Harold and Gail’s first meeting was the unlikely product of an extraordinary series of occurrences:  Gail was driving her aunt and grandfather from Michigan to California; they intended to go by way of Seattle, but a snowy cold front kept forcing their itinerary further south.  By chance, they stopped overnight in Fort Collins, CO, the very same week that Harold arrived there to begin a student teaching job.  Harold was living with his aunt, whose address he had given several months earlier to an acquaintance who was a member of his home-based Christian fellowship network.  Though he had forgotten all about it, the woman had by chance passed the information to Gail (who also practiced the same faith).  Thus it was that, on a September evening, in search of a bible study meeting, Gail knocked on a stranger’s door and Harold opened it.  They were married the following June in Carlsbad, CA.

After a couple of years, Harold returned to school and Gail worked two jobs while he completed his Masters’ Degree in Arts Administration.  He taught for a while, then they went into private enterprise together.  They first operated a retail flower shop and then, in 1981, set up their home as a long-term senior care facility, which they continue to operate today.  Their house is filled with birdsong; the property has dogs, cats, chickens, and a large garden.  During my visit, I witnessed a number of seniors being fed, entertained and cared for by Harold, Gail and their small staff.  I was treated not only to a delicious meal, but a performance at the piano, usually reserved for the residents—a medley of musical theatre selections, which they clearly love to perform together.

After 30 years of married life together—graduate school, three children, entrepreneurial ventures, shared tragedies and triumphs—their world was turned upside down when Gail discovered a secret that Harold had kept from the family all along:  that he had same-gender attractions and was having casual encounters with men.  The crisis that ensued forced them to recognize and evaluate what Harold refers to as the “capital” they had built up over three decades together.  Through counseling, quarrel, faith, love and a fierce sense of commitment, they drew heavily upon that capital to forge a solution:  a dynamic, harmonious, newly-defined marriage contract in which there are no secrets; a lifestyle where diversity and individuality are embraced.

Harold:
The evening that Gail and I met, I was sitting in Bermuda shorts and some thong sandals, grading papers, and a knock came at the door.  I opened the door, and there was Gail.  It was sort of like God was lowering this goddess, on a silver charger.  And I’m supposed to say, “No, God, I don’t want this one?”

Gail:
So I went down and got Grandpa and he visited with Harold’s aunt for a couple of hours, and I talked with Harold for a couple of hours.

Harold:
When it was over, I couldn’t remember her name.  But I knew what kind of a car they had, and where they were staying.  And it was on my way to where I was student teaching the next morning.  I went by, before they were up (Gail laughs), and I left this note on the windshield.

Gail:
It was meant to be.

Harold:
“Now that you know what my address is, you might want to try to use it again sometime.”  We got married the following June.

RF:
It sounds like the home-based fellowship you talked about was really a pretty major guiding element in your lives.  Was that equally true for both of you, would you say?

Harold:
Yes.  That was one of the things that—you know, when I opened that door and saw Gail there, I had absolutely no reservation about asking her in.  Because I could tell by her very appearance, and her demeanor, that she was one of our friends.  So that was a given.

RF:
So you had that foundation right away.

Harold:
We did.

Gail:
We talked about some pretty deep topics in that first visit.  I had the sense we learned a lot about each other in a short period of time.

Harold:
I’m a direct and straightforward personality—it’s kind of a family trait.  Beyond that, my upbringing hadn’t taught me caution or self-guarding behaviors, especially with others within our Faith.  There was (and is) an instant feeling of unity and trust, of no need for protective barriers, with someone who is also of the Faith of our family.

I have felt some guilt because I didn’t, or couldn’t, find a way to address sexual orientation issues while we were still dating.  On the other hand, I somehow had an intuitive sense that if these issues ever became important enough to require open address, we’d find a way to deal with them at that time.  I guess I didn’t want to borrow trouble ahead of time.

Harold:
We didn’t have kids for eight years.

RF:
Was that by choice?

Harold:
Well, that was by design.

Gail:
He went back to get his Master’s degree before we moved back here, to just get it over with—

Harold:
Two summers.

Gail:
His school didn’t let out quick enough for him to get back there; so on our anniversary, with my corsage on, I would get on the train in Santa Ana and go to Colorado; and I would register for him, and go to class for him for… a week?

