The odd couple

He's gay, she's straight - why on earth are they getting married? American author TAMA JANOWITZ on how New Yorkers solved the dating crisis

What I have come to call the New New York couple has always existed but has, I think, become more commonplace of late. There is a new openness - perhaps even a new interest - in gay men who want to get married. Once gay men came to New York because there was a certain community to be found, an acceptance in being gay, that could not be found elsewhere in the US. In small towns gay men were "permanent bachelors" - possibly spending their lives living at home, forced to be as unobtrusive as possible. Some gay men married but for quite different reasons than an openly gay man who marries today.

In smalltown America there was and is still a great deal of stigma attached to being homosexual; witness the recent events in which a closeted gay man living with his parents was killed in a Southern town and a gay teenager in Wyoming (who was more open about being gay) was brutally murdered. A gay man who married often did so to disguise the fact he was gay. A friend's father told her mother, after 20 years of marriage, that he was gay and was leaving. She was devastated; she had not, apparently, had a clue that her husband was homosexual. Women were more sheltered, or at least gay men were less open.

Gay men flocked to New York. Here there were careers in the arts as well as bars and sex clubs that catered to gay men. While there are plenty of lesbians who came for the same reasons, it's the gay men who began, I noticed over the past 10 years, to proclaim their interest in getting married to a straight woman. As one gay friend, who had lost his boyfriend of 12 years, said to me, "I'm thinking I should find a girlfriend and get married. Women can't be any trickier than guys are." And he wasn't my only gay friend who said he was sick of going out with men and wanted a girlfriend.

Part of this sentiment stems from a desire to have children. I know gay couples and single gay men with kids, and in middle-class families, books such as Heather Has Two Mommies (or is it Daddies?) are read to tots in order that they grow up to be accepting of diverse varieties of nuclear families. Nevertheless in order to produce genetically related offspring it is necessary to have one person of each sex, and our society is still definitely geared to male-female couples. At a recent birthday party, attended by about 100 people, I noticed at least half a dozen couples in which the man had been gay or was still gay but was married to heterosexual women; all of the couples had children, either biologically or through adoption.

The man was in his family's business, the woman owned and ran an art gallery in midtown Manhattan and the birthday party was her 50th. Everyone knew everyone else; there was a sense of family, as if the Titanic hadn't sunk but had simply drifted for so long there was no one else to meet.

Do the men have sex with the women? As we used to say about our parents with more than a little disbelief, they had to have sex at least once (or multiplied by however many kids there were). The first couple I personally knew who were gay/straight were perhaps the most tragic: J lived with his boyfriend and broke up with him to marry K. Together they started a successful PR firm and had a child. Then J got Aids and died; so did K, and finally the child. Another couple I know, with two kids, both continue to have an affair outside their marriage: he with a man and she with a woman - unusual perhaps only in that the man and woman with whom they have their extramarital affair are also a married couple. In this case it's a case of two gay/gay couples, but the ones who hang out together, the half-dozen couples at the birthday party, are all heterosexual women who do not appear to have affairs, all of whom are married to men who may or may not be active outside the marriage but all of whom, on first meeting, do not seem to be in the least bit shy of proclaiming their homosexuality. At least two couples I know have been married 30-plus years; obviously this is not a new phenomenon but what is new is the openness about it and the camaraderie.

The art crowd which I hang out with is a sort of private club for couples of this sort: it's impossible that a week goes by in which one spouse or the other doesn't have a birthday, or an art opening, or give a lecture followed by dinner to which the whole gang is invited. The central core of half a dozen to a dozen gay/straight couples is surrounded primarily by single gay men, who seem to dip in and out like butterflies sipping on nectar, providing flirtation, flower arrangements and public back massages. Have the women given up on having sex? Well, no one is shy about pronouncing their proclivities (if they are, one of the pals will announce it for them). None of them were lesbians or having affairs, and it's only the one couple who are both openly gay. So some of the straight women and gay men may well be having sex. In fact, a lot of my single girlfriends actually prefer gay men to straight.

Gay men can be more sensitive, more verbal, funnier, more artistic, less likely to park themselves in front of a television to watch football. One of my girlfriends consistently finds gay guys who think they want a girlfriend; they talk to her about marriage, having kids, and even go as far as kissing her before they get scared off. She's always left high and dry, but the truth is, as she's discovered, whether the men in New York are gay or straight, they tend to lose interest in sex (at least with the same woman) quite quickly, and why not at least live an existence with someone with a similar sensibility? "Besides," she says, "sex is fun for a little while, but I don't think I'd want to go on taking off my clothes, putting on some idiotic negligee and perfume and having to take showers three times a day for my whole life. There's too much chlorine in New York City water, it dries out your skin." At least without sex you don't have to worry about getting Aids, which nowadays you're probably more likely to get from a heterosexual husband than a gay or asexual man (at least one who's not having sex with you).

In many ways I have the feeling that, at least in New York, this phenomenon - gay men married to straight women - is going to be the wave of the future. Unlike the very few straight/straight couples at the birthday party who seemed, when together, to be constantly bickering and when apart to be in desperate search for a better partner, the gay/straight couples all seem to be good friends. Between them there is a certain accepting, non- judgmental quality: they appear to be a team.

Perhaps it is because the women don't fear the men will run off with a younger model; the men are committed to their marriages, having made a choice to be married to a woman. Or perhaps it is because with the sexual aspects of marriage made less important they are free to go out together, raise a family together, live lives that are both together and apart in the way our grandparents did.

Previous generations didn't have the same expectations for marriage that we have. Often a marriage was arranged: couples were put together for business reasons, and men and women hoped they would like each other but did not "fall in love". If they were lucky they would love each other, but mostly people were aware that life was short and people had to work hard. Marriage was there in order to join families, businesses, and procreate. Tama Janowitz's latest novel, `A Certain Age', is published this month by Bloomsbury, pounds 12.99.