Despite what now appears to be a preponderance of evidence, I truly did not know my ex-husband was gay

The following is an excerpt from Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage by Kelly Foster Lundquist and available now from Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

Kelly Foster Lundquist was nineteen when she met Devin at church camp in the late ’90s. Immediately inseparable, the two bonded over bootleg Tori Amos recordings and a sense of disconnection from the spiritual fervor of their fellow camp counselors. Devin was classically handsome and Kelly on the plain side of pretty, but they matched. Their twinned search for God, acceptance, and love would profoundly shape the rest of their lives.
 
In this striking debut memoir, Lundquist revisits her relationship with Devin twenty years after their divorce, as she investigates the “beard” trope in literature, culture, and her own romantic life. The straight woman who unwittingly marries a gay man is either a laughingstock or a fool—or both—in the popular imagination. And yet reality—much like desire—is more wild. Reality is midnight pad Thai, tenderness in Ralph Lauren sheets, ritual visits to Blockbuster, and beginning a PhD in queer theory while your husband secretly struggles to reconcile his double life. 
 
A tour de force of empathy and vivid prose, Beard reckons honestly with the harm done to both husband and wife by churches that required rigid performances of gender and sexuality. In contrast, Lundquist learns to let go of brittle certainties as she embraces what her first marriage taught her about risk and redemption. 

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When I tell this story as a joke, I am its punchline.

Leaning in close, I might start with this bit: “The night before my first husband got outed to me back in 2003, I was in Chicago’s Boystown neighborhood dressed up as Liza Minnelli for Halloween.”

If the person I’m speaking to laughs—particularly if that listener happens to be a gay man with whom I share a set of cultural preoccupations—nineteenth-century American literature, musical theater, twentieth-century Hollywood, sitcoms of the 1970s and ’80s—I might feather in more detail. Having leaned in, I might open my brown eyes wide. I might gesticulate expressively: half Norma Desmond, half Sally Bowles.

“I was getting my PhD in queer theory. My dissertation was on Walt Whitman’s Bowery masculinity.”

Then perhaps this little nugget: “We were at a bar called Cocktail with two gay friends of mine the night after Halloween when a barista who’d recently seen my husband out with another man walked over to say hello.”

If the person to whom I’m speaking laughs even harder at this, I might say something like, “My ex and the man he ended up with had rhyming names: Devin and Kevin” or “After we divorced, my ex returned to school to get a degree in interior design” or “For our first birthday present as a couple, he asked me for a pink oxford shirt from Old Navy and a tube of Sun-Ripened Raspberry Hair Gel from Bath & Body Works.”

If it’s the right sort of moment, and perhaps my listener happens to be a couple of cocktails in, that might end up making them giggle so hard they tell me to stop talking so they can catch their breath.

My friend Carlos lay down on the floor of a fine dining restaurant where we both worked the first time I told him about it and kicked his feet like a child being tickled.

I’ve gotten actual spit takes. One of my friends even peed his pants.

Just a little pee, but still.

Part of what makes it funny is the fact that, despite what now appears to be a preponderance of evidence, I truly did not know either that my ex-husband was gay or that he was cheating on me before that post-Halloween night at Cocktail in Boystown.

As an English professor, I’m professionally qualified to tell you this serves as both situational and dramatic irony, with a garnish of verbal irony. I get why people laugh at me, why I have prompted them to, and why I have laughed so often at myself.

It’s easier to be the one telling the joke than the one being laughed at, and beards are such an easy punch line.

The first time I registered the beard as a trope, I was watching Saturday Night Live with my then-husband Devin when Rachel Dratch appeared on the screen as “The Girl with No Gaydar.”

She has Dratch’s trademark goofy grin, somehow both crooked and hyperbolic. Her eyes are wide when she stumbles into a bar full of what are meant to be legibly gay men—lisps and limp wrists, teacup poodles, leather chaps, and rhinestone dog collars abound—and marvels at the number of hot, unmarried men in the room.

The seemingly “smartier, savvier” women who accompany Dratch to the bar, possessed with more presumably reliable gaydar, roll their eyes at Dratch’s inability to accurately decipher the pulsing Morse code of that particular room.

On the night Devin and I watched that skit for the first time, we were two years away from our apartment in Boystown where I’d be holed up studying Judith Butler and Foucault by day and drinking pitchers of diluted cosmopolitans at bars with names like The Manhole by night. But I got the joke: gay men were always so obviously gay that any girl with a faulty “gaydar” was goofy at best.

