A woman who married her long-lost brother after meeting him for the first time as an adult has spoken out about their relationship and why she feels it is ‘nobody’s business’ that they share a father.
Debby Zutant, 50, married Joe Burns, 36, in Cuba in October 2015. The pair met 13 years earlier in 2002 after she tracked down her adoptive father Danny who, after putting her up for adoption when she was a baby, went on to have Joe with another woman.
THEY FELL IN LOVE ‘AT FIRST SIGHT’, HAD SEX ON THE COUCH OF HER SYRACUSE, NEW YORK, HOME THE SECOND TIME THEY SPENT TIME TOGETHER AND LIVED IN SECRET AS A COUPLE BEFORE FINALLY TELLING HER FAMILY ABOUT THEIR ‘SPECIAL BOND’ IN 2012.
Now, they live in Key West, Florida, where she says they are free to go about their lives like any other married couple.
Speaking to DailyMail.com on Wednesday, Debby said she wanted to speak out to prove that her attraction to her half-brother is not freakish or sick but the symptom of Genetic Sexual Attraction, (GSA) a well-documented condition which is common in newly-reunited estranged relatives.
‘I KNOW IT SOUNDS WEIRD. WE HAVE STRUGGLES LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE BUT WE JUST DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT ANYMORE,’ SHE SAID.
She recalled the first time they were intimate and how it left them both ‘mortified’ until she began researching sibling intimacy and discovered a ‘community’ of others who were experiencing the same thing.
I was mortified. I know that people will think I am some sort of hillbilly but I’m not, I’m a normal person,’ she said.
Debby’s father Danny died before she and Joe revealed their relationship to their families.
He was older and in a ‘bad place’ in his life when he impregnated her birth mother, a Roman Catholic, when she was 15.
They decided to put Debby up for adoption and she was taken in by a loving, middle-class family, the Zutants.
She grew up in Syracuse, New York, less than a mile from where Danny lived for most of his life.
Fourteen years ago, when she was 36, she hired a private investigator to track down her birth parents.
Danny, her father, was still alive but had been in a car accident and was mentally disabled. He nonetheless remembered her when they met and produced a tattered photograph of her as a baby that he had been carrying around in his wallet for 36 years.
He also revealed that after putting her up for adoption, he stayed with her mother for 16 years but finally left her to be with a different woman – Joe’s mother.
Joe was born and lived in Wyoming where he and his mother lived off the land. Five or six years after he was born, Danny and his mother parted ways.
He stayed in touch with his father, however, and was part of his life by the time Debby tracked him down.
They met for the first time in 2002 when she was working in a bar in Syracuse.
There was a big huge party. It was a busy day at the bar and one of my uncles comes in and he says,
“DEBBIE, I WANT YOU TO MEET YOUR HALF-BROTHER JOE,”‘ DEBBY SAID.
It was, she said, ‘love at first sight’.
‘WE JUST LOOKED AT EACH OTHER AND IT WAS LIKE INSTANTANEOUS, THE ATTRACTION. IT’S NOT EVEN ABOUT THE SEX. IT’S A BOND UNLIKE ANYTHING. NOBODY CAN UNDERSTAND THIS BOND IT’S SO STRONG.’
The newly-introduced half-siblings decided to go to dinner to get to know one another.
As she got ready for their outing, Debby had to squash the feeling that she was going on a date.
‘I WAS HAVING TO REMIND MYSELF THAT IT WASN’T A DATE, I WAS JUST DOING OUT WITH MY HALF-BROTHER.’
During the meal, Joe, an artist, revealed that he was living with their father in his small apartment. Debby, who owned her own home, immediately offered him a room at her house.
There was no sexual interaction on their first date but when he did visit her soon afterwards, the sparks flew.
‘We were on the couch on opposite ends and within the next hour we inched closer and closer and it happened.
‘I FREAKED OUT. I WAS LIKE, “WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!” WE WERE BOTH LIKE, “WHAT HAVE WE JUST DONE.”’DESPITE THEIR SHAME, JOE MOVED IN AND THEY IMMEDIATELY STARTED SHARING A ROOM. THEY HAD REGULAR SEX AND LIVED AS A COUPLE BEHIND CLOSE DOORS BUT KEPT THEIR RELATIONSHIP HIDDEN FROM THE WORLD AND DID NOT DISCUSS THE ‘ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM.’
Racked by thoughts that their relationship was wrong, Debby began researching what she now knows to be GSA.
She was comforted to learn there was a condition for what she was experiencing and took solace in the other people who were online and said they were afflicted by it.
Nonetheless, they kept their romance hidden.
‘JOE WASN’T COMFORTABLE WITH PEOPLE KNOWING ABOUT IT,’ SHE SAID, ADDING THAT HE DID NOT HAVE A ‘SUPPORT SYSTEM’ IN PLACE TO HELP HIM THROUGH ANY FORM OF ADMISSION.
Over the course of the next 10 years, Debby started confiding in friends about their illicit living arrangement.
They accepted her, ‘100 per cent’, and vowed to keep her secret.
In 2012, the pair moved to Key West, Florida, where they introduced themselves to their new neighbors as any other couple would.
