On the surface, Carol Grever seemed to have a great marriage. She and her husband, Jim, had an active social life. Together they managed to build a multi-million-dollar employment agency. But their sex life wasn't stellar. In fact, it was a black hole.

Grever ended up having an affair which she confessed to her husband. Jim said she could leave him, but that he'd fight to ensure the children would stay with him. Grever remained in the marriage. She felt her kids needed both parents, and didn't want to put them through a messy divorce.

Then, about eight years ago, after more than 30 years of marriage, Jim finally told his wife he had "homosexual tendencies." Grever, who is now 60, was devastated. "It took me a year to get my self-esteem back and my identity," says the former English professor from her home in Boulder, Colo.

Growing up, homosexuality was one of those issues that were never discussed. "My formative years were the 1950s," she says. "It was Leave It to Beaver, the nuclear family was the norm." It was a time when people believed "'til death do us part in the marriage vows."

After Jim's news, Grever, still trying to be June Cleaver, found some books on the straight spouses of gay men but they were "clinical and analytical and cold and they didn't offer much hope. They made me very depressed."

Over the past 8 years, Grever has come a long way from her Leave It to Beaver days. She has remarried and, in response to the depressing literature she was subjected to, she has written and just published her own book, My Husband Is Gay: A Woman's Guide to Surviving the Crisis. The book is based on the personal experiences of 26 women, and takes a sophisticated approach to sexuality, while keeping the material accessible and personal.

Grever's first husband, she discovered later, began having sex with men just a few years into the marriage. "His first encounters with other men occurred while we lived in Portland, Ore., when he was 23 or 24," she writes. "He was initiated, ironically, through a gift from me. I gave him a membership at a downtown YMCA to help him stay fit."

In retrospect, Grever realizes that many of the things she liked about Jim, while stereotypical, were attributes she has come to associate with gay men.

"He was sensitive," she says. "Very, very clean in the way he lived and took care of himself. He enjoyed music. He enjoyed the kind of art I liked. We liked to go to musicals. We went to all the Broadway musicals we could possibly do. We went to New York one time and in five days we saw eight different shows. We liked to do the same things."

While most gay-straight marriages (Grever refers to them as mixed-orientation couples) end in divorce or separation, Grever notes 15% stay together. "[Gay husbands] are good companions," she explains. "And that seems to be the pattern in the marriages where they did stay together. In many cases they said things like, 'I regret the loss of a sexual relationship, but what I have left is enough to keep me here.' "

Grever notes that many of these mixed-orientation couples who stay married are often well over 50. One woman now in her seventies took care of her husband who died of AIDS. Another woman's husband "moved out of the house and lived with a [male] lover for six months and just couldn't hack it. He came back and said, 'This isn't what I want. I want to come home.' He did and he's been living with his wife ever since."

On the other side of the age spectrum, Grever interviewed several women who had married gay or bisexual men fully aware of their husbands' sexual preferences. "They tended to be younger people, activists or idealists, often with a confrontational bent," she writes.

Men who explore their homosexuality but settle down with women are a phenomenon Grever feels will become more common in the future. "People don't talk about it yet, but I think it's definitely a trend ... and that's OK as long as people know what's going on and there isn't the deception and the infidelity. One of the points that several people made when I was talking to them is that it wasn't so much the fact he was gay, but the fact he was deceiving them and he was being unfaithful."

Many of the gay men who marry women, says Grever, actually want to stay with their wives. "It took my husband Jim a long time to decide to leave and it had to be my decision because he really would have been quite comfortable staying married to me and doing his other thing on the side. I finally woke up one day and said, 'Wait a minute, what's in this for me?'

"When a gay man comes out he is likely to want to stay in the marriage -- if nothing else as a cover. He is not eager to leave the family, leave the home, leave the life. He just wants to have his gay life in addition."

But having a sex life with men and maintaining an emotional relationship with a woman, Grever says, often doesn't sit well with the gay man's wife. "I really do believe that women cannot separate sex from love, sex from emotion. And I think it's easier for men to have sex without any commitment. In fact, that's how my husband did his gay life, it was practically all anonymous. That is so sad to me, because it just seems so mechanical."

That situation also poses a very serious physical risk, one which Grever says resulted in the worst day of her life. "When I went for my AIDS test I don't think I ever felt the depth of rage that I felt on that day and the days following," she says. "It made me the most angry."

Grever tested negative. When she received a safe-sex lecture it was a "humiliating" experience.

Despite all that, Grever says she has been able to move on. Like their gay husbands, most women, she says, go through a process at the end of which they discover they now have a new lease on life.

"When they find out he's gay, they say, 'I'm OK. I'm not unattractive.' And once they accept the reality of the situation ... and that they can't do anything about it, then they can begin to find a way to forgive and to heal. There can be a hopeful and constructive outcome from this pain. And it is painful."