Seven years after watching that skit for the first time, divorced and teaching at a community college in California, Devin sent me an email asking if I’d been watching 30 Rock. Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon reminded him of me, he said.

As luck would have it, I had just finished rewatching an episode of 30 Rock called “The Head and the Hair.” In that episode, Lemon informs a suspiciously handsome man she’s just begun dating, “If you’re a gay man looking for a beard, I don’t do that anymore.”

My ex-husband was right.

Liz Lemon was like me.

A year later, I caught another episode of 30 Rock in which Lemon makes a splash on a daytime talk show by coining sassy catch phrases to chide women for putting up with bad behavior from their men. “Deal-breaker!” is the one that sticks.

During audience Q&A in that first episode, a “plain” young woman approaches the mic with her “hot” fiancé. Her hair, face, and baggy linen dress are all shades of beige. She wears matronly gold hoop earrings and no makeup.

The fiancé, on the other hand, looks like he could be Tom Brady’s cousin: all steely jaw and broad shoulders and well-coiffed hair over a collared, checkered button-up artfully arranged just outside the neck of his form-fitting sweater.

When the two of them get their chance to pose a relationship query to Lemon, the beige woman reports that her fiancé keeps arguing with her about their wedding plans.

Emboldened by the talk show audience’s approval of her hot takes, Lemon interrupts her, “Nope. Your fiancé’s gay. Look at him. Look at you. Classic case of fruit blindness.”

The message is clear: beige girls only land boys who look like that if the boys have something to hide.

Not long after this episode aired, Parks and Recreation introduced the conservative character Marcia Langman, a proto-Karen. As spokesperson for the Society for Family Stability, Langman objects to a marriage between two male penguins at the zoo and calls for the resignation of the show’s protagonist, Leslie Knope, for officiating the wedding. In later episodes, we meet Langman’s presumably closeted husband, whose sexuality is ostensibly made obvious in bits like having him ogle a banana sheathed in a condom.

One of (several) Langman punch lines: She’s a frigid bigot who deserves to be hoodwinked by him.

Another mid-aughts beard plotline arose in later seasons of The Office when Angela marries “The Senator,” who then ends up having an affair with Oscar, her longtime  coworker. Partly because both Oscar and Angela were more prominent characters than Langman, this relationship got depicted with a bit more tenderness and warmth, but certainly, we are meant to understand that Angela deserves to be fooled because she’s as morally rigid as she is vain.

If beard jokes abound in sketch and situational comedy, it’s no surprise they also pop up in books written by those same comedy writers.

In Modern Family writer Cindy Chupack’s 2007 essay about her first husband’s remarriage to a man, she writes, “What woman today doesn’t have a guy-who-turned-out-to-be-gay story? Admittedly, it’s a smaller and stupider subset that has a husband-who-turned-out-to-be-gay story.”

There’s the scene from Tina Fey’s 2011 memoir Bossypants in which one of her musical theater friends from high school comes out to a room full of people, and his coming out is noted by all but “scone-faced Patty,” his Catholic school girlfriend who is described as “a sweet, quiet girl with short curly hair and a face as Irish as a scone . . . the only person at the party who didn’t get what Brandon’s deal was.”

More recently, there’s “The Actress,” an SNL short featuring Emma Stone, all beiged up in a Kohl’s sweater and matronly haircut. The joke of the sketch is that Stone—the beard in a gay porn scene—continues to ask the director questions about her character’s motivation. Exasperated by her persistent attempts to give this character nuance, the director finally tells her, “She doesn’t have a backstory! She exists to be cheated on!”

In the first season of Apple TV’s homage to musicals, Schmigadoon, Ann Harada plays Florence, the wife of the titular town’s closeted mayor, Aloysius Menlove (pun intended). Oblivious to her own ironic wordplay, Florence sings the song “He’s a Queer One, That Man o’ Mine,” which contains the stanza “My man is gentle / As soft ’n’ sentimental / As any lace adorn’d a valentine / He’s a queer one / That man o’ mine.” But then later, when her husband finally and very publicly comes out, she tells him, “Of course I knew you were a homosexual! I’m not stupid!” The implication: if she hadn’t known, she would be stupid.

There’s the line in Rebecca Makkai’s 2017 novel The Great Believers about a beard whose closeted and sexually restless husband ultimately causes her protagonist’s death from AIDS: “Dolly was short and plump, her hair tight in curls. If Yale was right about Bill being in the closet, then he’d chosen his wife predictably: plain, but put together; sweet enough that she likely forgave a lot.”

