March 6, 2025 • 34 mins
In this episode of Out Late with David, Stefan Schneider shares his journey of coming out as gay, navigating relationships, and building a modern family. He reflects on the challenges of coming out in the early 90s, the impact of his sexuality on his marriage, and the emotional turmoil of divorce. Through self-discovery and therapy, Stefan learns to embrace his identity and finds happiness in his new life with his husband and blended family. The conversation highlights the importance of authenticity, communication, and the complexities of family dynamics in the LGBTQ+ community.
Takeaways
Chapters
00:00 Navigating Identity and Relationships
15:00 The Journey of Self-Discovery
30:00 Building a Blended Family
33:48 Reflections on Happiness and Authenticity
Podcast website and resources: https://www.OutLateWithDavid.com
YouTube Edition: https://youtu.be/YGWJGVhw2s8
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvsthP9yClKI4o5LxbuQnOg
Certified Professional Life Coach, David Cotton: https://www.DavidCottonCoaching.com
Contact me: mailto:david@davidcottoncoaching.com
© 2025 David Cotton Coaching, LLC. All rights reserved. The "Out Late With David" podcast and its content are the property of David Cotton Coaching, LLC. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from David Cotton Coaching, LLC is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to "Out Late With David" and David Cotton Coaching, LLC with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Takeaways
- Coming out is a complex process that varies for everyone.
- The societal context during the early 90s made coming out challenging.
- Authenticity in relationships can create both closeness and tension.
- Divorce can be a painful but necessary step towards self-acceptance.
- Rebuilding relationships with children requires patience and love.
- Self-discovery often involves confronting difficult truths about oneself.
- Having a clear vision of what you want in a partner can guide your choices.
- The journey to happiness is not linear and requires effort.
- Childhood experiences can shape one's understanding of identity.
- Creating a supportive environment for children is crucial during transitions.
- "I just wanted to fit in and be normal."
- "The only way out is through sometimes."
- "I always wanted to be a dad."
- "I had to sacrifice something of myself."
- "I felt like I had split up my family."
- "We met on Christian Mingle."
Chapters
00:00 Navigating Identity and Relationships
15:00 The Journey of Self-Discovery
30:00 Building a Blended Family
33:48 Reflections on Happiness and Authenticity
Podcast website and resources: https://www.OutLateWithDavid.com
YouTube Edition: https://youtu.be/YGWJGVhw2s8
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvsthP9yClKI4o5LxbuQnOg
Certified Professional Life Coach, David Cotton: https://www.DavidCottonCoaching.com
Contact me: mailto:david@davidcottoncoaching.com
© 2025 David Cotton Coaching, LLC. All rights reserved. The "Out Late With David" podcast and its content are the property of David Cotton Coaching, LLC. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from David Cotton Coaching, LLC is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to "Out Late With David" and David Cotton Coaching, LLC with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
[Music]
(00:11):
You're listening to Outlet with David. True Star is coming out later in luck.
And now here's your host, David Cun.
Today's guest talks about coming out as a process. But one where he gets better each day.
However, it didn't start that way. Two years into a relationship with his former wife,
(00:31):
he came out as gay. But she decided to stay with them and they got married four years later.
There were some twists and turns along the way, eventually leading to divorce.
But now happily remarried, the union with his husband created a modern family with children
ranging from 18 to 42. Stefan Schneider joins us today from his home in Larchmont, New York.
(00:53):
Stefan, welcome. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. It's good to see you.
Thank you. I wouldn't know more about this blended family with you and your husband, but first I kind
of want to go back in time. Yeah. Where you're married to your wife, you're a relationship with her,
you came out as gay, she decides to stay with you. Tell me about that. How did you navigate it?
(01:17):
You know, I think it's easy to second guess these things, right? With hindsight.
It's easier to reflect on things and see things clearly. But I think, you have to realize the
context of the time, it was the early 90s. It wasn't so cool to be gay. We were still in the midst of
(01:43):
the AIDS epidemic. I always think that maybe since I was five, I probably, five or six, I knew that I was gay.
It was torture. I used to wish it away when I was a kid at night trying to pray the gay away as they
say, right? And really feeling in some ways cursed. I experimented a little bit in high school.
(02:08):
Then I think that at the time, I was very relationship oriented. I think that when I put my foot into
the gay community, there weren't role models that showed me loving relationships. I'm sure that
(02:30):
they were there. I just didn't see them at the time. I just wanted to be normal. You know what I mean?
I just wanted to fit in. It's funny how we characterize that as normal to be normal. We say normal.
We're normal. We're not normal. What I considered normal at the time, right? What I was led to
(02:54):
believe was normal or what felt more mainstream. I loved her very much. We started our relationship
in college. I loved her very much. We had a bit of a long distance relationship. I got to a point
where it was probably a year, maybe a year and a half into a stating. When things were starting to get
(03:18):
more serious, I came out and basically told her, "Hey, look, I have something to share with you.
This is a really hard thing to reveal, but I'm pretty sure that I'm gay." I don't think we can
continue forward. There's a lot of dialogue back and forth on it at the time. Where we settled on
(03:40):
was that I couldn't reconcile. Maybe we talked fairly openly. It was not an easy conversation to
have. We talked pretty openly, but where we settled on was that I was probably by. I couldn't
reconcile with the fact that I had feelings for her. I was attracted to her. I think also,
sometimes when you make those revelations, it creates authenticity and it kind of pulls you in,
(04:05):
what separating you pulls you in closer. I think we stayed together. I proposed a few years later.
We were in our early 20s. We got married. Had a fairly traditional wedding. It was always
looming there in the background. It was one of those things that we were fairly avoidant about.
(04:28):
We didn't talk about it, but then it's like anything else. It bloomed at a number of times until
the marriage dissolved 14 years later. You said that it maybe made you closer by being vulnerable and
honest with her in your communication. I think so. I didn't want to
destroy our family right and do damage to her. That was never my intention. Go into it with
(04:57):
going to these things with dubious intentions. We found ourselves that it created a lot of
attention in the relationship and what initially felt like authentic closeness became a tremendous
source of attention in the relationship over time and something that we couldn't talk about.
