I Discovered My Husband's Secret Gay Life
Author Sally Ryder Brady long suspected that her husband of 45 years was leading a DOUBLE LIFE, but it wasn't until his death that the truth came out.
The brightest lights cast the darkest shadows, and from the moment we met, my husband, Upton Brady, radiated a multifaceted brilliance. When he died suddenly in 2008, my world was drained of light, yet I had no idea of the utter darkness that awaited me. Days after our four grown children and I scattered his ashes at sea, I began sorting through his closet. Upton's bathrobe and Brooks Brothers cashmere blazer still carried his clean scent.
I turned to the drawers in his bedside table, expecting to find nail clippers, cough drops, and the usual miscellany. But instead, two handsome naked men with polished bodies looked at me seductively from the cover of a magazine.
Two days later, I uncovered more gay porn, videos this time. And then condoms. We had never used condoms.
Not wanting to add to my children's grief, I called my closest friend, who had supported me through years of Upton's drinking and unbridled anger, when I wasn't sure I could stay in the marriage. I told her about the porn, and she was silent. She confessed that years ago her teenage son discovered Upton buying gay porn in a remote drugstore. The boy, badly shaken, told his mother, who vowed never to breathe a word.
I met Upton Brady at the Boston Cotillion in 1956, when I was 17 years old. In a cloud of white tulle, I watched the fine-boned Harvard sophomore, elegant in a well-cut tailcoat, make his way across the ballroom toward me. "Upton Brady," he said. He bowed slightly, catching me in the spell of his dazzling blue eyes, then placed his hand against the small of my back and whirled me across the floor, our bodies so perfectly together that we could have been partners in another life. We owned the ballroom that night, but we didn't meet again until 1961, when we were both living in New York. For a year, Upton wooed me with sweet nothings penned in his fluid chancery hand. His quick-silver mind overflowed with intellectual antics, his conversation with snippets from Shakespeare. When he proposed, I said yes. On November 17, 1962, we were married.
RELATED: Is Staying in Love a Choice?
But I must have seen shadows. On our wedding day, an unbidden, ominous prayer rose in my throat: "Dear God, please make this marriage work." The morning after our alcohol-induced honeymoon night at the Plaza, I knelt in St. Patrick's Cathedral with my new husband, and the same prayer sailed in again.
A year before we married, Upton had started working at the Alfred A. Knopf publishing company. His meager salary was designed to be augmented by a trust fund. But while both of us had always hobnobbed with the "right people," neither of our families had any money. Nevertheless, we were a fresh young couple, much in demand at parties and benefits. All we had to do was look beautiful. Without a single pattern, Upton made all of my evening clothes. He knew instinctively what fabric to use and where to get it cheap. He understood drape, cut, and stitching.
RELATED: I Lost 120 Pounds and Changed My Life
A month before our daughter, Sarah, was born, we were invited to a gala. We didn't have enough money to buy even fabric for a dress, but I had a bolt of exquisite white sari silk shot with gold stashed away. From this Upton fashioned a gorgeous strapless Empire gown that concealed my baby bulge. According to Women's Wear Daily, there were three saris that night: a Main-bocher, a Givenchy, and an Upton.
Despite such loving attention, there were still shadows. Upton was extremely homophobic. When one of his sisters left her husband for a woman, Upton was not just incredulous, he was repulsed. A few years later, his brother Buff came out. Upton was openly vituperative, and when Buff became an early AIDS victim, Upton actually said, "It serves him right." He also started drinking heavily, his behavior edging toward abusive. If dinner was five minutes late or he tripped over a bicycle on the lawn, he'd fly into a disproportionate rage. This dark side of Upton was new to me.
RELATED: My Battle With Breast Cancer
I went through the motions of a happy marriage until one night in 1970 when Upton called from a publishing party, very drunk, to say he was spending the night in town with our close friend Edward.* I didn't care where he stayed, as long as he wouldn't be driving home.
The next morning, when Upton appeared, his eyes refused to meet mine. In barely a whisper, he spoke.
"I had sex with Edward."
Sex? With our friend, my friend, Edward?
How could this be? "This was the first time, right?"
Eyes lowered, Upton shook his head.
I felt my safe world tremble.
"What shall we do? Will you leave me for Edward?"
"Never! I never want to leave you." Upton's eyes streamed. "It will never happen again. I give you my word."
I loved Upton, wanted to spend my life with him. But did he want me? Could I believe him? Confession left him broken, filled with shame. Yet I'd heard venom in his voice when he spoke of Edward, as if the sex had been Edward's fault. Upton swore he would never have sex with a man again, and I believed him. He gave me his word.
In 1970, I was clueless about homosexuality. Today I see Upton's eagerness to marry me in a new light. Harvard Magazine published an article in 1998 about gay students in the '50s and '60s and the college psychiatrists who told them they could be "cured." Did Upton believe he could be cured if we married? Did I secretly believe that too?
RELATED: The Accident That Changed My Life
We never mentioned Edward again. Upton became director of the Atlantic Monthly Press, still charmed us with stories, delighted in his children, and designed my clothes. But his brilliance dimmed in the haze of alcohol. One morning in 1982, driving to work, panic seized him as he entered a large roundabout. He circled for two and a half hours, frozen, unable to exit. That afternoon, he checked into the hospital and remained in the psychiatric ward for six weeks. When he came home, he made his way toward sobriety with the help of a good therapist. He regained his good spirits. On Saturday nights, we had what he called "a party." The only thing I craved in bed was spontaneity--the kind we had in years past, when gin and whiskey permitted. But Upton made it clear that from then on, Saturday nights were the only nights for making love.
Then, in 1993, he plunged into a crippling depression. It took Upton three years to emerge from the darkness. When he did, he was exhausted, as if drained by a battle. His antidepressants made him totally uninterested in sex, which he seemed to welcome and expected me to accept. He avoided all physical contact and flinched when I laid a hand on his shoulder or kissed his cheek. That was in 1996.
But the gay magazines and condoms were dated 2005. Upton's sex life had not stopped. Why couldn't I have given him pleasure, comfort, relief from his torment? I struggled with this and finally realized that Upton had two separate realities: the straight, Catholic family man and the closeted homosexual. All his adult life, he fought so hard to keep them separate. In the end, he just couldn't.
His secrets had exhausted me too. I needed to tell the children. Each of them knew Upton kept something hidden. And here it was. Were they upset to learn their father desired sex with men? No. They were relieved the secret was finally out. What still grieves us all is his shame, his fear that if we knew, we wouldn't love him.
Upton is gone, but the questions remain: Did he have sex with men before he married me? Did he break his promise? Was the porn a way to keep that promise?
Someone recently asked me why I didn't leave Upton. The answer is simple: I loved him. His pain was so huge, its roots so deep, I could not possibly abandon him. His toxic secret was the shadow beneath his light, the pain he drank to relieve, the prompt for my prayer, and the missing piece in a story of enduring love.
Sally Ryder Brady 's memoir, A Box of Darkness: The Story of a Marriage, is available February 1.
More from Harper's Bazaar:
Reprinted with permission of Hearst Communications, Inc.
