but they are not as far from the media discourse of the 2020s as they might appear. As Phoebe Maltz Bovy explores in The Last Straight Woman, the post-Me Too “Ban Men feminism” of the 2010s, alloyed with the new valorization of queerness and sexual fluidity, created a discursive situation in which women’s desire for men—the sort experienced by a majority of the female population—is presumed either not to exist or to be so politically tortured that it must be channeled into other forms. “No one is impressed by the woman who thinks she needs a man,” Bovy writes. “And that is how this gets expressed, that a woman thinks she needs one. The implication is that she has thought wrong.”
In a recent essay for this magazine, Mana Afsari recounts a Valentine’s Day debate held by young right-wing men in Washington, D.C., at which “nearly every speech is against romance.” The men’s arguments “detail the dangers of infatuation, and amid the laudations of reason over passion, logic over love, are explicit and implicit warnings against being a ‘simp’ or a ‘sucker.’” While surrounded by young women in the capital who share their values, these young men, many of them staffers in the Trump administration, “talked about the abstract women, archetypes they’d read about online, who would always hurt them.”
As with lavender-marriage discourse, it can be bewildering to sort out how much of this is, like, real. I know many people, gay and straight, who date, hook up and get married as one would expect normal people to do; I have never met a heteropessimist in the flesh. Nor is it the first time in history with a widespread sense that “the rules have broken down.” At the turn of the 1970s, the historian Bruce Schulman writes, “Polls revealed widespread disenchantment among American youth. In 1970-71, one-third of America’s college-age population felt that marriage had become obsolete and that having children was not very important,” and “nearly half felt that America was ‘a sick society.’” Gay writers later in the decade frequently noted that they were inventing modern gay life, including the gay couple, in a context where the authority of heterosexual norms seemed to have disintegrated.
One of these gay writers was Michael Denneny, a former graduate student of Hannah Arendt at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought and the editor of the first gay imprint at a major U.S. publishing house. In 1978, the gay literary magazine Christopher Street published Denneny’s innovative double interview with two gay men reflecting on their three-year relationship, structured around photos they had taken of each other. In a 1984 book called Decent Passions, Denneny attempted, with uneven results, to extend the same format to straight and lesbian couples. Commenting on a pervasive cultural anxiety about love, Denneny noted a growing tendency to explain our romantic selves in terms of structural social logics:
By some odd psychological trick—or perhaps it’s just mental laziness, a numbness induced by the watered-down social science vision of life the media saturates our world with—we increasingly tend to see ourselves as exemplifying various generalities. We nod our heads as we are told in countless books, magazines, and talk shows that we are alienated from a dehumanized social system, suffering from the frantic narcissism of the me generation, fleeing intimacy and fighting responsibility, or suffering the shock of a breakdown of values.
Perhaps Denneny’s caution against seeing ourselves as exemplifying various generalities offers a way to understand the paranoid discourses that now suffocate our thinking about desire. It may remain impossible to determine what percentage of people are really influenced by such notions and how. But no matter where we look, we find examples of how digital technologies have enabled the anxious gaming-out of desire, a neurotic prescription of experience in order to foreclose the possibility of confusion, discomfort or pain. As Afsari documents, before they even have experience, young people in particular consume content, post on forums and debate on social media threads, often with people who similarly lack encounters with the carnal world. People of all ages gorge on slop from self-appointed influencers, therapists and “relationship experts,” and multiply arcane litanies of “icks,” red flags, boundaries, dangerous diseases and predatory behaviors. They pathologize love itself, mainlining YouTube pop-psychology videos that recast it as an “addiction” to a “dangerous drug.” These logical formulas may seem to offer reassurance, a comforting replacement for the rules that have supposedly broken down. But it is only a situation of paralyzing fear of our own desires that could make an arrangement like the lavender marriage, whose foundational premise is that the partners cannot truly love one another, appear as a bright spot on the burned-out hellscape of modern romance.
Passionate love retains its vitality in the modern world, Michael Denneny went on to write, precisely because it arrives as an uncontrollable external force that awakens the unfathomable parts of ourselves. “As something that overcomes us, that we suffer (pathein, to suffer), it is not something we choose. Passion is something that happens to us. It is flush with sexuality, that part of us still in the realm of nature with all its arbitrary, inexplicable, exuberant energy.” In holding off its inherent sufferings with logic, circumscribing them with discourse, blaming them on social categories, Denneny says, we become inert bystanders who can only peer into our own stories from the outside. “This type of thinking leads us to being spectators at our own lives.”
