Fifteen-year old Becki Cornett looked across the table at her sister, Heather, 17, and then at her mother.

“Are they the same questions we have been thinking about?”

With that, Connie White, née Cornett, looked her daughter straight in the eye and nodded. Heather describes her mother’s eyes as a beautiful shade of blue, but that night they had been reduced to blood-shot, drowning windows in what was obviously one of the most painful moments of her life: telling her children their father is gay.

Connie was late getting home that night. In fact, her daughters were worried. Normally if their mom was running late she would take time to call them. But that night, there really wasn’t an opportunity. For the last several days she had been waffling about whether to confront her ex-husband on his infidelity during their marriage. In particular, there was a rumor circulating that he had been having sex with other men.

“I had been having suspicions [about Brian being gay] about six to eight months after our divorce,” says Connie. “I heard a rumor second or third or fourth hand that while we were married Brian had had an affair.”

She recalls one night when a person close to her brought up the rumor. “I kind of jokingly said that it wouldn’t have surprised me if it was a man. I was half-serious and half-joking. That was when [my friend’s] eyes got really big and her jaw dropped and that that was actually the rest of the rumor — that Brian had been having sex with men while we were married.”

On Monday, Jan. 13, of last year, just a few days before her birthday, Connie finally got up the nerve to go to Brian and ask if the rumor was true.

“He was like a deer in headlights,” Connie said, describing Brian’s reaction when she approached him about the rumors. “He gave me that innocent look like, ‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ and said, ‘What? I never had an affair.’”

“When she initially called before she came over,” recalls Brian, “I had a feeling that this might be the issue. I knew I needed to tell them. I just wasn’t sure how. Initially, I suppose I denied it out of self-defense. Then Connie said it was really important and that she needed to know. I think Connie was anticipating the worst. She was already upset. She was pretty much prepared, but still it was upsetting to her.”

Connie reminded Brian they are, after all, divorced now. “I never wanted to come out and say, ‘Hey, are you gay?’ I didn’t want to say that,” she explains.

She was, understandably, upset. But it wasn’t the fact that Brian was gay that bothered Connie so much as that he had been unfaithful — not that the fact that his affairs had been with men wasn’t an issue.

Abby Stein is a psychotherapist who works with families going through the very same process as the Cornetts. Stein works with the Straight Spouse Network, a group that grew out of an initiative by Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) in the early 1990s.

Stein said that this critical moment, when the “elephant in the room” is addressed, is the culmination of years of pain and can be totally unpredictable.

“A couple like Brian and Connie feel like they have lived a lie,” says Stein. “They go into a marriage with all the hopes and fantasies and certain ideas of how their lives will be lived and how they will grow old and co-grandparent. Suddenly this is turned around and now the straight spouse has to look inward and the gay spouse has to stop and look inward. Both see their self-deception. It is a tragic moment. But it is so necessary for healing.”

After the issue of Brian’s infidelity was aired, Connie and Brian were able to have a very real and meaningful — if painful — conversation.

“‘Are you telling me you had an affair?” I asked. “Brian said, ‘No, not really.’ So I said, ‘Have you changed to men since we were divorced or are you saying you have had feelings toward men all along?’ and he said, ‘Yes,’ and he told me there were so many things….” Connie’s voice trails off as she tries to compose herself.

“Under the circumstances, Connie was strong,” recalls Brian. “We were both upset about the whole thing. It was a very personal moment and I would say that she was strong. I figured she would freak out and get mad. She did not get mad. She did not seem to be vindictive or anything. She just seemed sad. I completely understood her hurt.”

When Brian and Connie first met there was a pretty significant age difference. He was 18 and she was 14. Connie was at an Explorer’s meeting, a young adult division of the Boy Scouts of America, open to both young men and women between the ages of 14 and 20 years old. Brian was an advisor.

“He walked in,” says Connie, her voice trembling, barely audible. “He was absolutely gorgeous.”

Looks don’t matter to the law, though. Connie was still very much underage and Brian had no intention of jeopardizing his chosen career in law enforcement.

Connie and Brian became very good friends over the next year or so. He decided to become a police officer. After Brian graduated from the police academy, Connie decided to ask him out to dinner.