(05:18):
It was too painful in some ways until it boiled to a head at the time that we decided to get the
divorce. Was your sexuality the reason for the divorce? Is that what? Yeah, I think it was the
recourse for the divorce. It was a big burden for her. What it states to you also is, I remember at that
(05:39):
time, I just remember, because it's hard. It's hard to reflect back right 13 years later. I'm in a
very, very different, much happier place in my life. I was thought that I remember thinking at
the time that I would never be happy. That happiness wasn't something that was in the cards for me.
(06:01):
I couldn't understand why I was happy. I was very depressed at the time too. I think suppressing
that's very, very hard. It was a rough period. I think even after coming out the divorce process was
fairly acrimonious. It took us three years to get divorced. We went to trial. We were disseminating
(06:25):
absolute fortune on attorneys at the time. It left me in a really rough state for a number of years
afterwards financially and emotionally. At some point, it clicks and you pick up the pieces and you
move forward. At a very dear friend, I actually just reconnected with her not too long ago.
(06:47):
I remember at the time she was going through divorce and she said these very wise words to me. I
just told her that the stuck with me all these years, but she said the only way out is through sometimes.
Exactly. I got through those years and I've gotten to a better place, which is much happier now.
(07:10):
When I'd say to you also, I was thought that I was never going to be happy. I'm actually happy.
I'm actually very happy. I can tell that at your face. It just comes across.
Why did you think you never would be happy? What was the thought you had then beyond that?
I went to therapy at the time because one of those things, you can't keep this all inside. I had
(07:34):
a number of therapists over the years that I saw. I'd go to therapy for a while and that I'd
step back and go back into therapy for a while. I was kind of felt like, I'm in a situation where
I've made this decision. If I made this decision, I have to stick with it.
(07:54):
We start to have kids and I always, always, always want to be a dad. I absolutely love and adore
my kids and kids in general. I love their authenticity and their spirit.
(08:14):
At the time, going to therapy, it was really hard. I remember my therapist wanted me to talk more
about what would it be like if you let yourself be gay. I couldn't even have the conversation with him.
I couldn't even have the discussion with him. I was so avoidant on it because it wasn't something
(08:35):
I could allow myself to feel or to think about. Really, the way that I reconciled with it was
in some ways I recognized that to have what I wanted at the time, which was to be married with
kids and to have a family, I'd have to sacrifice something of myself. I had this mindset that being
(09:00):
gay, I would also sacrifice something that was really important to me. It was a matter of choosing
one or the other. I thought choosing to be in a heterosexual relationship was the...
It was a path that I had chosen and I was committed to stick with it. It was the way that I looked at things.
It was a what's at risk if I do one thing or the other, which am I going to benefit in our minds the
(09:27):
best from? Yeah, in either way, there'd be some form of trade-off. I felt like either way I'd
be compromising something that was important to me. That's how I think I just coped with it at the time.
When you were married, did the kids know that dad was gay? No. In hindsight, my daughter will say
(09:48):
stuff to me like, "You know, you did make some pretty fabulous. You did some pretty fabulous dresses
for my Barbie." It should have been fairly obvious. There are things about me that were very stereotypically
gay. The things that we talk about now that there were all these context clues that nobody had an
(10:15):
idea. In fact, when I came out, a lot of people were very surprised. I think there were certain people
who were not at all shocked, but a number of people were very surprised. I think I hit it tremendously
well. It's funny too, because I had actually, in hindsight, I had actually separated from a lot of
(10:35):
people that knew me when I was younger. I lost contact with a lot of the people. I almost
erased that part of my identity to create this new identity. I've reconnected with a lot of those people
since coming out. I have this one good friend from high school. She's one of my closest friends now.
She always said to me that when we reconnected and she saw these pictures of me on Facebook,
(11:00):
she said, "You have this picture perfect, like Sears, portrait, looking family with a beautiful
wife and gorgeous kids." I thought to myself, "Eastrate." Like, what? Because,
I mean, my nickname was a kid. We always laugh about the side-tooled brothers who
(11:21):
absolutely tortured me with their friends. I was the baby and the family. My nickname on the
street that I grew up on was fruity. Fruity, because I was like a very gay presenting little six or
seven-year-old kid. Even to the point where I remember one of the moms didn't know my real name.
(11:43):
My parents are from Germany, so my name is fairly ethnic anyway. She just thought that I'm
every one day I came over and she said, "Does Fruity want some ice cream?" I kind of made a face and
they all started laughing. My brother and I always fun-started laughing. They had to tell her what my
real name was and she just thought it was some German name. How did you feel as a child when they
(12:07):
would call you Fruity? It was something, it was a curse. It was torture for me. I did not want to
be gay when I was a kid. I felt very different. I think when you were a kid you just want to feel
accepted. You want to feel, as we said earlier, "normal." You want to fit in and it left me feeling
(12:27):
very vulnerable. Being gay was not a positive thing at that time in the 70s and 80s growing up.
Particularly during the AIDS epidemic that started back in 1981. I remember two. It was really
funny. My mom had this good friend and she tried to... It's around the time that I was 13 and you
(12:56):
start to present sexually hitting puberty and all that stuff. My mom's good friend said to her,
"Haven't read this book and she gave her a copy of everything you wanted to know about sex,
but we're afraid to ask." Have you ever read the... Are you familiar with the movie?
The movie is very funny. I still appreciate it. The book was supposed to be this informed
(13:23):
authority on sex and the chapter about being gay was horrifically depressing. It was horrifically
depressing. It basically said, "Most gays will be subject to a life of unhappiness." It was at a
time they wrote the book when being gay was still a mental illness, was how they defined it.
(13:49):
The DSM was changed. What it says, I remember that was psychologically at the image
rather than helping me. I remember even things in the Boy Scout manual and Boy Scout book about
how you should not touch yourself in things like that. The programming of
(14:11):
of heteronormative perspective on the world and very pure 10 and make you feel bad.
Yeah, absolutely. In your own mind. When you're a kid, you're a kid. How? This programming that we're doing.
As a life coach, I'm committed to help you discover the passions in your life and help you map a
(14:36):
course to achieve the things you really want. Together we will unwind those persistent self-doubt
that are holding you back. You'll begin to see your passions more clearly and set achievable goals.