Deciding to leave my lavender marriage felt exactly like that: like going from spectator in my own life to becoming, suddenly, a living character in an unwritten story. My ex-wife and I both faced vertiginous encounters with the deepest fears our arrangement had anesthetized. She discovered that, while she had loved me, she had always been more ambivalent about men than she had allowed herself to understand. The day she told me on the phone she’d slept with another woman I could hear the change in her voice. I could hear that she was a different person than the one who had been married to me. That she had come to life. But what she said was, “I don’t recognize myself, I don’t know this person.” Exactly what I had felt as my carefully wrought ideas about who I was melted into thin air, as I became at once what I really was and a stranger to myself.
Image credit: swirlingthoughts (CC/BY Flickr)
Between the late 1980s and the mid-2000s, newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times occasionally ran stories about gay men who were married to women. These often had a somewhat lurid air—Could your husband be secretly gay? Might he give you AIDS?—along with a humanitarian curiosity about the fact that it was still rather common for closeted gay men to marry women. When the media reported on these “lavender marriages,” it was with a whiff of scandal and, toward the few who openly acknowledged being in such an arrangement, a dose of skepticism.
I know this because I read them all, along with every personal essay I could find in every obscure digital magazine about gay men and women trying to have sex with each other. (Emphasis on the trying.) I was hesitating on the edge of my fundamentalist, evangelical upbringing and of my looming marriage to my fiancée, whom I had haltingly told that I “used to think I was gay,” or possibly—I forget the exact words—that I had “struggled with my sexuality.” I gave a similarly terse account to our pastor in New York, who encouraged me to have dinner with an “ex-gay” member of the congregation. The man suggested a diner in Greenwich Village, where he confirmed my deepest fears and most groundless prejudices about gay culture: that it was empty, alienating, and no place for someone like me. Despite his exile from the gay community, he confessed that his sexual attractions hadn’t changed; he couldn’t marry a woman, but he hoped I could.
This is how I had landed on the concept of the “lavender marriage.” I had given up my illusions that I might eventually become straight. I had accepted the unanimous verdict of psychology and even of evangelical ex-gay organizations, which in the early 2010s were backing away from “sexual orientation change efforts” (SOCE) even as they continued to promote mixed-orientation marriage. None of my spiritual counselors, even those who ostensibly didn’t believe in SOCE, seemed as concerned as I was that I might be headed for disaster. My mother remembers believing my official narrative that I’d had crushes on boys in the past but now was in love with my fiancée, even though the agonizing emails I sent her intellectualizing my decision suggested I hadn’t convinced myself. My sister recalls her saying, “I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry him.”
My thoughts circled in excruciating loops of anxiety and grief at the prospect of a life without desire. But the alternatives I imagined—losing my family, being cast into an alienating subculture that didn’t share my values, devastating my fiancée—seemed, in the moment, worse. And I did love her, in every way I could: she was smart and kind, a funny writer, gentle in a way that simultaneously made me feel safe and want to shelter her from the world. I tried to magnify those feelings enough to cover what was unmistakably absent. On the program for our wedding ceremony, I placed a quote from the film director Stephen Daldry, who no one but me was likely to know was gay, about his marriage to his longtime friend Lucy Sexton. This hidden-in-plain-sight backstory turned the otherwise platitudinous sentiment into both a prayer and, I now think, a silent protest: “To marry your best friend is one of the great gifts of life.”
●
Measured against the abyss I feared as I approached the altar, my lavender marriage perhaps couldn’t help but be a pleasant surprise. After the sort of fumbling starts familiar to all former virgins, my wife and I gradually grew comfortable with each other’s bodies and learned to please each other. Throughout the decade we were together, sex became a confirmation of our emotional intimacy, a dimension of our relationship that was positive enough to gradually attenuate the apocalyptic emotions I had struggled to repress in the months before our wedding. Cozy domestic intimacy suited me: for the first time in my life, I felt I was facing the world with someone on my side.
With the accumulation of time and the perfection of habit, it grew easier to disguise from myself the strenuous mental effort it took to hold the old fears at bay. I carefully revised my archive of memory, accentuating my prepubescent crushes on girls and the female college friends I had reported to my mother as marriage prospects. I studiously avoided old journals and emails, and forgot the handwritten draft of the yearning homoerotic novel I’d written in high school, now yellowing in a closet. I poured my libidinal energies into graduate study and political activism. I first trained my new arsenal of poststructuralist philosophy on my residual religious epistemology, then deployed it to invent my own private, boutique queer theory—the real thing was one of my many mental no-go zones—from, as the kids say these days, “first principles.”