“I finally got up the courage to ask him out,” she says. “It was kind of like a ‘congratulations on graduating from the academy’ thing.” She was still only 17.

“Connie was a very fun, sweet, nice and good-looking girl,” recalls Brian.

Until Connie was 18, there was always a chaperone. “Even though we had a chaperone, and it was usually my mom,” says Connie, “it was just like any other dating. We had lots of fun. We had a lot of common interests.”

In fact, they had one very specific common interest, albeit unknown. They both liked men.

“I didn’t have any girlfriends in high school,” says Brian. “That should have been a big clue. When I first realized I was gay, I guess it was long before I even was in junior high. I always knew I was interested in guys more than girls.” But Ridgecrest in the mid-’80s didn’t leave a lot of options for meeting other men.

“I never identified myself as being gay. I really wanted to believe it was a passing phase, even though in my mind I knew I was more into guys. I thought I could change. I really didn’t act on my desires until after high school. After all, I was in a small town.”

Ridgecrest is a community of less than 30,000 residents located in the Mojave Desert in Central California. It is the kind of town where everybody knows everybody else’s business. And it takes a lot of energy to fly under the radar.

“People would hang out at the parks and meet people that way,” explains Brian. “I was 18 before I had my first encounter. I had messed around with both men and women, but nothing serious, nothing like a relationship.” Until he met Connie, that is.

“There are many reasons gay men and lesbians marry,” Stein explains. “One is because they want children, or they meet a straight spouse with whom they have a lot in common. There are other reasons such as careers, economics, social expectations.”

For Brian, all of these applied.

After a year of being chaperoned, Brian and Connie got married. But there was a touch of irony that day. They were married in Brian’s brother’s living room, but the reception was held at the Ridgecrest Senior Center — directly across from one of the cruising parks.

“As we left the reception and walked out the doors,” recalls Brian, “one of the parks is across the street and I knew there were guys in that park that I had seen. I knew deep down then that getting married was the wrong thing to do. I just didn’t know how to get out of it. I thought I would just see how things progressed. I loved Connie and I knew I wanted a family. I wanted it to work. But sometimes, no matter how much you want something to work, it just doesn’t quite work out the way you want it to.”

It was cold as Connie made the long drive — though it is only 2 or 3 miles from Brian’s home — to her own home that Monday evening just over a year ago. She had no intention of telling her daughters. “I didn’t want them to know what was going on. I didn’t want to tell them. But I couldn’t sidestep Becki’s question,” she explains.

In hindsight, finding out Brian is gay made Connie realize how blind we can be when we really want to be. Finding out that her husband was gay “was like a big piece of a jigsaw puzzle. And suddenly the puzzle was all there. A lot of things suddenly just made sense,” says Connie.

Over the years, there had been times when Connie had suspected Brian was having gay feelings. But he always managed to deflect.

“There was this one time when Connie caught me with a gay magazine,” says Brian. “She was in tears. At the time, I told her I just came across it from someone at work and I was just curious.”

Connie remembers that morning clearly. “We had only been married about four or five months. Brian worked the graveyard shift. He was late getting home that morning. He was due home at 8:30, and about 10:00 or 10:30, I heard him pull into the driveway. Being a policeman, I was always worried when he was late.”

“I looked out the window and watched him sit in his car for a few minutes,” recalls Connie, thinking it was strange he lingered in the truck for such a long time. “I was at the window, eager for him to come in.”

Brian still hadn’t come in. Connie went back to her housecleaning, but just couldn’t seem to wait. “I thought, ‘What the heck is he doing?’” She went back to the window and watched Brian as he got out of his truck and stashed something behind a piece of plywood outside the house.

“It seemed very odd,” says Connie. “When he went to bed, I went out to see what it was.”

It was a gay magazine. “When I confronted him, I said, ‘Are you trying to tell me something? Do you have something you want to tell me?’”

“She was more pissed off,” says Brian. But this incident merely marked the beginning of an endless list of times when Brian slipped up.

“Maybe consciously she didn’t know,” says Brian, “but when all is said and done, when she found out, I said, ‘If you are truly honest with yourself you had to know. All the signs were there.’ She just chose to ignore them.”

