I had a great time at Mr. Mid-Atlantic Leather last month in Washington D.C. For those who don’t know, MAL is an annual fetish event for gay men. There is a lot of socializing in the lobby of the host hotel and a lot of kinky play in the rooms. One of the highlights for me was a mummification party. However, things got awkward when I had to explain to my friends that my husband thought I was on a business trip.
We’ve been together for 25 years, living a happy life in a very blue college town in a very red state. Early in the relationship, he discovered that I am into BDSM when he found some Polaroids and some bondage gear in a duffel bag in the back of the closet. I had planned to tell him, just not at the very beginning of our relationship. Instead of ripping off the Band‑Aid and having the hard conversation like an adult, I did what any conflict‑averse gay man with a bondage fetish might do: I shoved the whole thing back into a duffel bag and hid it in the closet, hoping it would somehow magically resolve itself. Shockingly, it did not. My kink side never went away even as we created a wholesome, Norman Rockwell home life for ourselves.
Over the years, I’ve quietly met up with friends for BDSM play. No romance, no emotional cheating — just consenting kinky adults doing consenting kinky adult stuff. I know this is dishonest. I know I should have addressed it sooner. I love my husband, and I want to stop lying. I want to be honest about who I am. I want to talk about future kink activities without detonating our marriage by giving him a full account of my past extracurriculars. How do I come clean in a way that acknowledges the harm, takes responsibility, and gives our marriage the best chance of surviving? And is there any hope of negotiating a future where my kink life can exist above‑board instead of in a duffel bag in the back of the closet? Can I have my wedding cake and eat it while tied to a chair too?
Conflicted About Kinky Excursions
“I’ve been cheating on you the entire time we’ve been together — something I rationalized to myself as ‘not cheating’ because there was no emotional involvement, just mummy parties and other bondage scenes with other kinky gay men — and I’d like to keep getting tied up on ‘business trips,’ honey, but with your permission, so I don’t feel like shit about myself.”
That’s not something you can un-say, CAKE, and there’s a decent chance that saying that out loud ends your marriage… even if your husband knows you’ve been meeting up with “friends” to get tied up, which I strongly suspect he does.
A married person might be able to get away with hiding one or two infidelities over the decades, but very few married people can successfully hide decades of regularly scheduled infidelities from their spouses. So, you’re either an astonishingly good liar, CAKE, or your husband knows. Or knows enough. He found that duffel bag, he saw those Polaroids, he knows about your gear. Unless your husband is astonishingly dense, CAKE, he has know your kinks never “magically” resolved themselves. They didn’t disappear with that duffel bag.
But there’s a difference between kindasorta knowing and having your suspicions confirmed. Even if he kindasorta knows you’ve been discreetly getting your bondage needs met elsewhere, your husband may have taken some comfort in the ambiguity (“maybe he’s been faithful to me and bondage porn is his outlet for this”) and being told what he already kindasorta knows will devastate him.
For what it’s worth, I was at MAL too with my husband. We met plenty of married gay couples who live perfectly Norman Rockwell lives back home and have weird, wonderful sexual adventures, together and apart. (I actually popped in on a mummification party for a few minutes. Perhaps we chatted.) Gay couples prove every day that the choice between Mayberry and MAL is a false one, as do lots of adventurous straight couples. But you can’t have both — or you can’t have it on the up and up — unless you’re willing to risk everything by leveling with your husband.
But before you talk to your husband, CAKE, you need to be clear what “above board” means to you. Do you want to to have your bondage buddies over to the house? Do you want him to come to MAL with you? If he wants a DADT arrangement where your bondage activities are concerned, CAKE, are you prepared to continue keeping this part of your life hidden from him — are you prepared to keep lying to him — but now with his consent? And if he has his own kinks and/or his own confession(s) to make, how are you going to feel about that?
Seeing as you chickened on this convo 25 years ago, there’s a good chance you’ll chicken out on it again. So, consider putting everything you need and want to say in an email, and then having that conversation. Good luck.
Early 40s married and monogamous hetero guy here, Dan. My wife and I have started going to nudist spaces over the last year, mostly beaches or day clubs, just to see and be seen. We always come home and have really hot sex afterwards. Lots of dirty talk once we’re home about people we saw checking us out, both of us describing the hot people we saw, and things like that. It’s been fun. My question, though, is whether it would be ethical for us to host a dinner party or some kind of gathering at our home for other nudists. We would advertise it as non-sexual. It would strictly be a time and place where people could gather in one space, clothes-free. We have drinks and serve apps or dinner or something. It would not be promoted as a sexual thing — no sexual activity would be allowed — but it would definitely fuel the sex we have after everyone left. Would this violate the general rule against bringing other people into your kinks unwillingly? Or is this more like the foot fetishist who works at the shoe store? Does it cross some sort of line, because we would be advertising it as non-sexual. Which it would be! Kind of?
Help Our Maybe Ethical Situation
There are people — mostly men — who are into suits. Wearing business suits and seeing other men in business suits turns them on. I imagine some of these guys go into finance just so they can go to business meetings where they’ll be surrounded by other men in suits. If these guys are lucky enough to have spouses, they no doubt plow the sexual energy they built up during those meetings directly into their loving husbands. There are people — again, mostly men (what is it with men?) — who are into wetsuits. I imagine some of these guys take up scuba diving just so they can go diving with other people in wetsuits and then they go home and plow that sexual energy into their spouses. There are people out there — mostly men — with medical fetishes who go into medicine…
Even if none of this was okay — even if it wasn’t okay for someone into business suits to go to a business meeting or for someone into wetsuits to take up scuba diving — how would we possibly control for it? Since there’s no way to prevent a business suit pervert from attending a business meeting or a wetsuit pervert from scuba diving, HOMES, we don’t even try. So long as a business suit fetishist can behave appropriately in meetings and a wetsuit fetishist can behave appropriately on dives — so long as they can hide their excitement and maintain their composure — no one gets fired or tossed off the boat.
The same standard applies to you and your wife: So long as you can maintain your composure at nudist events — so long as you aren’t visibly aroused at your dinner party, HOMES, so long as you don’t make your guests uncomfortable — you’re allowed to find the atmosphere arousing. And you’re allowed to plow the erotic energy you derive from your nudist dinner party into the wife once the guests are gone, the dishes are done, and the towels you placed on the chairs are in the hamper.
Secret perving is always permissible so long as pervs keep their perving secret.
I just learned my husband of three years cheated on me. It was just once, he insists, and it was early in our relationship. I did not find out about this until a month after I gave birth to our son. I found out because he was texting men and when I questioned him, he lied and said he wasn’t texting men but he 100% was. (He would do it sitting next to me on the couch.) So, I did deep dive on his phone and caught him on Grindr, Taimi, and Adam4Adam. I saw stuff — chats with men — going back to before we met. I was worried that I would be one of those wives whose husband comes out gay and leaves her after the kids go to college. Last night I finally got him to talk about it. He says he has been sleeping with men since the age of eighteen. He cheated on his ex-wife and all girlfriends before me with men. But he insists he only sleeps with men because he likes having his prostate stimulated. He swears he isn’t attracted to men. He says the proof is he can only stay hard for gay men if he jacks himself off while he is getting “topped.” He says since we were together, he would “mostly” use one of my toys up his butt and jack off looking at pictures of men and reading texts from men, but he wasn’t actually meeting up with men anymore except for that one time. He says he only slept with men in the first place because he was too afraid to ask a woman to “play with his butt.” He swears he’s not attracted to men at all. I am so confused.
Straight Husband And Gay Sex
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