Throughout your journey, I'll be there to challenge and encourage you in moving forward to discover
your authentic self. For more information about my personal life coaching services,
(14:59):
or to arrange a complimentary consultation, visit davidcottoncoaching.com.
You're listening to OutLate with David.
[Music]
(15:32):
So when you went through all this, at some point in time you realized you were gay.
Was there like a moment in time? For me, I looked at a mirror actually and said,
"David, gotten your gay." When was that realization for you? Was you remember?
I remember my brother was about four years older than me and my older brother happens to be gay.
(15:56):
I hung out with a little bit more of a mature crowd when I was in my early years in high school.
I hung out with a lot of his friends. I think I was always a bit of an old soul, even as a kid.
I remember I went to a party with some of his friends and I ended up making out with one of his
(16:21):
guy friends at the time and entered into a relationship for a couple of months with the guy
and dated him and we had sex at the time. I thought to myself, I was like, "This is my place.
I have found me. I have discovered me." Then we broke up and I was absolutely gutted and
(16:42):
heartbroken at the time. Hold were you at the time? I was 14.
It's 14 at the time. So fairly young. Then I'd venture into that space, but a lot of my brother's
friends graduated from high school at that point in time and had moved on. I had to reestablish friend
(17:02):
groups and didn't really find anybody that I clicked with in that way or connected with in that way.
So I just sort of swept it under the rug. I remember coming to terms with it and saying to myself
that at that early age, this is me, 100% who I am. It sounds like you even had a role model in your
older brother. Was he out gay and out at the time? He was out but still fairly closeted.
(17:32):
I remember I even confided in him who I was. He knew who I was. It wasn't like we used this big secret.
It was just one of those things we just didn't talk about it. We just didn't talk about it
over the years. I remember confiding to him before I got married. I wasn't sure if I was doing
the right thing. I came out to a couple of friends before I got married and basically said,
(17:54):
I don't know if I can go through with this. There were maybe three people who knew at the time and
we just never talked about it. No one had any advice like slow down, think about this.
We were all in our early 20s. We were all in our early 20s. You make different decisions with the
(18:20):
context. The information you have at that time. They're empathetic. I think they didn't want to force
the decision. I moved forward and said, I'm going through it. I just need to talk to somebody and
express what's going on. I think they were waiting for me to maybe raise it. They would have been
supportive if I had continued to bring it up. It wasn't the case at the time.
(18:47):
So you decided to separate and divorce? What did you learn about yourself through that experience?
I was a rough process. It was gut wrenching to me to not see the kids every day.
I'll say financially it was very hard to separate out and having to juggle the expenses and
(19:12):
child support and court costs and attorney fees and things like that. It's really, really rough.
I remember when I first came out, there was a first moved out. It's actually, it's really fun.
It was February 1st, 14 years ago. We're almost at the 14 year anniversary of that time.
(19:35):
It was a mix of elation and excitement and just incredible hardship and depression and sadness.
A lot of guilt around the time too. I had to put up my family and
(19:55):
to destroy my family to affirm myself. I had a lot of time. You think about a 14 years. It's
like spending 14 years in a prison cell. I don't want to say it was miserable. You're sitting
(20:17):
alone with it for a lot of that time. It's like sitting in solitary confinement with it,
say for those times where I talk to a therapist about it, but you're holding onto the secret.
I had a lot of time to say this is authentically who I am. I know who I am and what decisions
am I going to make and how is my life going to play out? Am I happy? I'd sit up at night and
(20:39):
wrestle with it and think about it. What I'd say is I went into it and I just said,
okay, I made that decision. There was a side of me that I wanted to satisfy by being in this
relationship. Now I get to try out the other side without I'm free to move forward and try and
(21:00):
experience this other half of myself. How did the children react to the divorce
at the time and dads now out his gay? It was hard for the kids. I think it's the thing is,
I didn't come out as gay straight away for a couple of months before I revealed that to the kids.
I dated for a while. I think we all have our period of adolescence. During that period of time,
(21:28):
you have your gay rebirth and you're out there having a good time and enjoying and dating.
I actually, I mean, a checklist. I went into a lot of this within being very intentional,
but I wrote a checklist. These would be the seven perfect things that I want a relationship in the
partner. When I'd start dating guys would be together for a couple of weeks and I'd just sort of say,
(21:53):
do they fit the criteria? They're four out of seven. Not going to continue forward and I'd
break it off. I met my now husband at the time and I introduced him into the kids' life. He has
kids also. He's got four kids. We're like the gaity bunch. We have seven kids between the two of us.
(22:18):
Like the Brady Bunch TV show, the 19s. Exactly. We're like the gaity bunch, but we've got one extra.
It's not six kids, it's seven. He was much more open with his kids, much more transparent with his kids.
Came out to his kids earlier than I came up to mine, but his kids were also older.
(22:40):
Then one by one, we started to tell my kids. They struggled with it, but I think also for the most
part they accepted it more with it. I did have a little falling out with my oldest son for four
years. He didn't talk to me. He was 13 at the time that I came out. He was struggling with a lot of
(23:08):
issues at the time. He just had a lot of things going on in his life at the time. He
helped me off for four years at the time. It took me a long time to rehab that relationship. We're
in a much better place today. I'd reach out to him for four years. I was at this mindset. I
(23:32):
remember I had this friend at the time. She had talked a lot about her relationship with her dad
and things that her mom told her about her dad. It was good to have her there. At some point,
her dad just checked out because he got frustrated and stopped following up with her. She
internalized it and really hated him for it. I remember at the time thinking, "I'll never stop
(23:55):
reaching out to my kid because my role as a bother is to remind him that I love him." I think also,
for me, I knew a lot of the work that I had done being gay and reconciling with just stuff. At night,
when I'm laying in bed and I'm processing all these things, I think we all
have certain truths that we acknowledge to ourselves that we may not necessarily speak to other people.