To some degree Connie agrees.

“I’m a very trusting person,” she says. “I took him at his word. He was 21 and I was 18. I thought, ‘Okay, so he is curious.’ I didn’t see anything wrong with that.”

Stein explains how a person can be blind to what would appear to be the obvious.

“Denial is so easy. Even if you could suspect there are issues such as Brian was having, Connie likely couldn’t go there. You cannot even allow yourself to think it, especially if there are children involved.”

But it was the little things that kept popping up. “I guess if I really had stopped and put them together, I would have had 2 and 2 come up to 4, but I never really paid attention,” admits Connie. “You hope you can trust the man you have spent the last 14 years being friends with and being married to.”

Trust has been a huge issue with Brian’s family. It almost seems that the fact that Brian had been lying overshadowed the fact that he is gay.

The night she confronted her mom about her dad’s sexuality, Becki had been studying with a friend for semester exams. When she heard her mom come in, she went downstairs to the dining room. Her mom was sitting at the head of the table, with her back to the kitchen. Becki sat down on one side and Heather on the other. Ironically, all the things that make up a day-to-day family life were in that room. A mother, her two daughters, a built-in wooden hutch that holds the everyday plates and bowls on one side and cereal and peanut butter on the other.

“My mom had told us that she had just needed to talk to my dad about something. Nothing out of the usual,” recalls Becki, who was then 15. “But there really seemed like there was something more. So I went down to talk to her after my friend left.”

Heather and Becki sat down on either side of their mom. They pressed their mom about the conversation with their dad that night.

“Our mom just told us that she had heard some rumors and so she had gone to dad and asked him about them,” recalls Heather. “You could tell it was something big because she was just really upset and crying.”

That was when Becki asked her mom if it was the same questions that she and Heather had been thinking.

“It was an emotional experience,” says Becki. “I ran outside and started crying, and it was painful. It wasn’t so much that he was gay, it was that he was lying about it for so long.” Becki recalls that Heather just went to her room. “I think the best way to describe it is that she was in shock.”

“When Brian and I talked that night,” says Connie, “I told him that his two teenage daughters [Becki and Heather] had had suspicions. I wanted him to tell them. But when I came home.… I just couldn’t bring myself to lie to my daughters.”

After a while, Becki and Heather returned to the table with their mom. Connie told her daughters that they needed to talk to their dad.

“I told them I really didn’t want them to hear it from me,” recalls Connie. “But we sat around the table and cried for a while.”

For Becki, it boiled down to her father having lied for so many years.

“I don’t like lying,” Becki says. “It is very hurtful when people lie, even about little things. And this was huge.”

Heather agrees. “At first I felt very hurt. He had lied to us. I felt betrayed and I was kind of angry with him because he had hurt mom. I was really upset about that.”

Stein explains that betrayal is a nearly universal issue, often even beyond the issue of sexual orientation. “There is always such a strong sense of betrayal among spouses and children because the person coming out worked so hard to make themselves believe it could work and that pain can be transferred. Even though the gay spouse finally comes to know it won’t work, and even though they aren’t internally happy, they stick by the family and children and when the spouse and children find out they feel betrayed. But for the gay spouse, it was a lie they can’t help. It can be very tragic.”

“Lying has been one of [Becki and Heather’s] biggest issues,” avers Connie. “He lied from the very start. He lied to me since I was 14. That is 23 years. He was who I had built my life around, and the fact that I had built my life around a man who was lying to me really devastated me. It was just devastating.”

“I can’t apologize for something I have no control over,” says Brian of being gay. “But as far as the dishonesty and deception and cheating, those are not things I am proud of, even though I know why I did them.”

Stein affirms Brian’s feelings. “Clearly [Brian] tried to fool himself into not only thinking, but being, something he wasn’t — capable of having a relationship with a woman. Everyone is a victim. And in Brian’s case, there is especially the guilt of having let down his four children. That can be devastating.”

“I guess seeing how we are so important to him, if he would have had something to say, he wouldn’t have said it because we are so important to him,” reasons Becky.