Harold:
Something like that.

Gail:
‘Bout a week, or a week-and-a-half.

Harold:
‘Til I could get free of my teaching responsibilities here in California.

Gail:
So that was an interesting couple of years.  And when we went back full time, I worked two jobs.  So when they say the wives, you know, starving grad students together is—

Harold:
You get a P.H.T. degree:  Putting Hubby Through.  But as we talk about it, I think that, even at that point, we had begun the practice of sort of filling in for each other and supporting each other in various things.  She supported me in my work on my Master’s program, and did a lot of things like that.  I think I probably did my share of supporting her also.  So we had begun the process of sort of matching with each other.  Instead of there being a straight line of demarcation between she and me, there was a curvy line, and some places I would flow towards her, and other places she would flow towards me.  Even from the beginning, that was happening.

Gail:
He was teaching, and after school put on plays and did things for the kids on his own time.  If I wanted to see him, I went and helped on the sets, too.  That was just something that I felt I needed; to be there, and be a presence, you know?

Harold:
I was aware from the very beginning that her attraction to me wasn’t because I was a Monday night armchair quarterback with a three-day beard and a beer belly.  She was attracted to me because I was articulate, and creative and talented and musical, that we had a lot of things in common from that.  So, evidently, she wasn’t looking for a man who reveled in macho heterosexuality.

Gail:
I never liked men like that.  Never.  I never dated them, I didn’t like them at school.

Harold:
I have to say, about Gail, something that really touches me and really moves me about her:  I can tell that she has a real profound love and connection and conviction and commitment to family.  And that that’s an unconditional thing.  It’s just not on the agenda that you would throw someone away if something came up that was troubling about the other person.  About someone in the family.

Gail:
When I was really young, I saw people turn against their own family and I just said, “I don’t care what anybody ever does, I will never, never do that.”

RF:
Can you reflect on how, years later, you hit a crisis point?

Gail:
Well, it was because it was something that Harold kept from me.  And that was what was causing the trouble.  We think.

Harold:
Gail came to a place where she felt that our life was invalidated.

Gail:
That’s when I was in crisis.

Harold:
Right.  And the therapist asked her to bring pictures.  Of our—

Gail:
Of our life.

Harold:
Past.  Yeah.

Gail:
Our wedding, our kids…

Harold:
And here Gail was, saying, “all of my life was a waste.”  I’m paraphrasing.  “All of my life was a waste; it’s just blown away, there’s nothing to… and I’m so distraught, and hurt over the whole thing.”  So, she brought the pictures, and the therapist looked at them with her, and she says, “well, these show happy people.  There must have been some happiness back there.”  And it was, in a sense, that Gail just couldn’t deny, yes, there was.  And it was a matter of the therapist being able to bring the focus back to the things that were good, and the things that were connected.  And the things that were worth keeping in the relationship, as opposed to being focused on the things that were problematic, and dysfunctional, and stressful and hurtful.

Gail:
At that time.

Harold:
I think that that is a strategy that we certainly learned in counselling, but found ourselves doing even unconsciously—sometimes your frame of mind is really your choice.

Gail:
She said that probably the reality of your worry was less than you really think, and more than you would want.  And she was able to really sit on me at times.  Like, I would have Harold read to me.  I couldn’t read more than about five minutes, and I was just… I couldn’t see.  So he would read, and I would feel the warmth of his body and the timbre of his deep voice, and I would just—there were like two parts of me.  There was this really angry, striking-out, judgmental part, and it was very loud and more vocal; and then there was this loving, forgiving, non-judgmental, caring, you know.

Harold:
And the therapist, I remember, in one session, observed to her, “that angry, hurting, striking-out part of your personality, feels like it’s in charge right now.  Do you really want it to be?”

Gail:
Yeah, she just sat on me in one session, and she said, “are you aware that it’s trying to crush the loving side of you?”

Harold:
“It’s in control.  And do you want that to be crushed?”

Gail:
And that was a big deal, that day.  I was really in turmoil.  So she sat on me that one day, and she said, “is that what you want?  What a way to live.”  And I was logical enough, somehow, she got through to me.

Harold:
The issue of finding out that there was a part of my personality that had attractions to men—that sort of dissipated quickly.  And her bottom-line issue is that she didn’t want to be abandoned, and she wanted to be included in my whole life—my whole personality—rather than excluded.

