Understanding of the process by which an individual with same sex sexual orientation becomes aware of his homosexuality and eventually embraces homosexual idetity is of great interest and importance to social work and the other helping professions. The coming out process appears to take place over an extended period of time and to have identifiable and predictable stages. This paper explored the process of coming out in a sample of 15 self-identified gay men who had been married to women. Four patterns of reasons for marriage in this group emerged, which we call: Repressed, Naive, Wistful and Pragmatic. Implications for social work practice are presented.
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Scott et al. (1996) studied this question.