Twenty-five years ago, I was barely conscious that the gay world existed.

Today, after having been married for more than a decade to a woman and having fathered children who still live with me, I know that I am a gay man. I’ve come out and now identify myself as gay.

I decided to write this book because I run into a lot of men who are just like me as I used to be—married to a woman, often with children, and dabbling in having sex with other men. After starting to write this book, I decided to include the stories of women as well, primarily because I noticed that the lesbians I know who had been married to men handled the transition to homosexuality more gracefully and with more integrity than my male friends and I did.

The idea for this book occurred to me one night a few years ago at a bar on Pittsburgh’s South Side. I was with four friends. We met there every week to watch Will & Grace. As we drank our beer, I realized that we were five gay men, all divorced from women we had loved, and among us, we had fourteen children. Even though I had met plenty of married men on gay sites on-line, up until that night I had considered myself an anomaly. I had lived life as a heterosexual man and didn’t realize I was gay until after I was married and had children. Before that night at the bar, I had been vaguely aware that my friends and I were meeting a lot of married men—men in straight marriages—in gay bars and other venues in which these supposedly straight men were looking to hook up with other men.