It wasn’t really from first principles, of course; it had strange roots in my childhood theology. Traditionalist Christians reject—or in my family’s case, do not even have access to—the concept of sexual orientation. In my grandparents’ folk wisdom, homosexuality was simply underdeveloped masculinity, a condition that could be remedied by sending a boy to work with cattle or buying him a subscription to Playboy. In my parents’ more prudish evangelicalism, homosexual lust is just a variety of lust; the heterosexual variety was just as sinful if it led a teenage boy to masturbation or premarital sex, though it’s not hard to imagine which would have caused greater scandal. It didn’t even really occur to me that I could be gay because my sexuality was entirely hypothetical, and one could not be what one did not do. Even for my parents, gay was something on the news, something distant and evil, almost incomprehensible, something the politicians we campaigned for were trying to stop.
Armed with French theory, my adult self transformed this denial of sexual orientation into a progressive rejection of all categories and binaries. My life, I decided, deconstructed the shallow, deterministic notion of sexual orientation by demonstrating the fluidity of sexual desire and latent bisexuality in everyone. Gradually, my attractions to men became not jolts of distress but satisfying reminders of my invisible challenge to everyone’s categories, including those of the hectoring gay rights movement I still detested with the last vestige of my world of right-wing grievance. Don’t tell me how the fuck I was born. I had discovered a radical power to create my own reality, even if it had curiously landed me exactly where the fundamentalists had always wanted me. Maybe they’d been right, sort of, for the wrong reasons.
It started to seem that the world was going my way. Polling showed LGBT identification spiking among younger Americans, with the largest percentages identifying as bisexual. It was the era of the ambiguously queer: culturally hip straight guys started painting their nails, dressing in androgynous fashions, identifying as he/they, and calling themselves things like “pansexual.” But a depressive angst was rolling in, darkened by the pandemic and the looming academic job market. My wife and I were talking about where we’d end up; I pictured what it would be like to move to somewhere like Mississippi and buy a house and a car. She wanted to live closer to her family. Now in my thirties, I was gripped by a powerful sense that my next move would lock in the rest of my life. The weight of nursing a private “queerness” I had never truly experienced, in a world that seemed eager to celebrate it, began to crush me with its absurdity.
To my surprise, my wife had long harbored the same anxieties, and suggested of her own accord that I settle the matter by getting some actual experience. After my first few hookups with men, I elatedly told myself it wasn’t some categorically different beast. At a certain level, sex was just sex. Sleeping with random men, who were intrigued by my story and gracious toward my inexperience, didn’t make me love my wife any less. On the contrary, the honesty it had taken us to arrive at the point of experimenting with our relationship this way had ignited an almost intoxicating new intimacy. That, too, felt like part of a broader social evolution. The world was new, I thought; the pandemic was ending, the old gay-rights paradigm was over, and now maybe I could be married to a woman and still be queer, sleeping with men on the side. But this almost hysterical optimism burned out fast, for the stubborn reasons my gut had sensed from the beginning. I was no more than situationally or incidentally bisexual, and it made no sense to have a primary partner who categorically wasn’t my type. To be honest, I didn’t want to have to use terms like “primary partner”; I didn’t want an open marriage or polyamory. I had always wanted the same thing: to be actually, stupidly, uncomplicatedly attracted to the person I loved, to a man.
It wasn’t sex with men, exactly, that did in my lavender marriage. It was a systematic awakening, the carefully compartmentalized parts becoming a whole, the coming back online of all the emotional circuitry I had dismantled in order to survive. It was the instant vaporization of an exquisitely wrought emotional enclosure, a reasoned and argued identity that now proved unable to withstand even a hint of real want and the courage it sparked. I’m not going to lie anymore, I wrote down as a kind of line in the sand, especially not to myself. When she asked if I would still choose to marry her if I could go back now, I had to give the answer I had known for a long time. Though in doing so I triggered the very event I had dreaded for a decade, though it would prove every bit as wrenching as I had feared, I now saw that it was nothing compared to what it had cost me to forestall it.
I was on the couch one afternoon next to a guy I had slept with; we were so close together that I couldn’t see his face, but his leg was extended in front of us, touching mine all the way to our feet. It was a position I’d been in so many times with her, the sort of contact I loved with the same body parts. Except his had some different quality, not a specific physical attribute—not hardness or body hair—but something closer to an aura or charge, something I can only call himness. I was not just myself there, then, I was all the past versions of me that had been awakened and agonized by himness, which I now saw I could have not just in my imagination or once in a while for an hour or two, but as a part of my everyday world. I felt suddenly ashamed of everything I had never been able to feel for her, the love and sympathy and attachment I had been unable to give for the simple, irrational, categorical reason that she wasn’t a he.