For Brian, avoiding disclosing his sexuality seemed the only option. The stakes were too high: his family and his daughters and his job. And when the divorce happened, there was the issue of custody. At the time of the divorce, joint custody was granted.

“My children are my life,” says Brian. “I knew if [Connie] knew I was gay that that would be an issue. We were very civil except for the property and the custody issues. Before I did anything, I wanted all of that ironed out first. Yes, I lied. But I felt they would have used [being gay] against me.”

Brian’s suspicions would have proven correct.

“Yes, it would have affected them,” confirms Connie regarding custody issues. “In fact, when I found out, my first instinct was to yank all visitation rights, to go to the court and cut off all visitations. I didn’t want my children to be raised around that type of lifestyle.”

But she says her more rational side won over. While Connie may have strong feelings about whether homosexuality is a chosen lifestyle or a biological trait, she could not bring herself to take away her daughters from their father.

“I decided that wouldn’t be fair,” she says. “He is their father and there is no doubt in my mind that he loves the children with every fiber of his being. They are his life.”

Rather than immediately revoke visitation rights, Connie sent Becki and Heather to their dad’s house to talk to him later that week, as per their regularly scheduled visitation.

“Mom said I should go talk to [Dad],” Becki recalls. “That way, I could understand what he has to say and then I can make a decision after that. When I went over there, he told me he was ready for anything I had to say and that he would accept whatever I decided if I would be a part of his life or not. And I told my mom, When I go over to his house on the weekend that I am not saying that anything is going to come out of this.”

“I knew I had to tell my kids,” says Brian. “There is never really the right time to do it. But one thing I was completely sure of is that I was prepared to let them accept it at their own rate, little by little.”

“Over time, I had been letting on little by little,” explains Brian. “I thought it was important for the kids to know. I tried to give subtle clues over time so that they could gradually come to understand. It isn’t easy, but my children are my life and I wanted them to know me.”

“That weekend, I talked with my dad and you could see it in his eyes that he was truly sorry that he had lied to us, and that was very touching,” says Becki. “He started crying, and even to this day that is the only time I have ever seen my dad cry, so that touched me.”

Heather agrees. “At first I felt kind of hurt that he had lied to us, but I realized soon after that it was probably a bigger cause of pain and stress to him and it was selfish of me to be so angry.”

Brian cannot emphasize enough how important his kids are to him. In fact, two of his daughters currently live with Brian full time, Becki and Kim.

“It was difficult because I knew everything was out in the open,” he says, “but I knew I still needed to talk to them to make sure they understood what it all meant. I knew they were upset about it. We were talking about very sensitive issues. It was difficult. I was hurt because I knew I had hurt them. I never wanted to do anything to hurt my kids.”

If anyone has a right to be angry, though, many would argue that it would be Connie.

Brian may be her children’s father, but he was also the only man she had ever known. After all, she met him when she was just 14 years old. They began dating when she was 17 years old and married when she was 18 years old.

“Brian has had more time to deal with his self-esteem and his self-confidence and self-identity because he has been dealing with this for a while,” maintains Connie. For her, these issues have had a significant impact on her mentally, emotionally, and physically.

Dr. Amity Pierce Buxton is the founder of the Straight Spouse Network and author of The Other Side of the Closet (John Wiley & Sons), a book that addresses the issues a family like the Cornetts faces when a gay spouse comes out.

Buxton explains that along with the issue of trust, self-esteem seems to be the other key universal victim in relationships that dissolve, especially those which involve someone’s sexuality: did you ever love me in the first place?

For Connie this was the other major issue. “Over the course of our relationship, I had gained over 100 pounds,” she says, although she has since returned to her former weight. “I had struggled over the years that I knew I was not attractive, but I hoped that my husband found me attractive.”

Buxton explains. “Once the gay spouse comes out, the straight spouse — in this case, Connie — looks back and feels this horrible sense of sexual rejection and low self-worth that they have been living with someone that isn’t sexually attracted to her. Often they have this sixth sense that they weren’t satisfying their partner, but for the issue to be one of gender attraction can be very, very painful.”

“I asked him if he was ever physically attracted to me,” Connie admits. “He told me he was, and that has helped a lot.”