(24:20):
They're truths that we hold on to. I remember thinking to myself, the truth is, you know, he might
tell himself that I'm all these things or all these things that he's hearing about me may sink in,
but he'll never be able to say with conviction, "My dad is really those things," right? I thought to
myself, "Maybe he'll never talk to me, but the best gift that I can give him is a healthy internal
(24:43):
dialogue." That is beautiful. Yeah, that he wouldn't have to sit in a therapist chair and pick all
the stuff apart, at least not in terms of feeling loved and wanted. So you stand a kindness,
caring, and compassion to leave that with him, to help him then rationalize or realize
(25:05):
that you're important to him as well, and then he enter back into your life. He did. Yeah, he did
took four long years. I write him letters on the regular. If I bought things for the kids, I'd
go out and I got ice cream for the kids at the end of the night before I dropped them off on a dinner
visit. I'd get one to go for him, and I'd say, "Just stick it in the freezer. He may or may not eat it,
(25:28):
but just let him know that I sent it." He'd black me on his cell phone, so he'd never, I don't think
he ever got my texts or my calls, but I try. Theoretically, I was like, "Maybe he'll pick them up some day,
I don't know." Or maybe he'll unblock me. A birthday and special occasions, they'd always drop off
gifts and try to do for him what I did for the other kids. It was hard though. It was a really rough
(25:55):
defense. Sounds like it was difficult, but it was the long game. The long game that you had in mind,
it wasn't the short fix, but to be there, even though you weren't there to be there for him.
Exactly. I think in my heart, I just sort of like, it became very stoic. I just sort of said,
"He's never, ever, ever going to respond to me." We will never, ever, ever have a relationship.
(26:17):
I just sort of accepted that the relationship was dead. What it say is, I think the way that I got through
it was, sometimes I'd write the letters and I think, "How do I feel engaged when?" I had to
go, "Look, I think we do this very well," as formerly married or straight presenting
(26:39):
gay men, you know how to compartmentalize your feelings. That's pretty sure this is a natural,
natural thing for me. It's a very well-exercised muscle. To compartmentalize the hurt and pain that I felt
(27:00):
was him very easily. I still went through the motions even if at times I just had to not feel
very much to protect myself. We also know how to put on that mask to protect ourselves.
It may be three feet thick, but we know how to put on that mask to look happy and
(27:20):
all content and a lot, absolutely, absolutely. The fake it till you make it, they say, right?
That's right. You make it ringed and you're not wrecked.
So we put on that mask sometimes denying that we're gay. A lot of guys I talk to are always
interested in. Here's somebody's married, in this case, you're married, and knowing that they may
(27:41):
have not had dated well because they didn't know why they didn't date well, but they didn't accept
that they were gay and therefore they had the mask on to protect themselves and really didn't
interact. Now they're in this world, they're out and it's like, "How do I date? How do I meet a guy?"
So tell us about your romantic story of how you met your husband and how you navigated that
whole dating experience. Well, we have stories all the time. I mean, I happen to have married
(28:07):
someone who is as much about a Joker as I am, right? I still wake up within every day and we laugh.
I mean, that's the key thing for me. It's a really nice, healthy relationship, but we always
get around when people ask us the first thing we say is we met on Christian Mangle and you'll see
(28:28):
people kind of look a little funny or sometimes we were like, "Oh, that's really nice." And then we're like,
"We didn't meet on Christian Mangle. They'll have a section for us. Are you kidding me?"
And then we always switch to, "No, he cruised me in a bathroom." But here we are, like 14 years
(28:48):
later, we're still together. But the reality is it's much more tame. I look for healthy outlets.
There was a gay community center in Westchester County that I had become aware of through my
therapist at the time. So I used to go to meetings periodically, but you got to put yourself out there.
(29:13):
I tried the dating apps, but the dating apps in 14 years ago, you have to realize the internet's
been an evolution. There was a mix of going on match and some of those sites at the time and just being
really annoyed by the whole dating scene. I mean, it was like, "It was not my thing."
We had Craig's list at the time and I thought, "Either I'm going to have a really hot date or I'm
(29:37):
going to get murdered tonight." It's going to be one or the other. But here we go. The show up.
I remember I was dating somebody at the time and I kind of knew we were on the out. It just was like,
"It wasn't the right relationship for me. We had been together for a couple of weeks and I
went through my checklist and I was like, "This is another right guy for me." So my ex I remember
(30:04):
there was a Tuesday evening and she didn't honor the custody schedule. I was supposed to have the kids
that night and I was livid because for me it was really about, you know, I was not only did I
walk the time with the kids, but I felt like it was really important for them to have consistency.
But it was very early on in our time apart and I think we were figuring out those boundaries and
(30:27):
those rules. And the guy that I was dating called me up and he said, "I'm going down to this
men's group tonight. What are you doing?" And I unraveled and told him about what had happened and he
said, "Why don't you come with me? Why don't you meet me down there?" And I thought, "You know,
I'm not going to sit at home. I'm going to go. I should do it. It's a Tuesday night. I never
(30:49):
get to do these things." So let's take lemons and make lemonade. So I went and he walked past the room.
They had an AA session down the hall and I thought, "Oh, he's cute, but he's an alcohol like,
right? Turns out that he was going to the bathroom. So he came back into the room and,
you know, and so the first checklist, I'm attracted to him, right? But then he talked and as he talked,
(31:15):
it was like, "All the check boxes went off for me." Like, I was like, "This is my guy. This is the
one that I want." And I remember after the meeting was over, these meetings lasted like two hours,
I specifically went up and grabbed him and said, "Give me a pen. You have a pen. I'm going to give you
my phone number. I like to plug this into your phone. We have a lot in common and I don't meet a lot
(31:40):
of people with whom I have a lot in common and I'd love to connect with you just because we're going
through a lot of similar things." And he gave me his number. I gave him mine and then I went out in the
parking lot and I dumped the guy that I was dating with that night and I was like, "Woo!" Yeah, yeah.
I just, I had a sense. I had a feeling. I had a hunch and we went out on our first date,
(32:04):
three nights later, which was a Friday. And, you know, the rest of history, we just, we really hit it off.
So Stefan, this time of you today has made me happy. So thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. I really am.
I appreciate you were willing to share your story and be open. We know that this will help others
when they hear that. So that's what I hope. Thank you again for being here today.
(32:28):
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate the time and I hope that others are able to
experience this positive of a journey as I have in these last four-klin years. It wasn't easy,
but here I am today and I'm happy.