●
I started seeing “MY HUSBAND IS GAY!” videos in the early 2020s when my TikTok algorithm, with its typical eerie prescience, decided to remind me that I was in a lavender marriage. A few years later, social media content would set the gears of the trend-story factory in motion. The New York Times’s Vows section (as well as the podcast edition of its Modern Love column) profiled Samantha Greenstone and Jacob Hoff, a pair of actors who met at a callback for Fiddler on the Roof and decided to get married after an “energy healer” told Greenstone she and Hoff shared “a spiritual umbilical cord.” The Washington Post followed the next year, attempting to turn Greenstone and Hoff into a broader trend (“small but growing”) without even attempting to marshal hard evidence. None of the downstream coverage did much better in that department. Greenstone and Hoff were profiled on ABC’s Nightline and by NBC’s Today. Business Insider registered the impossibility of knowing whether lavender marriage content really reflects a real-world trend, but reported that it had nonetheless “captured the imagination of Zoomers.” Vice claimed that lavender marriages are “rising in popularity again,” but quoted only an “expert” from a queer dating app speculating about social media content.
As plausible as the cultural context has made it, the current lavender-marriage trend is, perhaps even more than most trend narratives these days, probably fake. Which is to say that there is no empirical evidence that lavender marriages are actually on the rise. There are, rather, a handful of couples in lavender marriages supporting themselves by making content about their life choices, and even more journalists, driven by the same scramble to monetize attention, building trend stories around them. Still, a trend story that gets this much attention surely holds up some kind of mirror to society even if it is, on some level, bogus. How did we get to a place where we want to celebrate lavender marriages?
One part of the answer seems to lie in the claim that such marriages are “unconventional,” and therefore that to honestly embrace them is courageous. The gay therapist Joe Kort, who has been quoted in mixed-orientation marriage stories for two decades now, acknowledges that the number of couples who knowingly enter mixed-orientation marriages is small, and that even today, it’s more common for one spouse to come out after getting married. Still, he warns his clients that the main challenge of being in a mixed-orientation marriage is the “stigma”: “I tell them, ‘Be careful who you’re telling, because you’re not going to get a lot of support for this,’” he told the Washington Post. “It’s almost like they have to go into the closet as a couple.” If straight marriage is the new frontier of queerness, then the incomprehension of people clinging to traditional categories, perhaps people who think sexual orientation matters, might be the new homophobia.
This new approach to lavender marriage might also be a reach for progressive answers to the perception that right-wing creators are ahead of the game in connecting with young people disillusioned by the modern dating landscape. In a time of downward economic mobility and conservative cultural retrenchment, the lavender marriage can be a form of resistance. As opposed to “conventional romance,” the dating-app expert told Vice, “queerplatonic relationships” emphasize “strong emotional bonds without romantic expectations.” Guardian columnist Emma Beddington agreed. “Unlike the lavender marriages of the 1930s,” she gushed in 2025, couples like Greenfield and Hoff were “cracking open what marriage can be and … in our age of submissive tradwives, book bans and narrowly defined, exclusionary ‘Christian’ values reframing empathy as sinful, I find that enormously exciting.”
Inconveniently for Beddington, however, traditionalist Christians are thrilled about lavender marriages. Beaten back for a few years by high-profile scandals, the politics of marriage equality, and a wave of state-level conversion therapy bans, “ex-gay” organizations have seized on the new popularity of sexual fluidity to reconstitute themselves as gentler, less politicized champions of mixed-orientation marriage. The queer sex researcher Lisa Diamond, known for her book Sexual Fluidity, is a de rigueur citation in the new conversion therapy and has attracted attention from figures like Preston Sprinkle, who package conservative theology in a conciliatory tone without changing the substance. Though some of them still do, “trad” Christians scarcely even need to claim sexual orientation can be changed since gay people can now choose who they’re attracted to, or if they can’t, can still express their queerness by marrying straight people. As Kort told the Post, “Gay men are able to have sex with a woman if that’s his person.”