“Connie was a very nice-looking person, the kind that we can all appreciate,” says Brian. “She was a very nice, supportive woman. Early on, there was a lot of attraction there, but I knew I was still definitely more attracted to men.”

Brian paused. “But yet, there was a very real attraction to her. There was a level of attraction both physically and emotionally.”

Toward the end of their marriage, Connie says her feelings of rejection were heightened. “My own husband would not show physical affection to me. He would not hold my hand. He would not put his arms around me. He wouldn’t kiss me. He didn’t do anything that showed that he loved me. Not even in public or in private.”

Connie talked about how she felt during these times.

“It was devastating because I didn’t know what I had done wrong. For years I struggled with wondering what I had done that my husband didn’t love me anymore. I hoped that he had fallen in love with me the person and that he would still love me and do things that showed he loved me, but he never did.”

But for Brian, too, these were emotionally tough times. “I knew she had to wonder why I wasn’t being as affectionate. And I had to wonder it myself. I still had hopes, even though I knew there was no doubt that I was doing the wrong thing. In my mind, I still wanted to ‘be normal.’ I had these underlying desires to tell her after a few years. For the first few years, I was faithful.” But his need to be with other men would not abate.

Carol Grever is author of My Husband is Gay: A Woman’s Survival Guide (Crossing Press). Grever explains how some men are able to survive by compartmentalizing. “For Brian, it was almost like he had to be two different people: a good father and husband but also a gay man. It is virtually impossible for most people to make this work. It is very difficult for someone who marries young and wants to have a family and be a father and a husband and pull off that double identity.”

“I would lie there at nights thinking, ‘I know this isn’t working,’” recalls Brian. “‘I know I need to tell her.’” But somehow, he never did. To a large degree, it was because he truly loved Connie.

“Oh, yes,” says Brian, “I loved her. I think it was just… well… I don’t know how to describe it. I am not sure anyone can put into words why you love someone. It is just something within. There was something within me. It was more on an emotional level.”

For Connie, this was a very important — and painful — question. “He said yes, that he did love me and that he still loves me,” she manages through her tears. “At least I know he did love me, and that is very important.”

“I always looked forward to being home in the evenings together,” says Brian. “I felt comfortable being with her and being around her. I felt secure.”

For Connie, then, learning that Brian is gay was a double-edged sword. “I was dealing with not feeling attractive myself and was having these feelings of not feeling needed or wanted. I was devastated but at the same time relieved. All of those feelings I had been feeling were not all based on me and that some were Brian’s issues.”

Grever interviewed 35 families for her book, and she affirms Connie’s reaction. “Connie’s response is found in nearly the same words as almost every woman I have interviewed. There is this huge sense of relief having discovered that they had blamed themselves when things weren’t going well and concluded it was something wrong with them. If only they had been prettier, sexier, thinner, something, then there wouldn’t be this problem. But this just isn’t the case, and now Connie can understand this.”

When Becki confronted her father about this issue, she says she could see in his eyes that he truly cared for her mother. “In some ways, it was a very bonding experience,” Becki recalls. “You could just see it in his eyes. And he told us right there that he loved me and my sisters and my mom, and that he still cares for her very much.”

Buxton suggests an even more specific thought. “It is very likely that Brian loved Connie as much as he could love anyone. She was just the wrong gender.”

Brian and Connie managed to stay together for nearly 16 years. “She left me three weeks before our 16th anniversary,” says Brian.

“I didn’t know what it was after we got married,” says Connie of the growing distance. “It seemed like all our common interests got put aside. Over time, we were no longer friends. We were no longer buddies to go and do things. He and I became two parents who just happened to live in the same house.”

“When he and I split up,” she recalls, “I hoped that we could get back together. I initially moved out in hopes that it would be a slap across the face to wake him up. I was moving out so that we could work it out.” While it may not have worked out quite the way Connie planned, everyone in the family can agree that things have been much better since Brian came out.

Buxton calls this the stage of authenticity.

“He and I are great friends,” says Connie of their present-day relationship. “Before he came out, he was a very angry person. I think he was always worried about slipping and letting it out. My theory is that he was afraid that he was going to say something that betrayed himself and that he was very afraid of our reactions.”