Gail:
I don’t think we would have made it without the counselling.  It wasn’t because we weren’t intelligent enough to do it ourselves.  It was just that a third party can see you doing things you don’t see yourself.  They give input that is amazing.  And one of the things was never to say, “well, if you don’t do this, or if you do that, I’ll…” and name a price.

Harold:
Ultimatums.

Gail:
It was a big deal.  And when you’re hurting, or you’re having a problem in your marriage, you tend to wanna say, “I’m gonna leave.”  The problem we were having at that particular time, I don’t know how many times in about three days we’d, each of us, said we were gonna leave.  And our therapist said the reason we were saying that is that you’re fearful that the other one will hurt you; so, you’ll leave so they don’t hurt you.

Harold:
To escape being hurt again.

RF:
How did you find reassurance that you weren’t going to have that pain inflicted from the other one?  Once you both realized that that’s what you were fearing?

Gail:
Well, I think the counselling helped us to just take one step at a time, learning to communicate so that we could talk together.  Just sitting and listening to the other one, and not talking while the other—when you hear them, it doesn’t mean that you are gonna take on all those beliefs, or all that; it just means that they need to know that you did hear them, and they need to hear you.  Somehow, talking about things gave us time.  I was dealing with something I didn’t know anything about.  But I didn’t realize that was what was the biggest issue; that I didn’t know anything about it.

Harold:
And from my standpoint, you know, I didn’t know what to do either, except that I felt the only choice I had was to take her at her word.  I felt, “I’m the one where all of this sort of resides in the relationship; so I’m the one that needs to take the lead, I suppose, in trying to find a way through the thicket.”

We entered, then, a period of trying to do as many creative and innovative things together, as opposed to my doing things separately.  We did a lot of reading together; we were in support groups; we were in counselling; we did lots of things that put a more personal and a more human face on people who are lesbian or gay, or that kind of thing.  It brought us into contact with people that we really appreciate.  That have meant a lot to us.

Gail:
In some ways, we were very lucky.  Harold was at peace with himself, and loved himself.  So he was totally free to be there for me, to answer questions, to reassure me, and to help me try to process this new set of issues.  Up to that point, he’d had to protect and hide a big part of his self from me, for fear of me.  So when I finally figured out that it wasn’t his choice to have been—you know, women that would say—and I did that for a while, too—“you’ve betrayed me, you’ve lied to me,” everything you could think of to say.  Or what is the trust issue.

I say, well, “hey, you were the one that made him do that.  You were the one, not him.  He would have been glad to tell you.  But he was fearful of you.”  But it took me a long time to get to that point, to see, “okay, he’s been living my way for thirty-two years”—thirty-two years?  (Figuring out the dates.)  You were 52, thirty years married.  When this hit us.

RF:
(to Gail.) It sounds like you assume a responsibility for that limitation.

Gail:
Well, it took a while to get to that—

Harold:
I don’t know that she felt responsible for that, but she could see, certainly, that she played a role in providing a sense of openness where I wouldn’t feel punished by addressing sensitive issues.  Or issues that were sensitive to her, you see?  We see some people who blame the other person:  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

Well, the reason that they don’t tell ‘em before about a particularly troubling issue is because they’ve learned ahead of time, probably non-verbally, that they’re liable to get their hand spanked, or their neck cut off.  So they aren’t going to be open.  And it’s a real challenge in a relationship.  To learn the ability to be open enough so that you aren’t part of the stuff that’s keeping communication from flowing.

RF:
The romantic view going into a marriage is about this wholehearted trust.  That there are no secrets, and that that trust exists no matter what; and any realization that that trust isn’t 100% is a betrayal.  Can you address the idea of a successful marriage where trust is something that evolves, or maybe even more than evolves, but is wrenched into perspective, or into the light, even after 30 years?

Gail:
Well, at one point in the crisis—we were both worn out, and we were exhausted, and finally Harold said—he had said he wouldn’t leave, unless I asked him to leave.  And then, this one time, he said, “I think that basically you’re not processing this, you’re not making any progress, you’re in too much pain, and I think basically you’re telling me that I need to leave.”  Well, in a sense, all this stuff was going on and everything else was solid and secure.  History together, you know… children, businesses, starving grad students together… life.  We had history together that held through this crisis time.

