“I never, ever in my experience, never thought I was cheating on my wife, because I never went with another woman, I went with a bloke.”

According to Coming Out Australia, around 20 per cent of the Australian population are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, however many are facing their sexuality in secret. Amy Huynh investigates the hidden lives of Australia’s homosexual men.

John* was married for 11 years.

The 39-year old is a father to a daughter and a step-son.

For ten solid years, he worked as a senior manager at a Sydney based company in Australia.

But behind closed doors, he was having an affair with his personal assistant, Andrew.

“I never, ever in my experience, never thought I was cheating on my wife, because I never went with another woman, I went with a bloke,” Hobart said.

“I was living a double life, basically.”

Men leading secret, homosexual lives appear to be more common than first thought.

When John’s personal assistant, also a married man, left the company in which they worked, his departure brought attention to Hobart’s personal life.

“Basically I wasn’t coping, Andrew had left,” John said.

After being questioned by his boss, John revealed his double life to the rest of the company.

He said those working under him raised no concern over his sexuality. Everyone was fine except for his boss.

Yet John’s secret was not new at the company.

Five years earlier, John’s boss had confided in him, revealing that his father was gay and had been leading a double life.

“He played the whole I’m okay with it because my dad’s gay card, but he was the actual one that had the problem.”

In the four months following his coming out, John says he was “pushed out” of the managerial “boy’s club”.

“I became not the worker anymore, but the token gay. I’d become the brunt of jokes.”

After eight months on leave for health reasons, John was fired for visiting a male-dating site which pictured an erect penis.

He calls it double standards.

John says his own boss sent him pornographic videos prior to his knowledge of John’s sexuality and that this practice was “part of the work environment.”

“It was quite obvious and quite clear what we were allowed to do as senior managers.”

Ultimately, John saw his sexual life as the underlying issue that led to his sacking.

“What I do in the bedroom doesn’t affect my work life. I’m still the same person,” John said.

About 20 per cent of the Australian population are gays, lesbians, bisexuals or transgendered people, whether openly acknowledged or closeted says Wayne Elliott from community organisation, Coming Out Australia.

But Elliott says there’s no true indication as to the actual number, because of the closeted lives some choose to lead.

The Gay and Lesbian Lobby argue the same case of Labor MP David Campbell.

Campbell was filmed visiting a gay sex club in Sydney earlier this year and subsequently resigned as the NSW Transport Minister.

The former Minister admitted to leading a double life for 25 years at the same time as being married with two adult sons.

However, the public scrutiny and media backlash that followed the scandal was criticised by many.

“When it comes to judging a politician’s merit, specifically a minister, you should look to how they perform their ministerial functions, their obligations to parliament, whether they represent their constituency adequately, whether they represent the policies that they were elected for,” says policy and development coordinator of the Gay and Lesbian Lobby, Santhorun Raj.

“Those are the kind of questions that the lobby feels are important when it comes to judging a politician, not their private matters.”

But it may be a more common secret amongst men in Australia than what is generally known.

At Coming Out Australia, Elliott sees many clients that are still married.

“They’ve come out to their wives, but they’re still living in that family unit.”

He says David Campbell could very well have had a similar arrangement with his wife.

“It may not have been a secret. It was only a secret to those people out there who didn’t know him, which was really none of their business.”

It was a secret that has, for the moment, placed Campbell in a scandal that has seen the demise of his extended political career.

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Rick, who asked for his last name to be omitted, is a Sydney metropolitan train driver and one of three brothers that are all gay.

He says he’s familiar with situations in which a married man has had an arrangement with their wives.

“On some occasions I’ve heard some of the wives say they don’t feel as though they’re personally threatened,” he said.

“I guess in a lot of open relationships it’s not dissimilar, so long as there’s an understanding, and the other person is fully aware, it’s out in the open and the partner always comes back.”

Adam Walters, the Channel Seven reporter responsible for breaking the story on Campbell, told ABC Radio that the public interest of the story lay in Campbell’s deception of purporting to be a family man.

“The depth of the deception is reflected by the fact that since 1999, more than a decade now, he has represented himself as a family man of family values to his non-suspecting constituents in the Wollongong seat of Keira.”

“There is no question about that.”

Raj however believes that society is wrongly suggesting that heterosexuals are the only members of the community that can be committed to family values.

“I guess part of the fascination with the David Campbell story was that it was considered a scandal, and that there was some rhetoric that was mobilised around this idea that if you’re about family values then you can’t be gay basically,” Raj said.

“The lobby feels these kind of comments that have been made are particularly offensive, because a lot of same-sex couples are in family situations and do value themselves in terms of family values.”

John is vehement of this public perception of family values.

“He’s still a married man, he’s still a family man,” he said of David Campbell.

“I’m still a family man, I still have children, because I’m gay doesn’t mean I’m not a family man.”

Elliot echoes these sentiments.

“Children are conceived… naturally by a man and woman. But that does not determine the terminology of family. Family is made up of different aspects,” Elliott said.

For John, his sexuality was not confirmed until after he was married.

“I’d played with men before, I just kind of thought it was a bit of a phase and it would go away type of thing, but then when I met him, it made me go wow,” he said.

“But I had two kids at this stage, I had a wife, we were buying a house, so it wasn’t a case where it was easy just to walk away, besides I’d made the decision for better, for worse, so that was never going to be the case.”

John now acknowledges that what he had with other men while he was married were affairs. Although the affairs he was having were not with other women, he now recognises that he should have been committed to his wife.

John split from his wife in May 2007 due to other issues that arose within their marriage. However, it wasn’t until August 2008 that he came out to his ex-wife and children about his sexuality.

John says that the counselling he received from organisations like ACON, an organisation for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community, gave him the support he needed.

“And that kind of helped me step by step, to come out, which is what you need,” he said.

“Sometimes it’s just too hard to just go, yeah I’m gay.”

*Name has been changed