Amity Pierce Buxton

Emerging from anesthesia after an operation, Amity Pierce Buxton’s husband turned to her and said, “I have something to tell you.”

“I think I know what it is,” she replied.

Her instincts were correct. After 25 years of marriage and two children, her husband came out as a gay man.

That was in 1983. Within a year, Buxton began working to help others move through their own pain and shock. She went on to found the Straight Spouse Network, an international nonprofit that provides support and information to the partners of gay, lesbian or bisexual people, giving them what the network calls “real help at an unreal time.”

Buxton and her second husband have lived since 2006 at Piedmont Gardens, ABHOW’s continuing care retirement community in Oakland, Calif. Now 80, she continues her pioneering work by writing for academic journals, speaking at conferences and leading a local support group. She also remains actively involved in the network she founded.

At the time her first husband came out, Buxton’s professional life was devoted to training teachers and helping them develop curricula for urban schools. Her activism began when a group called the Gay Fathers of San Francisco asked her and several other women to tell their stories to help them understand why their wives were so angry.

The women talked about the disbelief and disorientation they felt and about how their husbands’ revelations triggered profound questions about their identities, their marriages, their children and their belief systems.

“We straight spouses get stigmatized along with our spouses,” Buxton points out. “People say, ‘What’s wrong with you? How was it you didn’t know? And you’re married to this person?’”

When she and the other wives finished talking, she recalls, “there wasn’t a dry eye. They gave us a standing ovation and told us, ‘Now we understand what our wives were going through.’”

She began leading support groups, and in 1986 the president of the Gay Fathers group suggested she write a book.

Drawing on her strong academic background — she has a doctorate in education from Columbia — Buxton contacted therapists and interviewed spouses all over the United States. In more than two million marriages, she learned, one spouse is gay, lesbian or bisexual. After five years of research and 450 interviews, she published The Other Side of the Closet in 1991. A second edition came out three years later.

Also in 1991, Buxton was asked to take over a straight spouse task force for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). She turned that and another support organization into the Straight Spouse Network, now an independent, volunteer-run nonprofit and the only such network in the world. It aims to promote healing and foster understanding between individuals, within families and with the larger community.

Buxton served as the network’s executive director for 16 years and remains on its board. And she speaks out against California’s Proposition 8, which restricted the right of gays and lesbians to marry.

Within the Piedmont Gardens community, Buxton talks informally about the issues gays, lesbians and straight spouses face in hopes of building acceptance and understanding. Fellow residents have donated to the network, helped it find grant support and invited her to speak at a church study group.

When Buxton reached her 80th birthday recently, she reaffirmed her commitment to her advocacy work.

“I want this next decade to be one of the most productive, creative decades I’ve ever lived,” she says. “I want to keep on this way, keep breaking boundaries.”