Heather agrees. “Anyone who is hiding that much within, it will cause stress and tension. I don’t know for sure, but my theory is that his anger had a lot to do with that.”

Connie explains how this fear and anger manifested itself in their home. “On a certain level, the girls were afraid of him. They were afraid they would say the wrong thing. He would never, ever physically harm them, but he could be terrible about verbally belittling people. We were never allowed to have people over, my friends, his friends, mutual friends.”

For Brian, it was a simple matter of stress. “I worked long hours at a stressful job,” he admits. “Twelve hour shifts were not uncommon. I just wanted to come home and be with my family. I wanted quality family time.”

Buxton added some other possible underlying issues. “If one of the spouses is gay or lesbian, and in this case, Brian, he has set things up so that things appear to be straight [as] in a play act in a drama. You don’t want to upset him, you don’t want to go off cue or you can get snapped at.”

“It is very difficult to walk around with a secret,” Stein agreed. “As a parent you have hard times, now multiply that times ten times the tension and stress of holding something inside.”

Both Heather and Becki talk about their dad’s anger and how that all changed when he finally came out to them.

“I was a little afraid to talk to him because I might make him angry,” explains Heather. “Now that is simply not a problem.” In fact, Halloween found plenty of parties at the Cornett home. There was one for Brian’s friends and one later for the girls’.

While Connie and Brian’s two older daughters were perhaps more capable of understanding the intra- and inter-personal and societal implications of Brian coming out, telling the two younger daughters that their father is gay took a different direction than anticipated.

“It was kind of funny, actually,” he recalls of his conversation in the car with Amanda and Kim. “I said, ‘You know how some boys like girls and some boys like boys and some girls like girls. Well, I need to tell you that I am one of those boys who likes boys.’ My 7-year old, Amanda, said, ‘Oh, you mean the gay thing’ and did the motion with her wrist. I said, ‘Exactly, the gay thing.’”

“The most important thing for them to understand,” Brian said, “is that it has nothing to do with their mother, that it is just who I am.”

For Connie, a member of the Latter Day Saints church, religion presents a unique issue when dealing with Brian’s sexuality. For her, it is important to understand that there is a fine line between her moral and religious beliefs and her children’s father’s life.

“It is difficult to teach my children what I believe is morally correct while at the same time teaching them to be tolerant,” says Connie. “I don’t want them to grow up thinking that being gay is morally right, but I don’t want them thinking that people should be persecuted or discriminated against in any way because of who they choose to be. I don’t want them to not trust or love their father.”

“Brian and I belonged to the same church,” she continued. “In fact, it was through his influence that I was baptized into the LDS church. That is one thing that has really shocked me. The church does not condone homosexuality. I cannot condone Brian’s choice of homosexuality. Each person has a choice. I will tell them that face-to-face.”

But Connie understands the reality of her own world, as well.

“This does not make me love Brian any less. It doesn’t make me respect the fact that he is the father of my children any less. And I will always be grateful that this man has given me four beautiful daughters.”

Although Becki and Heather are old enough to work things through themselves, Brian and Connie have two other daughters, Amanda and Kim. For them, the lessons need to be a little more basic, says their mother.

“I have seen people just be nasty to other people because they are gay or because of the color of their skin and I don’t want my children to do that,” emphasizes Connie. “I want my children to make the right choices for themselves, but I want them to be tolerant of other choices. Knowing that their father is gay, they know they have to be tolerant and loving to their dad. It can be difficult for them. They have been told all their life that being gay is a wrong choice, but it’s like, ‘Now dad is gay, what do I do?’”

“Sometimes someone at school might think that it is kind of odd that my dad is gay,” says Becki. “I just tell them, ‘You know, my father fell in love with my mother and that is all you really need to know.’”

For Connie, regardless of Brian’s sexuality, he remains very much your everyday kind of dad.

“I remember when Heather was in junior high,” said Connie, recalling a very familiar scene in any household. “She got all dressed up to go to her first dance. She was dressed to kill and she walked out of her bedroom.”