I wonder how unique Stefan's story really is. That is getting married when both the future
(32:55):
husband and the future wife know one of them is LGBTQ+. Marry just challenging enough. Two people
coming together in union, learning to live together, blending their lives and hopes and dreams for
the future. In Stefan's situation, they came together knowing he was gay. As a child, Stefan was told
that gays will be subject to a life of an happiness. Through his journey of self-discovery and pursuit
(33:20):
of happiness, he realized he wouldn't be happy 100% of the time, but his perspective was key to his
happiness. He needed to wake up each morning, watching to be happy. This is an easy act we can do for
ourselves, setting the tone of our intention as we move through the day. Rebuilding a fractured
(33:40):
relationship is a process as it was with his estranged son. Patients needed to be the foundation of
his actions, even though there was no guarantee of achieving the desired outcome. With his acts of love,
Stefan knew he was being true to himself while honoring his son. We be wise to follow his example
in the relationships in our lives. Finally, I was struck by Stefan's clarity on what he really wanted
(34:06):
for himself, going so far as to having the list of attributes for his future partner. The list guided
his behavior in actions and kept him true to himself. Too often we try to change ourselves to fit with
another when we should be looking for the people in our life that fit with who we are.
I wish Stefan and his gady bunch family continued happiness. Thanks for listening. I'm David Cotton.
(34:31):
Join us next time for Outlate with David.
To hear more episodes, visit Outlate with David.com and to learn more about personal life coaching
services, go to DavidCottonCoaching.com
[Music]
(00:11):
You're listening to Outlet with David. True Star is coming out later in luck.
And now here's your host, David Cun.
Today's guest talks about coming out as a process. But one where he gets better each day.
However, it didn't start that way. Two years into a relationship with his former wife,
(00:31):
he came out as gay. But she decided to stay with them and they got married four years later.
There were some twists and turns along the way, eventually leading to divorce.
But now happily remarried, the union with his husband created a modern family with children
ranging from 18 to 42. Stefan Schneider joins us today from his home in Larchmont, New York.
(00:53):
Stefan, welcome. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. It's good to see you.
Thank you. I wouldn't know more about this blended family with you and your husband, but first I kind
of want to go back in time. Yeah. Where you're married to your wife, you're a relationship with her,
you came out as gay, she decides to stay with you. Tell me about that. How did you navigate it?
(01:17):
You know, I think it's easy to second guess these things, right? With hindsight.
It's easier to reflect on things and see things clearly. But I think, you have to realize the
context of the time, it was the early 90s. It wasn't so cool to be gay. We were still in the midst of
(01:43):
the AIDS epidemic. I always think that maybe since I was five, I probably, five or six, I knew that I was gay.
It was torture. I used to wish it away when I was a kid at night trying to pray the gay away as they
say, right? And really feeling in some ways cursed. I experimented a little bit in high school.
(02:08):
Then I think that at the time, I was very relationship oriented. I think that when I put my foot into
the gay community, there weren't role models that showed me loving relationships. I'm sure that
(02:30):
they were there. I just didn't see them at the time. I just wanted to be normal. You know what I mean?
I just wanted to fit in. It's funny how we characterize that as normal to be normal. We say normal.
We're normal. We're not normal. What I considered normal at the time, right? What I was led to
(02:54):
believe was normal or what felt more mainstream. I loved her very much. We started our relationship
in college. I loved her very much. We had a bit of a long distance relationship. I got to a point
where it was probably a year, maybe a year and a half into a stating. When things were starting to get
(03:18):
more serious, I came out and basically told her, "Hey, look, I have something to share with you.
This is a really hard thing to reveal, but I'm pretty sure that I'm gay." I don't think we can
continue forward. There's a lot of dialogue back and forth on it at the time. Where we settled on
(03:40):
was that I couldn't reconcile. Maybe we talked fairly openly. It was not an easy conversation to
have. We talked pretty openly, but where we settled on was that I was probably by. I couldn't
reconcile with the fact that I had feelings for her. I was attracted to her. I think also,
sometimes when you make those revelations, it creates authenticity and it kind of pulls you in,
(04:05):
what separating you pulls you in closer. I think we stayed together. I proposed a few years later.
We were in our early 20s. We got married. Had a fairly traditional wedding. It was always
looming there in the background. It was one of those things that we were fairly avoidant about.
(04:28):
We didn't talk about it, but then it's like anything else. It bloomed at a number of times until
the marriage dissolved 14 years later. You said that it maybe made you closer by being vulnerable and
honest with her in your communication. I think so. I didn't want to
destroy our family right and do damage to her. That was never my intention. Go into it with
(04:57):
going to these things with dubious intentions. We found ourselves that it created a lot of
attention in the relationship and what initially felt like authentic closeness became a tremendous
source of attention in the relationship over time and something that we couldn't talk about.
(05:18):
It was too painful in some ways until it boiled to a head at the time that we decided to get the
divorce. Was your sexuality the reason for the divorce? Is that what? Yeah, I think it was the
recourse for the divorce. It was a big burden for her. What it states to you also is, I remember at that
(05:39):
time, I just remember, because it's hard. It's hard to reflect back right 13 years later. I'm in a
very, very different, much happier place in my life. I was thought that I remember thinking at
the time that I would never be happy. That happiness wasn't something that was in the cards for me.
(06:01):
I couldn't understand why I was happy. I was very depressed at the time too. I think suppressing
that's very, very hard. It was a rough period. I think even after coming out the divorce process was
fairly acrimonious. It took us three years to get divorced. We went to trial. We were disseminating
(06:25):
absolute fortune on attorneys at the time. It left me in a really rough state for a number of years
afterwards financially and emotionally. At some point, it clicks and you pick up the pieces and you
move forward. At a very dear friend, I actually just reconnected with her not too long ago.
(06:47):
I remember at the time she was going through divorce and she said these very wise words to me. I
just told her that the stuck with me all these years, but she said the only way out is through sometimes.
Exactly. I got through those years and I've gotten to a better place, which is much happier now.
(07:10):
When I'd say to you also, I was thought that I was never going to be happy. I'm actually happy.
I'm actually very happy. I can tell that at your face. It just comes across.
Why did you think you never would be happy? What was the thought you had then beyond that?