I’ve heard that before, from one gal that had cancer, and the husband, you know, they lived through those things together.  And they had a child that was autistic or something.  And they lived through those times together.  And then this comes up, it’s just another thing in life.  It isn’t like it should threaten the whole base; and somehow, I was able to see that.  When he said that, it really scared me, because I really thought everything was pretty secure.  It was like that security was gonna go away.

I spent the night in conflict and resolved, in the morning, that I didn’t care what I had to do.  Or what we had to do together.  That our relationship, and our history together, was worth more than whatever this was that I didn’t know anything about.  And we could get through it.  It was worth fighting for.  Something that was really, really special.  So I made this decision that no matter what I had to do, that I was going to do whatever I had to do to make this work.

Harold:
It was like riding a wild horse, and a merry-go-round and a roller coaster all at the same time.  But I was able to tell her, from the very beginning, “this isn’t about me going away unless you send me away,” but, at the same time, “these issues can’t be put back in the box any more.  They just won’t fit.”

What I meant was that if we were to continue in a relationship and as a married couple, we had to deal with my sexual orientation issues openly and honestly.  It wasn’t an option to go back to a time or a strategy where I would or could promise to practice suppression or denial.  She didn’t know what in the world those two statements meant.  She now knows more what that meant—because time has passed and I have rebuilt the confidence, as we were talking about.

Sure, betrayal can happen, regardless of the couple’s sexual orientation.  And some things probably can’t be excused.  We haven’t seen many things, though, that can’t be understood, and through that understanding be processed and resolved.  Things can be rebuilt.  But they can’t be rebuilt alone.  I couldn’t have done it alone; she couldn’t have done it alone.  It was only as I was willing to make a statement, and then stand by that, as time went by, that she began to believe what I had said.  If I had said, “this isn’t about me going away unless you send me away,” then I had to stay around.  And I wanted to stay around.  That was the honest truth.

Gail:
Because of the willingness to go forward with whatever situation we had, because of our history together, because I loved him—I knew that for sure, I wouldn’t be going through all of this pain if I didn’t—then suddenly it was like a whole new picture.  It was like the reason I didn’t gain anything, or get anywhere, is because I didn’t know anything about the subject.  I was absolutely clueless.  And I’ve learned that knowledge dispels fear.  I think most of my crisis was fear.

RF:
Gail, can you point to a specific moment or insight when you said, “oh, this is possible”?

Gail:
Time took care of all the answers to that.  Suddenly I’d say, “hey, I’m feeling fine.  I’m not worrying about that, or fearing that any more.”

Harold:
My observation of Gail and the situation at the time was that the hinge pin really was:  (a) coming to the idea that she realized that she didn’t know; (b) that she had ownership of the solution for that.  She had to take hold with her hands.  And she was willing to do that.  That was an observable turning point to me; because, by making the commitment, and to be open and to do this and to do that or try a variety of things, then that answer came sort of along the way.

We went to a variety of events and excursions and things like that, that had to do with the LGB community.  I remember that we went to Pride the first time.  Here we are, looking like a couple from Nebraska.  (They laugh.)

It was, in a sense, quite a mind-blowing experience.  Lots of eye candy, and lots of, you know, just things you just don’t ever see anyplace else.  We went to dinner after that, to a nice place we’d been wanting to visit.  But it turned out to be the “straightest” environment you could imagine, compared to the Pride environment we had just left and… I crashed.  I just went into a depression—

Gail:
I was scared to death.  I thought something terrible was happening.

Harold:
Finally, we realized that what was happening was… culture shock.  That we had just been—Gail and I together—had been exploring a part of, or an activity, that had always been a part of my personal and private life.  And here we were, in an activity that wasn’t personal and private.  It was sort of like we were just ripping ourselves open like that.  There was no owner’s manual how to do all this.  We realized after doing something like that:  we went to that place, and we came back.  And we were the same people.

RF:
The world didn’t fall apart.

Harold:
We didn’t have to buy a new car, we didn’t have to change jobs, we didn’t have to live in a different house, we didn’t have to wear different clothes, you know?  We didn’t have to buy a different Bible.