Apparently Brian did not like what he saw. It was a scene right out of “The Cosby Show”. “He told her to turn right around and go change her clothes. He looked like he was ready to kill. Heather was so crestfallen. I tried to tell her it was nothing, that she looked very cute. ‘I don’t care if you think it is cute!’ Brian said, ‘You look like a woman! Now go back in and come out looking like a little girl!’ He just didn’t want his little girls to grow up.”

“He is very much a normal dad,” avers Connie. “He will beat away the boys. Only the best boys for his daughter.”

There are some differences having a gay dad, though.

At Becki’s recent 16th birthday party someone told her to make a wish and blow out the candles. As superstitions dictate, someone said, “No wishing for boys.”

Connie recalled Brian leaning over to Becki and whispering, “Unless it’s for me!”

Brian puts it this way: “I don’t flaunt it, but I don’t hide it. I am respectful but unapologetic.”

Becki also talks about how she and Brian argue over who is cutest at the mall. “We’ll be at Wal-Mart and I will see a cute guy and my dad will say, ‘No, but check out that guy over there.’ Sometimes we debate over posters. Like most teenage girls, I love Orlando Bloom. He’s not my dad’s type, though.”

“In that way, it is a little bit different,” concedes Connie.

On a serious note, she explains that she and Brian have a clear understanding about maintaining a certain sense of decorum. But, emphasizes Connie, this would be the same request regardless of gender. “When he is with his friends, he is to use the utmost discretion.”

For the four kids, though, Brian just seems to be your average dad.

“My dad is a normal guy,” says 11-year-old Kim. “He teases me and my sisters, just like all my friends’ dads do. He watches movies with us all the time and we have lots of fun. He really trusts us and is surprisingly relaxed about letting us go to our friends’ houses so long as he has a phone number, address, and knows where we are. My dad is cool and fun to be around!”

Becki agrees with her sister.

“My dad is a great guy,” says Becki. “He is the only person that I really have to talk to. He does all the normal dad stuff. He bugs me and my sister about stuff that dads worry about. The only real difference is that we can argue over who is the cuter guy at the mall.”

And now that Becki has reached 16, family rules allow dating.

“I tend to be over-protective, so I have to watch that very carefully,” Brian admits.

Ultimately, though, Brian knows the one thing that all parents must come to understand: “You can’t keep your kids in a protective bubble all their lives, and that is tough for any dad.”

Grever says the Cornett’s situation is a very lucky one. “This idea of tragedy, of a lie, of betrayal, can be left at just that. It can seem like the end of the world. But in other cases, families like the Cornetts can choose this as a gateway to a better life for everyone concerned. You will never be able to cover up the disasters that have occurred along the way, but you get past those stages and you become who you were meant to be.”

“There is one thing we all know,” says Heather, “and that is that dad loves us, no question about that. But once he came out, I saw a big change in dad. He was less tense, less irritable.”

For Brian, too, there was a change. “I don’t have that internal turmoil that I used to have that I was constantly dwelling on. I wanted to be there for Connie and the kids and yet I knew at the same time that I was not where I should be. For me, coming out was such a big sigh of relief.”

“I think that one thing is that dad is actually himself,” says Heather. “He is not hiding anymore. It has made things more pleasant. Mom and Dad get along a lot better now. There seems to be some issues resolved that might not have been otherwise.”

“We have our hard times,” says 11-year old Kim, “but we are always there for each other. I am happy to know I have somebody to turn to when I have a problem.”

For Connie, things can still be a bit difficult. Buxton explains why this might be the case. “For the straight spouse, it is the most painful. You have trusted someone with your very core essence, with your most intimate moments and self. You can feel rejected as a woman, your femininity, your sexuality, that somehow you were not a full woman. But then you realize, like Connie does, that no matter what you might have done, no matter who you had been, it wouldn’t have been for Brian and you move on. My hat is off to Connie.”

Ultimately, it is Heather who touches on the point that seems to suggest the clearest result of Brian’s coming out.

“After my dad came out,” said Heather, “my mom said to me that she thought Dad had become more like the man she fell in love with.”

“It’s so true,” says Connie, fighting back the tears. “It’s so true.”

“Now that the truth came out, healing could begin,” says Brian. “I could become the person that I should be.”