I went to therapy at the time because one of those things, you can't keep this all inside. I had
(07:34):
a number of therapists over the years that I saw. I'd go to therapy for a while and that I'd
step back and go back into therapy for a while. I was kind of felt like, I'm in a situation where
I've made this decision. If I made this decision, I have to stick with it.
(07:54):
We start to have kids and I always, always, always want to be a dad. I absolutely love and adore
my kids and kids in general. I love their authenticity and their spirit.
(08:14):
At the time, going to therapy, it was really hard. I remember my therapist wanted me to talk more
about what would it be like if you let yourself be gay. I couldn't even have the conversation with him.
I couldn't even have the discussion with him. I was so avoidant on it because it wasn't something
(08:35):
I could allow myself to feel or to think about. Really, the way that I reconciled with it was
in some ways I recognized that to have what I wanted at the time, which was to be married with
kids and to have a family, I'd have to sacrifice something of myself. I had this mindset that being
(09:00):
gay, I would also sacrifice something that was really important to me. It was a matter of choosing
one or the other. I thought choosing to be in a heterosexual relationship was the...
It was a path that I had chosen and I was committed to stick with it. It was the way that I looked at things.
It was a what's at risk if I do one thing or the other, which am I going to benefit in our minds the
(09:27):
best from? Yeah, in either way, there'd be some form of trade-off. I felt like either way I'd
be compromising something that was important to me. That's how I think I just coped with it at the time.
When you were married, did the kids know that dad was gay? No. In hindsight, my daughter will say
(09:48):
stuff to me like, "You know, you did make some pretty fabulous. You did some pretty fabulous dresses
for my Barbie." It should have been fairly obvious. There are things about me that were very stereotypically
gay. The things that we talk about now that there were all these context clues that nobody had an
(10:15):
idea. In fact, when I came out, a lot of people were very surprised. I think there were certain people
who were not at all shocked, but a number of people were very surprised. I think I hit it tremendously
well. It's funny too, because I had actually, in hindsight, I had actually separated from a lot of
(10:35):
people that knew me when I was younger. I lost contact with a lot of the people. I almost
erased that part of my identity to create this new identity. I've reconnected with a lot of those people
since coming out. I have this one good friend from high school. She's one of my closest friends now.
She always said to me that when we reconnected and she saw these pictures of me on Facebook,
(11:00):
she said, "You have this picture perfect, like Sears, portrait, looking family with a beautiful
wife and gorgeous kids." I thought to myself, "Eastrate." Like, what? Because,
I mean, my nickname was a kid. We always laugh about the side-tooled brothers who
(11:21):
absolutely tortured me with their friends. I was the baby and the family. My nickname on the
street that I grew up on was fruity. Fruity, because I was like a very gay presenting little six or
seven-year-old kid. Even to the point where I remember one of the moms didn't know my real name.
(11:43):
My parents are from Germany, so my name is fairly ethnic anyway. She just thought that I'm
every one day I came over and she said, "Does Fruity want some ice cream?" I kind of made a face and
they all started laughing. My brother and I always fun-started laughing. They had to tell her what my
real name was and she just thought it was some German name. How did you feel as a child when they
(12:07):
would call you Fruity? It was something, it was a curse. It was torture for me. I did not want to
be gay when I was a kid. I felt very different. I think when you were a kid you just want to feel
accepted. You want to feel, as we said earlier, "normal." You want to fit in and it left me feeling
(12:27):
very vulnerable. Being gay was not a positive thing at that time in the 70s and 80s growing up.
Particularly during the AIDS epidemic that started back in 1981. I remember two. It was really
funny. My mom had this good friend and she tried to... It's around the time that I was 13 and you
(12:56):
start to present sexually hitting puberty and all that stuff. My mom's good friend said to her,
"Haven't read this book and she gave her a copy of everything you wanted to know about sex,
but we're afraid to ask." Have you ever read the... Are you familiar with the movie?
The movie is very funny. I still appreciate it. The book was supposed to be this informed
(13:23):
authority on sex and the chapter about being gay was horrifically depressing. It was horrifically
depressing. It basically said, "Most gays will be subject to a life of unhappiness." It was at a
time they wrote the book when being gay was still a mental illness, was how they defined it.
(13:49):
The DSM was changed. What it says, I remember that was psychologically at the image
rather than helping me. I remember even things in the Boy Scout manual and Boy Scout book about
how you should not touch yourself in things like that. The programming of
(14:11):
of heteronormative perspective on the world and very pure 10 and make you feel bad.
Yeah, absolutely. In your own mind. When you're a kid, you're a kid. How? This programming that we're doing.
As a life coach, I'm committed to help you discover the passions in your life and help you map a
(14:36):
course to achieve the things you really want. Together we will unwind those persistent self-doubt
that are holding you back. You'll begin to see your passions more clearly and set achievable goals.
Throughout your journey, I'll be there to challenge and encourage you in moving forward to discover
your authentic self. For more information about my personal life coaching services,
(14:59):
or to arrange a complimentary consultation, visit davidcottoncoaching.com.
You're listening to OutLate with David.
[Music]
(15:32):
So when you went through all this, at some point in time you realized you were gay.
Was there like a moment in time? For me, I looked at a mirror actually and said,
"David, gotten your gay." When was that realization for you? Was you remember?
I remember my brother was about four years older than me and my older brother happens to be gay.
(15:56):
I hung out with a little bit more of a mature crowd when I was in my early years in high school.
I hung out with a lot of his friends. I think I was always a bit of an old soul, even as a kid.
I remember I went to a party with some of his friends and I ended up making out with one of his
(16:21):
guy friends at the time and entered into a relationship for a couple of months with the guy
and dated him and we had sex at the time. I thought to myself, I was like, "This is my place.
I have found me. I have discovered me." Then we broke up and I was absolutely gutted and
(16:42):
heartbroken at the time. Hold were you at the time? I was 14.
It's 14 at the time. So fairly young. Then I'd venture into that space, but a lot of my brother's
friends graduated from high school at that point in time and had moved on. I had to reestablish friend
(17:02):
groups and didn't really find anybody that I clicked with in that way or connected with in that way.
