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10 Famous Gay Men Who Married Women

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Ten famous men married women first, then told the world who they actually were.

Long before “coming out” was a red-carpet moment with a magazine cover attached, it was often a quiet, terrified decision made after years of pretending. A new rundown video, “10 People Who Came Out Of the Closet After Marrying Someone Else,” walks through the actors, musicians and directors who used heterosexual marriage — sometimes called a “beard” arrangement in Hollywood shorthand — to keep their careers intact while hiding who they loved. Some of these marriages lasted decades. One lasted less than a year.

• Rock Hudson married his secretary, Phyllis Gates, in 1955 and stayed married for three years to protect his leading-man image; his homosexuality became public knowledge only after his AIDS-related death in 1985.
• Elton John married German recording engineer Renate Blauel in 1984, divorced her in 1988, then came out as gay before marrying David Furnish.
• Peter Marc Jacobson was married to Fran Drescher for 21 years and co-created “The Nanny” with her; he came out as gay after their 1999 divorce, a story the two later mined for the sitcom “Happily Divorced.”

Hollywood’s Cover-Marriage Era

Rock Hudson’s marriage to Phyllis Gates is the case that basically defined the term “lavender marriage” for a generation of moviegoers. Hudson was Universal’s biggest leading man in the 1950s, and the studio’s publicity machine leaned hard on the union to keep gossip columnists off the scent. It ended after three years, and Hudson’s sexuality wasn’t widely discussed until decades later, when his 1985 death from AIDS-related illness made international headlines and forced Hollywood to confront how long it had looked away.

Director Vincente Minnelli followed a different but related path. He married four times, including his 1945-to-1951 marriage to Judy Garland, and by most accounts lived far more openly as a gay man in New York than he ever did back in Los Angeles, where the studio system made discretion mandatory.

Elton John’s Detour Before Coming Out

Elton John’s marriage to Renate Blauel in 1984 surprised a lot of fans who’d already clocked him as gay from his stage persona alone. The marriage lasted four years, ending in divorce in 1988, and John came out publicly afterward before eventually marrying David Furnish. It’s one of the more high-profile examples of a musician marrying under pressure and then rebuilding his public identity on his own terms once the marriage ended.

A Sitcom Built on a Secret

Peter Marc Jacobson and Fran Drescher were married for 21 years and, together, created “The Nanny” — one of the biggest sitcom hits of the 1990s. Jacobson came out as gay after their 1999 divorce, and rather than bury that chapter, the two later turned it into “Happily Divorced,” a sitcom explicitly built around a husband coming out after the marriage ends. Few Hollywood couples have converted a painful personal secret into that direct a follow-up TV project.

The Marriages That Ended Fast

Not every one of these unions lasted years. Richard Cromwell married a young Angela Lansbury in 1945, and the marriage fell apart in under a year once Lansbury learned about his bisexuality. Anthony Perkins, best known for “Psycho,” had dated men before marrying Berry Berenson in 1973; that marriage held until his death from AIDS-related complications in 1992. Alan Cumming was married to Hilary Lyon from 1985 to 1993 and came out as bisexual in 1998, later marrying Grant Shaffer. Tony Richardson was married to Vanessa Redgrave from 1962 to 1967 and didn’t publicly acknowledge his bisexuality until 1985, after an HIV diagnosis.

Richard Cromwell’s marriage to Angela Lansbury didn’t survive a year — it ended the moment she found out the truth.

What ties these stories together isn’t just secrecy, it’s timing — how long each man waited, and what forced the moment he finally stopped hiding. It’s the same pattern that shows up whenever a public figure’s private life doesn’t match the image built around them, the kind of gap that’s kept celebrity gossip in business for a century, whether it’s a string of ex-wives nobody saw coming or a royal relative who turns out to be nothing like their public role suggested.

Of the ten names in the video, Peter Marc Jacobson’s is the one with the tidiest ending — he didn’t just come out after Fran Drescher, he and Drescher turned the whole story into a sitcom pitch, and “Happily Divorced” ran for two seasons on TV Land off the back of it.