The conservative Christian counselor Pieter Valk goes so far as to argue that Gen Z’s sexual fluidity and dating pessimism have created an opening for the gospel of the lavender marriage. To his credit, Valk, who experienced old-school conversion therapy himself, is critical of attempts to revive it with better branding, and even of selective use of research on sexual fluidity like Diamond’s. Still, it all points in a direction that remains broadly unaltered since Tim LaHaye’s early evangelical tract The Unhappy Gays appeared in 1978: Valk hopes that “unencumbered by a sexual identity label,” young people “might discern whether God is calling them to vocational singleness or Christian marriage.”
It’s perhaps no accident, then, that it was so easy for me to synthesize my residual homophobic prejudices with a postmodern allergy to supposedly “essentialist” categories; their shared rejection of sexual identity has made the new queer prophets of fluidity and Christian advocates of the “biblical sexual ethic” into strange bedfellows. Michel Foucault, the Catholic seminarian Urban Hannon wrote in a 2014 essay entitled “Against Heterosexuality,” was an “unexpected ally” in the battle against the concept of sexual orientation; one merely needed to wait for popular culture to catch up with queer theory. Perhaps taking this injunction as a call to action, Stephen Adubato has more recently weaponized Foucault and a host of pre-Stonewall homosexual writers in a kind of postmodern guerilla warfare on modern gay identity. Adubato argues that sexual orientation robs gay men of “agency” while also mystifying their spicy “ontological” position “in conflict with nature” and in “rebellion against the Creator.” This deliberately paradoxical construction expels homosexuals from the moral community while preserving them as a host of fallen angels to sprinkle extra smells and bells on Catholic traditionalism. In what can only generously be termed conservative Christian queer theory we are confronted with the curious figure of a strategic anti-essentialism.
●
That lavender marriages exist and apparently make some people happy shouldn’t surprise us more than any other indication of the world’s teeming diversity. Who are we, pundits of any stripe, to say a man who comes out in his sixties shouldn’t stay married to his wife and continue raising their kids together? All human lives are anomalies shaped by peculiarity and accident, and in judging any one of them by political formulas we risk doing them violence.
But as I learned the hard way, we also risk doing them violence by denying the relevance of categories that give a name to our desire and grant us power to envision a life that nourishes it. It doesn’t follow that, as the gay radical Dennis Altman wrote in 1971, “everyone is gay, everyone is straight,” or in its recent Christian inversion, if no one is straight, no one is gay. Trying to understand myself in that frame—as a teenage evangelical masturbating to gay porn, that homosexuality was something I did, not something I was; as a leftist lavender-married man, masturbating to gay porn, that everyone’s a little bit bi—kept me too long from my current life as a gay man who has found my deepest loves, my most satisfying community relationships and my most exciting intellectual partnerships with other people who share it. My lavender marriage was not, as I strained to assure myself at the time, an experimental form of queer agency; it was the reenactment of an old tragedy that in a better world would not have survived the twentieth century. It was indication that there are still places in which and people for whom such seemingly basic acts as understanding oneself as gay, coming out and insisting on relationships with people of the same gender are—and perhaps always will be—a daunting existential challenge.
My lavender marriage may have been survivable, even workable, but it was still what one called such things in the not-so-distant homophobic past: an arrangement. It was, above all, a logical arrangement into which I reasoned myself prior to any fleshly experience, despite a visceral sense that I was betraying my deepest desires. To do so was perhaps not an unusual move for someone steeped in evangelical fundamentalism, conditioned to understand desire as at best a secondary matter, more likely than not a danger and a hindrance to a life of Christian duty. Because human desire is fallen, it must be contained, mastered and redirected in accordance with a predetermined divine design. One hears this echoed today by advocates of mixed-orientation marriage like Valk, who inveigh against “romance idolatry” even among Christians who properly desire the opposite gender: “God has never promised us romance or sex or said that either are necessary to meet our intimacy needs.”
Such notions might strike the modern secular ear as strange and off-putting, but they are not as far from the media discourse of the 2020s as they might appear. As Phoebe Maltz Bovy explores in The Last Straight Woman, the post-Me Too “Ban Men feminism” of the 2010s, alloyed with the new valorization of queerness and sexual fluidity, created a discursive situation in which women’s desire for men—the sort experienced by a majority of the female population—is presumed either not to exist or to be so politically tortured that it must be channeled into other forms. “No one is impressed by the woman who thinks she needs a man,” Bovy writes. “And that is how this gets expressed, that a woman thinks she needs one. The implication is that she has thought wrong.”