So I just sort of swept it under the rug. I remember coming to terms with it and saying to myself
that at that early age, this is me, 100% who I am. It sounds like you even had a role model in your
older brother. Was he out gay and out at the time? He was out but still fairly closeted.
(17:32):
I remember I even confided in him who I was. He knew who I was. It wasn't like we used this big secret.
It was just one of those things we just didn't talk about it. We just didn't talk about it
over the years. I remember confiding to him before I got married. I wasn't sure if I was doing
the right thing. I came out to a couple of friends before I got married and basically said,
(17:54):
I don't know if I can go through with this. There were maybe three people who knew at the time and
we just never talked about it. No one had any advice like slow down, think about this.
We were all in our early 20s. We were all in our early 20s. You make different decisions with the
(18:20):
context. The information you have at that time. They're empathetic. I think they didn't want to force
the decision. I moved forward and said, I'm going through it. I just need to talk to somebody and
express what's going on. I think they were waiting for me to maybe raise it. They would have been
supportive if I had continued to bring it up. It wasn't the case at the time.
(18:47):
So you decided to separate and divorce? What did you learn about yourself through that experience?
I was a rough process. It was gut wrenching to me to not see the kids every day.
I'll say financially it was very hard to separate out and having to juggle the expenses and
(19:12):
child support and court costs and attorney fees and things like that. It's really, really rough.
I remember when I first came out, there was a first moved out. It's actually, it's really fun.
It was February 1st, 14 years ago. We're almost at the 14 year anniversary of that time.
(19:35):
It was a mix of elation and excitement and just incredible hardship and depression and sadness.
A lot of guilt around the time too. I had to put up my family and
(19:55):
to destroy my family to affirm myself. I had a lot of time. You think about a 14 years. It's
like spending 14 years in a prison cell. I don't want to say it was miserable. You're sitting
(20:17):
alone with it for a lot of that time. It's like sitting in solitary confinement with it,
say for those times where I talk to a therapist about it, but you're holding onto the secret.
I had a lot of time to say this is authentically who I am. I know who I am and what decisions
am I going to make and how is my life going to play out? Am I happy? I'd sit up at night and
(20:39):
wrestle with it and think about it. What I'd say is I went into it and I just said,
okay, I made that decision. There was a side of me that I wanted to satisfy by being in this
relationship. Now I get to try out the other side without I'm free to move forward and try and
(21:00):
experience this other half of myself. How did the children react to the divorce
at the time and dads now out his gay? It was hard for the kids. I think it's the thing is,
I didn't come out as gay straight away for a couple of months before I revealed that to the kids.
I dated for a while. I think we all have our period of adolescence. During that period of time,
(21:28):
you have your gay rebirth and you're out there having a good time and enjoying and dating.
I actually, I mean, a checklist. I went into a lot of this within being very intentional,
but I wrote a checklist. These would be the seven perfect things that I want a relationship in the
partner. When I'd start dating guys would be together for a couple of weeks and I'd just sort of say,
(21:53):
do they fit the criteria? They're four out of seven. Not going to continue forward and I'd
break it off. I met my now husband at the time and I introduced him into the kids' life. He has
kids also. He's got four kids. We're like the gaity bunch. We have seven kids between the two of us.
(22:18):
Like the Brady Bunch TV show, the 19s. Exactly. We're like the gaity bunch, but we've got one extra.
It's not six kids, it's seven. He was much more open with his kids, much more transparent with his kids.
Came out to his kids earlier than I came up to mine, but his kids were also older.
(22:40):
Then one by one, we started to tell my kids. They struggled with it, but I think also for the most
part they accepted it more with it. I did have a little falling out with my oldest son for four
years. He didn't talk to me. He was 13 at the time that I came out. He was struggling with a lot of
(23:08):
issues at the time. He just had a lot of things going on in his life at the time. He
helped me off for four years at the time. It took me a long time to rehab that relationship. We're
in a much better place today. I'd reach out to him for four years. I was at this mindset. I
(23:32):
remember I had this friend at the time. She had talked a lot about her relationship with her dad
and things that her mom told her about her dad. It was good to have her there. At some point,
her dad just checked out because he got frustrated and stopped following up with her. She
internalized it and really hated him for it. I remember at the time thinking, "I'll never stop
(23:55):
reaching out to my kid because my role as a bother is to remind him that I love him." I think also,
for me, I knew a lot of the work that I had done being gay and reconciling with just stuff. At night,
when I'm laying in bed and I'm processing all these things, I think we all
have certain truths that we acknowledge to ourselves that we may not necessarily speak to other people.
(24:20):
They're truths that we hold on to. I remember thinking to myself, the truth is, you know, he might
tell himself that I'm all these things or all these things that he's hearing about me may sink in,
but he'll never be able to say with conviction, "My dad is really those things," right? I thought to
myself, "Maybe he'll never talk to me, but the best gift that I can give him is a healthy internal
(24:43):
dialogue." That is beautiful. Yeah, that he wouldn't have to sit in a therapist chair and pick all
the stuff apart, at least not in terms of feeling loved and wanted. So you stand a kindness,
caring, and compassion to leave that with him, to help him then rationalize or realize
(25:05):
that you're important to him as well, and then he enter back into your life. He did. Yeah, he did
took four long years. I write him letters on the regular. If I bought things for the kids, I'd
go out and I got ice cream for the kids at the end of the night before I dropped them off on a dinner
visit. I'd get one to go for him, and I'd say, "Just stick it in the freezer. He may or may not eat it,
(25:28):
but just let him know that I sent it." He'd black me on his cell phone, so he'd never, I don't think
he ever got my texts or my calls, but I try. Theoretically, I was like, "Maybe he'll pick them up some day,
I don't know." Or maybe he'll unblock me. A birthday and special occasions, they'd always drop off
gifts and try to do for him what I did for the other kids. It was hard though. It was a really rough
(25:55):
defense. Sounds like it was difficult, but it was the long game. The long game that you had in mind,
it wasn't the short fix, but to be there, even though you weren't there to be there for him.
Exactly. I think in my heart, I just sort of like, it became very stoic. I just sort of said,
"He's never, ever, ever going to respond to me." We will never, ever, ever have a relationship.
