“Maybe I’ll find out I’m only 30% gay,” Cindy Chupack’s husband told her.
Sex and the City writer Cindy Chupack has been open about her ex-husband coming out as gay. She discussed it in a New York Times article in May and even shared the story of when he confessed that he “might be gay” at a Moth storytelling event.
“It was five days before my ten-year high school reunion that my husband told me he might be gay,” begins Chupack, who has also written for Modern Family and Everybody Loves Raymond. “He wasn’t sure he was gay, having never been with a man, but he thought it was something he outta figure out.”
He wasn’t trying to get out of going to the reunion—though she admits that would have been reasonable—but was anxious because they were about to buy a house.
“Somehow the ’forever’ of a wedding vow sounded sort of vague and optimistic, while ’30-year mortgage’ was surprisingly specific.”
“It was a commitment,” she added. “The kind of commitment you shouldn’t make while your sexuality is pending.”
Chupack jokes there had been “pink flags” she’d ignored along the way, “But then he asked me out and we slept together and he asked me to marry him and I but on a big white dress in front of 200 of my closest friends. So I thought he was straight.”
After the bombshell, he tried to comfort her, saying “You know, maybe I’ll find out I’m only 30% gay and then I’d rather be with you.”
Alas, it wasn’t to be: Chupack’s husband realized he was, in fact, fully gay, and the couple got divorced. The ordeal was heartbreaking, but Chupack’s storytelling makes it clear she was able to find humor in the situation.
In her Times column she discusses reconciling with her ex, who, like her has remarried and started a family.
“I felt proud of him, and proud of us,” she writes, “for releasing each other to our proper destinies.”
