One Closeted, Married Man on Living the Double Life in New York City -- New York Magazine

One Closeted, Married Man on Living the Double Life in New York City -- New York Magazine: "“No one was gay, no one even knew anyone who was gay,” he says. “It’s not 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, maybe I wouldn’t be invited. For lack of a better analogy, it’s like with actors, when you find out someone playing a straight role is gay. You don’t look at him the same way. I guess that’s always been my greatest fear.”"

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“But we were happy when she got pregnant,” he says. “And we’re happy now. I’m not always happy—I’m rarely happy, to be honest—but we’re happy.” William genuinely seems to see his misery as disconnected from his marriage, as if one life does not 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 ask him if he has ever heard of Richard Isay, a psychiatrist who has written at length about gay men, himself included, who have been in straight marriages. Isay believes that most gay men who marry do so as a way of denying their homosexuality. “Every homosexual man who marries,” he writes in Becoming Gay: The Journey to Self-Acceptance, “does so, in my clinical experience, because of early self-esteem injury that has caused him to see homosexuality as bad, sinful or sick.”