Gail:
Making an excursion like that was opening and expanding our experience.  We would go the restaurant, and we would sit there and look at the couples; and we would see things that we couldn’t believe.  We were both flirting with the waiter.  And—what a neat thing, you know?  But it didn’t really change basically who we were underneath.

Harold:
That’s one of the things that we see people are so afraid to do.  And it doesn’t have to be over LGBT issues, it can be just about anything.  Is the fear of writing your own script, or creating your own universe.  And that if the paradigm that you get off the shelf doesn’t fit—like if you go to the shoe store and the shoe doesn’t fit, you’re not at all afraid to get a larger shoe, or a shoe that does fit.  But if it doesn’t fit, there are so many people, like the ugly sisters in Cinderella, who try to cram their feet into an ill-fitting shoe.  The same way with this; I mean, some people just cannot bring themselves to break free of convention and tradition and create a relationship environment that is appropriate for them.

RF:
How have you then redefined and restructured the marriage?  In order to write that next chapter, in order to make it work for yourselves?

Gail:
We had been living with issues; we just hadn’t addressed them.  And that was making one of us sick.  It was making Harold sick.  And it was probably affecting me more than I realized, too.  So, when I was willing to learn, and open my mind and see if I was going to be able to process all this information, I could see that we had been living, happily and just fine, and it had been there all the time.  In a sense.  Now that it was open between us, we were really happier, and closer, and we had more to talk about, we didn’t have anything to hide from each other.  I don’t know whether those are typical problems in marriages or not; but I think so, because we learned to talk together about anything.

Gail:
I think that people need to be separate from one another, I mean—for years and years, we really didn’t do anything except just together.  And I think that couples should do that, but I think they should also have their own space and be a little more autonomous.

Harold:
And give each other privacy.  Some kind of privacy.

Gail:
But at first the word autonomous just made me mad, when we were in crisis.  It really, I think, is good for you to find a strong place so you’re both dealing with… you are here because you choose to be here, not because you have to be, or you—

Harold:
Expect to be.

Gail:
We both knew that each other had chosen to keep the relationship, and we felt that we had monogamy, in that we were each married to one person; and we had fidelity, in that we remained in agreement with one another.  And we have forged on like that.

Harold:
And if we have, along the way, gone back to our agreements and revisited them, and carved them in a new slab of granite, that’s good, I think.  I just don’t have much patience with people who, early in life—when they don’t know who they are and don’t know the other person very well—expect themselves, in that sort of frothy, romantic mindset to make a set of agreements that are going to last them as they mature and evolve and emerge and change.  The agreements between us have to be current.  Sometimes it’s an everyday kind of thing, you know?  The idea isn’t to forge an agreement.  But staying in agreement as you go along.

RF:
How do you differentiate that from avoiding responsibility for your actions?  If you’re always able to customize the parameters?

Harold:
You can’t unilaterally customize the parameters.  It’s something that we have to sit down together and work through and find the common ground.  That we can move from this point of commonality into this point of commonality.  I don’t think either of us are afraid to say—any more—“I’m not comfortable with that.”

Gail:
I think that the comfort zones come gradually.  There were things that I said, I would never, I will never, I won’t, I can’t, I’m not.  And I probably… none of those are true today.

Harold:
I don’t even like the word compromises.  Because compromise, if you compromise something, it means to me that you weaken it.  I mean, it can have that connotation.  That if something is compromised, then it’s weakened.

Gail:
It seems like we’re stronger together now than we were before.

Harold:
Sure, there have been many, many things that I have had to put away, or to not think about, or to not experience, or to not enjoy, because my feelings for Gail are important enough that I know that if I were to do those things which—I am free, I am an adult, I’m a free agent, I could do those things—but I know that at the same time, I would erode the relationship we have.  And I think that we both have that sense of respect for each other and love for each other, so that that relationship is really important to us; and we, by this time, know the things that would tend to do that.

RF:
As people of strong faith, how do you reconcile or justify this lifestyle, this definition of marriage in the context of what so many people would say, what about adultery?  What about fidelity?