(26:17):
I just sort of accepted that the relationship was dead. What it say is, I think the way that I got through
it was, sometimes I'd write the letters and I think, "How do I feel engaged when?" I had to
go, "Look, I think we do this very well," as formerly married or straight presenting
(26:39):
gay men, you know how to compartmentalize your feelings. That's pretty sure this is a natural,
natural thing for me. It's a very well-exercised muscle. To compartmentalize the hurt and pain that I felt
(27:00):
was him very easily. I still went through the motions even if at times I just had to not feel
very much to protect myself. We also know how to put on that mask to protect ourselves.
It may be three feet thick, but we know how to put on that mask to look happy and
(27:20):
all content and a lot, absolutely, absolutely. The fake it till you make it, they say, right?
That's right. You make it ringed and you're not wrecked.
So we put on that mask sometimes denying that we're gay. A lot of guys I talk to are always
interested in. Here's somebody's married, in this case, you're married, and knowing that they may
(27:41):
have not had dated well because they didn't know why they didn't date well, but they didn't accept
that they were gay and therefore they had the mask on to protect themselves and really didn't
interact. Now they're in this world, they're out and it's like, "How do I date? How do I meet a guy?"
So tell us about your romantic story of how you met your husband and how you navigated that
whole dating experience. Well, we have stories all the time. I mean, I happen to have married
(28:07):
someone who is as much about a Joker as I am, right? I still wake up within every day and we laugh.
I mean, that's the key thing for me. It's a really nice, healthy relationship, but we always
get around when people ask us the first thing we say is we met on Christian Mangle and you'll see
(28:28):
people kind of look a little funny or sometimes we were like, "Oh, that's really nice." And then we're like,
"We didn't meet on Christian Mangle. They'll have a section for us. Are you kidding me?"
And then we always switch to, "No, he cruised me in a bathroom." But here we are, like 14 years
(28:48):
later, we're still together. But the reality is it's much more tame. I look for healthy outlets.
There was a gay community center in Westchester County that I had become aware of through my
therapist at the time. So I used to go to meetings periodically, but you got to put yourself out there.
(29:13):
I tried the dating apps, but the dating apps in 14 years ago, you have to realize the internet's
been an evolution. There was a mix of going on match and some of those sites at the time and just being
really annoyed by the whole dating scene. I mean, it was like, "It was not my thing."
We had Craig's list at the time and I thought, "Either I'm going to have a really hot date or I'm
(29:37):
going to get murdered tonight." It's going to be one or the other. But here we go. The show up.
I remember I was dating somebody at the time and I kind of knew we were on the out. It just was like,
"It wasn't the right relationship for me. We had been together for a couple of weeks and I
went through my checklist and I was like, "This is another right guy for me." So my ex I remember
(30:04):
there was a Tuesday evening and she didn't honor the custody schedule. I was supposed to have the kids
that night and I was livid because for me it was really about, you know, I was not only did I
walk the time with the kids, but I felt like it was really important for them to have consistency.
But it was very early on in our time apart and I think we were figuring out those boundaries and
(30:27):
those rules. And the guy that I was dating called me up and he said, "I'm going down to this
men's group tonight. What are you doing?" And I unraveled and told him about what had happened and he
said, "Why don't you come with me? Why don't you meet me down there?" And I thought, "You know,
I'm not going to sit at home. I'm going to go. I should do it. It's a Tuesday night. I never
(30:49):
get to do these things." So let's take lemons and make lemonade. So I went and he walked past the room.
They had an AA session down the hall and I thought, "Oh, he's cute, but he's an alcohol like,
right? Turns out that he was going to the bathroom. So he came back into the room and,
you know, and so the first checklist, I'm attracted to him, right? But then he talked and as he talked,
(31:15):
it was like, "All the check boxes went off for me." Like, I was like, "This is my guy. This is the
one that I want." And I remember after the meeting was over, these meetings lasted like two hours,
I specifically went up and grabbed him and said, "Give me a pen. You have a pen. I'm going to give you
my phone number. I like to plug this into your phone. We have a lot in common and I don't meet a lot
(31:40):
of people with whom I have a lot in common and I'd love to connect with you just because we're going
through a lot of similar things." And he gave me his number. I gave him mine and then I went out in the
parking lot and I dumped the guy that I was dating with that night and I was like, "Woo!" Yeah, yeah.
I just, I had a sense. I had a feeling. I had a hunch and we went out on our first date,
(32:04):
three nights later, which was a Friday. And, you know, the rest of history, we just, we really hit it off.
So Stefan, this time of you today has made me happy. So thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. I really am.
I appreciate you were willing to share your story and be open. We know that this will help others
when they hear that. So that's what I hope. Thank you again for being here today.
(32:28):
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate the time and I hope that others are able to
experience this positive of a journey as I have in these last four-klin years. It wasn't easy,
but here I am today and I'm happy.
I wonder how unique Stefan's story really is. That is getting married when both the future
(32:55):
husband and the future wife know one of them is LGBTQ+. Marry just challenging enough. Two people
coming together in union, learning to live together, blending their lives and hopes and dreams for
the future. In Stefan's situation, they came together knowing he was gay. As a child, Stefan was told
that gays will be subject to a life of an happiness. Through his journey of self-discovery and pursuit
(33:20):
of happiness, he realized he wouldn't be happy 100% of the time, but his perspective was key to his
happiness. He needed to wake up each morning, watching to be happy. This is an easy act we can do for
ourselves, setting the tone of our intention as we move through the day. Rebuilding a fractured
(33:40):
relationship is a process as it was with his estranged son. Patients needed to be the foundation of
his actions, even though there was no guarantee of achieving the desired outcome. With his acts of love,
Stefan knew he was being true to himself while honoring his son. We be wise to follow his example
in the relationships in our lives. Finally, I was struck by Stefan's clarity on what he really wanted
(34:06):
for himself, going so far as to having the list of attributes for his future partner. The list guided
his behavior in actions and kept him true to himself. Too often we try to change ourselves to fit with
another when we should be looking for the people in our life that fit with who we are.
I wish Stefan and his gady bunch family continued happiness. Thanks for listening. I'm David Cotton.
(34:31):
Join us next time for Outlate with David.
To hear more episodes, visit Outlate with David.com and to learn more about personal life coaching
services, go to DavidCottonCoaching.com
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