In all-too-rare contrast, Tony Kushner’s beautiful depiction of the beard Harper Pitt in Angels in America helped me be brave enough to name what was happening in my first marriage and to leave it with more grace and love than I would have otherwise.

Still, the trope of the beard persists.

She is short (I’m 5’3″).

She is plump (me too).

She is sweet (usually).

She is plain (as I sometimes feel).

She is dumb (as I have often felt or been made to feel).

Beards can be shaved, washed down a drain, swept with the meaty flesh of a palm into a bathroom garbage can.

We exist to be cheated on…

No trope exists in a vacuum.

If the beard’s beige serves as camouflage, gay men have got nothing for cover. In pop culture the queerness made legible on their bodies is flamboyant, meticulous,  preoccupied with its own aesthetic. They are depicted as indifferent to, if not repulsed by, the bodies of the women who love them. Never mind that in real life they may have conflicted feelings about their sexuality or it might take them years to decipher that code for themselves, let alone for anyone else, or that even today there remain countless reasons to hide your sexual identity, even from yourself.

I’m as guilty of the presumption of queer legibility as anyone. When my brother came out to me a year after my divorce, I blurted out, “But you’ve never said anything mean about my clothes.” As if one of the central prerequisites for being a gay man were professing catty opinions about fashion. In my own defense, during my first marriage and sojourn in Boystown, derisive comments about my wardrobe were not infrequent.

It’s easy enough to consign both beard and queer partner to these tropes because the pattern-desperate brain, hungry for control, likes to believe we’d know if we were missing something.

It’s messier to reckon with sexual fluidity or the complexity of desire. It’s messier still and much less comfortable to own the fact that we can lie and be lied to.

Here’s the thing: not all beards are beige.

One night in 1956, Elizabeth Taylor threw a dinner party at her home in Los Angeles’s Benedict Canyon. She and Montgomery Clift had been best friends for nearly six years. He kept his own complicated sexuality (he was either bisexual or gay—accounts differ) tightly under wraps because of the way both the public and the studio system punished queerness at the time. But Taylor was well aware of Monty’s sexuality. She had asked him to marry her three times anyway.

Each time he said no.

But they played along when, between Taylor’s marriages, their studios encouraged the press to play up rumors of their supposed romantic connection.

That night in 1956, they were filming Raintree County together. After a long day of filming, a group gathered for a meal at Taylor’s home. The dinner party consisted of Taylor and Clift; Taylor’s second husband, Michael Wilding; Rock Hudson and his wife, Phyllis Gates (also a beard); and actor Kevin McCarthy.

It was foggy that night in Benedict Canyon, and after leaving Taylor’s house around midnight, Clift struck a utility pole with his car, leaving it an “accordion-pleated mess.” His famously symmetrical face was pulped.

McCarthy, who witnessed the wreck, raced back to Taylor’s house to get help. In her hurry to get to her beloved friend, Taylor left her house without shoes. She crawled through the crumpled car’s rear window and lifted Clift’s rapidly bluing head into her lap, cradling and kissing it.

All the while, he pointed desperately to his neck. The impact had knocked several of his front teeth into the lip of his trachea. He was choking to death. One by one, she reached into his mouth and extracted the teeth. She saved his life. Clift survived, but his famous face was never the same.

In my most self-aggrandizing moments, fleeing the beigeness I fear most, I ponder the end of things with my own personal Monty Clift: the way I taught him to make mashed potatoes the night before I left, or how we are both alive now and well because of when and how I ended things. I picture myself as Elizabeth Taylor, some violet-eyed savior wearing Maggie the Cat’s white slip. Monty’s head nestled safe into the pillow of my Butterfield 8 breasts, the whiff of White Diamonds in his brutalized nose as I pluck each ragged incisor clean.

He breathes free.

He walks away from the wreck, and so do I.

But sometimes I also wonder: what if I was the teeth?

Kelly Foster Lundquist teaches writing at North Hennepin Community College in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. A 2013 Milton postgraduate fellow at Image Journal and Kenyon Review writers’ alum, her work has appeared in Last Syllable Lit, Whale Road Review, and The Academy Stories among other places. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University and an MA in English from Mississippi College, and remains a PhD dropout. Lundquist lives in a little red house by the Mississippi River with her spouse and daughter.

Excerpted from Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage by Kelly Foster Lundquist ©2025 (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.). Reprinted by permission from the publisher.

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