This is probably not exactly true. Children most likely pay the greatest price of all. Any divorce is most difficult for children because it is hard for them to understand how the two people they love most can stop loving each other.
The implication in my original statement was not that the end of a straight marriage with a gay husband/wife was less painful than a conventional divorce. The point was that it is no more or less painful. Divorce is no fun for anyone.
The issue in divorce is not so much love
between the parents as much as it is the child's love for both parents. When divorce turns ugly and one or both parents are battling, it places a child in a very difficult position of having to chose between two people- both of whom they love.
It's the stability of the family, the child's daily life and the acrimony that sometimes develops during the divorce process that determines whether a bad situation becomes an awful situation.
Children are very resilient. Unfortunately, the parents often are so busy and stressed battling with the spouse that the children get lost in the mix.
I am offended by old men trying to justify their behavior because of the times they lived in. They are the reason gay rights are not further advanced. They were cowards, afraid to challenge the status quo. It is equally offensive when they pat a coward and liar of this generation on the back for following their cowardly path. That is pure bullshit. I don't respect these people and certainly don't consider them role models.
When I was in my teens and twenties, I got to see a glimpse of what it was like for gay people who grew up in the pre-Stonewall era.
In those days, there was no such thing as "gay rights". or "equality". The term generally used was "homosexual rights" . The term "homosexual" was the polite term - "homos", "fags", "dykes" or the great general category of "degenerates"was more commonly used.
When most people thought of a homosexual person, they pictured a lecherous pervert hanging out in the schoolyard waiting to molest children. It's no surprise that the average gay person couldn't identify with the "perverts" that society represented as being a "homosexual".
The police often raided gay bars and arrested the patrons.
Employers occasionally hired private detectives to go to the bars and write down license plate numbers. On Monday, employees would be fired if their car was one of those in the parking lot of the gay bar over the weekend.
In these days when our biggest battle is whether gays can marry or serve in the military, it's very easy to forget- while we're watching Queer as Folk, or Queer Eye for the Straight Guy or Project Runway- that life for a homosexual wasn't a whole lot of fun until very recently.
And to call anyone a "coward" who survived those days with their dignity and self-worth intact- well, it just shows that you need to actually talk to some of the people in their fifities,sixties and seventies who lived through those times.