In a recent essay for this magazine, Mana Afsari recounts a Valentine’s Day debate held by young right-wing men in Washington, D.C., at which “nearly every speech is against romance.” The men’s arguments “detail the dangers of infatuation, and amid the laudations of reason over passion, logic over love, are explicit and implicit warnings against being a ‘simp’ or a ‘sucker.’” While surrounded by young women in the capital who share their values, these young men, many of them staffers in the Trump administration, “talked about the abstract women, archetypes they’d read about online, who would always hurt them.”
As with lavender-marriage discourse, it can be bewildering to sort out how much of this is, like, real. I know many people, gay and straight, who date, hook up and get married as one would expect normal people to do; I have never met a heteropessimist in the flesh. Nor is it the first time in history with a widespread sense that “the rules have broken down.” At the turn of the 1970s, the historian Bruce Schulman writes, “Polls revealed widespread disenchantment among American youth. In 1970-71, one-third of America’s college-age population felt that marriage had become obsolete and that having children was not very important,” and “nearly half felt that America was ‘a sick society.’” Gay writers later in the decade frequently noted that they were inventing modern gay life, including the gay couple, in a context where the authority of heterosexual norms seemed to have disintegrated.
One of these gay writers was Michael Denneny, a former graduate student of Hannah Arendt at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought and the editor of the first gay imprint at a major U.S. publishing house. In 1978, the gay literary magazine Christopher Street published Denneny’s innovative double interview with two gay men reflecting on their three-year relationship, structured around photos they had taken of each other. In a 1984 book called Decent Passions, Denneny attempted, with uneven results, to extend the same format to straight and lesbian couples. Commenting on a pervasive cultural anxiety about love, Denneny noted a growing tendency to explain our romantic selves in terms of structural social logics:
By some odd psychological trick—or perhaps it’s just mental laziness, a numbness induced by the watered-down social science vision of life the media saturates our world with—we increasingly tend to see ourselves as exemplifying various generalities. We nod our heads as we are told in countless books, magazines, and talk shows that we are alienated from a dehumanized social system, suffering from the frantic narcissism of the me generation, fleeing intimacy and fighting responsibility, or suffering the shock of a breakdown of values.
Perhaps Denneny’s caution against seeing ourselves as exemplifying various generalities offers a way to understand the paranoid discourses that now suffocate our thinking about desire. It may remain impossible to determine what percentage of people are really influenced by such notions and how. But no matter where we look, we find examples of how digital technologies have enabled the anxious gaming-out of desire, a neurotic prescription of experience in order to foreclose the possibility of confusion, discomfort or pain. As Afsari documents, before they even have experience, young people in particular consume content, post on forums and debate on social media threads, often with people who similarly lack encounters with the carnal world. People of all ages gorge on slop from self-appointed influencers, therapists and “relationship experts,” and multiply arcane litanies of “icks,” red flags, boundaries, dangerous diseases and predatory behaviors. They pathologize love itself, mainlining YouTube pop-psychology videos that recast it as an “addiction” to a “dangerous drug.” These logical formulas may seem to offer reassurance, a comforting replacement for the rules that have supposedly broken down. But it is only a situation of paralyzing fear of our own desires that could make an arrangement like the lavender marriage, whose foundational premise is that the partners cannot truly love one another, appear as a bright spot on the burned-out hellscape of modern romance.
Passionate love retains its vitality in the modern world, Michael Denneny went on to write, precisely because it arrives as an uncontrollable external force that awakens the unfathomable parts of ourselves. “As something that overcomes us, that we suffer (pathein, to suffer), it is not something we choose. Passion is something that happens to us. It is flush with sexuality, that part of us still in the realm of nature with all its arbitrary, inexplicable, exuberant energy.” In holding off its inherent sufferings with logic, circumscribing them with discourse, blaming them on social categories, Denneny says, we become inert bystanders who can only peer into our own stories from the outside. “This type of thinking leads us to being spectators at our own lives.”
Deciding to leave my lavender marriage felt exactly like that: like going from spectator in my own life to becoming, suddenly, a living character in an unwritten story. My ex-wife and I both faced vertiginous encounters with the deepest fears our arrangement had anesthetized. She discovered that, while she had loved me, she had always been more ambivalent about men than she had allowed herself to understand. The day she told me on the phone she’d slept with another woman I could hear the change in her voice. I could hear that she was a different person than the one who had been married to me. That she had come to life. But what she said was, “I don’t recognize myself, I don’t know this person.” Exactly what I had felt as my carefully wrought ideas about who I was melted into thin air, as I became at once what I really was and a stranger to myself.
Image credit: swirlingthoughts (CC/BY Flickr)
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.