Harold:
According to what I’ve always been taught, and always learned and known, is that what will serve me after life is over is the relationship I have with my creator.  Not the approval I have with the body of believers.  Because, according to the Bible story, we were created out of the breath of life from God, and the dust of the earth, we can never be fully spiritual in life, and we can never be fully temporal.  There is a dichotomy there.  And until life is over, and the spirit goes back to the creator, we will have that temporality, that carnality about us.  And there are some things about human nature, and about being temporal and carnal, that are not very attractive.  You have to give people permission, and yourself permission, to be temporal and carnal.  I don’t expect myself to be wholly and 100% spiritual.  I can’t do that.  It isn’t the time in my existence, in my spirit’s existence, to be fully spiritual.

There’s an awful lot of what people believe in the name of religion, or in the name of Christianity even, that is puritanistic, that is nowheres near what was taught and lived by the man himself, by Christ himself.  So in a sense, to me, the approval of the body of believers is sort of like a popularity contest.  It really doesn’t matter to me about the body of believers.  Because they’re not the ones that will support me in the afterlife.  It’s my relationship with my creator.  That’s the only thing.

Harold:
From the beginning, as I look back on it now, it seems we were weaving together a relationship that was open, creative and resilient.  Without knowing it, we were moving towards a relationship that would be able to stand the stresses and challenges involved in dealing with something like sexual orientation issues at some later point.  We’ve both agreed, though, that even if I had found a way to bring the topic to open discussion early on, we probably would have married anyway.

Gail:
How prepared would we have been to deal with the issues?  What did we know?  We were brought up in a time and in families that didn’t talk openly about sexual issues in general, much less homosexuality.

Harold:
Providence, then, seemed to bring these issues into the open for us when we were more prepared to deal with them than when social or psychological theory might suggest it to have been more timely or appropriate.

Gail:
By the time all of this was upon us, we had found ways to deal with lots of challenges.  Being starving grad students together; moving from being employed to being self-employed entrepreneurs, working all night in the florist business because of weddings, funerals, holidays, or the prom; having and raising three children in the middle of it all; business failure and bankruptcy; the disintegration of closeness in the extended family when my parents divorced after over 40 years of marriage; a whole house remodel; and living more than 20 years with a business in our home doing caregiving for older people and their families.  I was upset and devastated, sure—but I also felt that if we had lived through all those previous things, certainly it wouldn’t be impossible to work through this business of sexual orientation.

Harold:
I think that what we have done is that we have taken hold with our hands and kept an issue that in so many other cases has broken apart a marriage, and not allowed it to do that.  We found—with resilience and good humor, and understanding, and empathy and compassion, and love—we have found a way to keep that from happening in our relationship.  Because we believed in our relationship, we believed in each other, and we just didn’t feel that we should be such slaves to convention and tradition.  That there were other ways to be authentically, and ethically, and morally—there was some way through the forest that we could do it and not have to throw the marriage away.

RF:
How do you define a marriage?

Gail:
Well, it’s a coming together of two… individual people that it takes a lifetime to… know.  I think it’s a certain willingness to want to connect with somebody that you’ve put a lot of effort in learning to get along with, or learning to learn their habits or whatever, and some of ‘em you don’t like, but it doesn’t break it just because you don’t like it.

Harold:
The C-word is big when you talk about marriage, and I mean Commitment.  But the litmus test for commitment in our culture is sexual exclusivity.  And there are lots and lots of ways to demonstrate and to live and to have commitment one with the other, that are additional to that.

Like I said before.  There isn’t anything that I can think of about my marriage where I’ve named a price.  In other words, “I’ll break it up, or I’ll ditch it if this and such happens.”  That, to me, is a sense of commitment.

In other words, I’m saying to myself and to her, “I stand ready to work through anything that I can think of, or things that I can’t think of.”  And that’s a lot more profound to me than whether you have affectionate feelings for someone.  Other than yourself.

Gail:
Harold used to say that he felt like, if he had gone off or something, that by the time he tore himself loose from our connection and commitment, what would there be left of him?

Harold:
If I pulled the stem and vine of my life out of her, and out of my family—and I pulled the stem and vine of their life out of me—I wouldn’t be anything much more than a quivering pile of hamburger.  And to go into a relationship with someone else at that point is expecting them to help me with a lot of healing.  And why should I?  Why should I do that?  Unless she were to say to me, “get out of my life.  I don’t want you here anymore.”  Then that’s a different story.  But if we both want to be with each other, then it should be our business how we do it.