Michael O'Hanlon was your typical Australian man — married, three kids, living in the suburbs with a corporate job.

"Mortgage, four-bedroom house, the whole catastrophe," as he jokingly describes it.

He loved his wife and his children but by the time he reached his early 40s, he reluctantly realised he could no longer live with the huge secret he had been hiding for years.

He was gay.

"It was after the year 2000 actually, I remember being very unhappy around that time," he said.

"New Year's Eve, on deck for Y2K, thinking what the hell am I doing? You know, I've got to change my life somehow."

He said "a lot of us fall out of the closet", and the catalyst to his divorce was his wife reading a journal entry about his attraction to another man.

"I wrote about somebody I had fallen for at my work and my then wife read my journal, and that was Christmas and we had sort of separated by Easter," he said.

He is still close friends with his wife, who he rings several times a week. He said his two sons and daughter find it quite fashionable to have a gay dad.

Website provides safe space

Mr O'Hanlon said he sought out a Commonwealth-funded support group for gay and married men years before coming out, but could not make the leap.

"I thought 'hmm, that's what it looks like, these are other people in my situation', then I ran back and hid in the closet for another six years. It's a long process," he said.

The DALE website includes forums for men to share their experiences. ( ABC News: James Hancock )

Ultimately the forces keeping his sexuality a secret, such as a lack of gay role models and a strict Catholic mother, were overpowered by the need to be honest to himself and others.

Mr O'Hanlon is just one of many Australian men who have struggled to come out to their wife. He is now in his 60s and has left the corporate world to become a visual artist.

He used to help run a successful Melbourne support group for such men, but it was eventually shut down due to dwindling numbers.

Now to fill the gap, a website has been created called DALE (Digital Acceptance Learning and Empowerment) to give men like Mr O'Hanlon a safe place to share their feelings and get help from others, particularly those from regional areas or ethnic minorities.

'A pretty big population'

Caleb Hawk from the Victorian AIDS Council, which helps run the DALE project, said so far the site had attracted about 70 registered users and 10,000 unique visitors.

"One of the researchers that was looking at this population has done some modelling to actually suggest that there might be up to 17,000 men in Australia who are same-sex attracted and living in a heterosexual relationship or lifestyle," he said.

"When you think about that in the grand scheme of things that's actually a pretty big population for no service provision whatsoever targeting them."

Beyond Blue is leading the project with $200,000 of funding over two years from the annual Movember fundraising campaign to improve men's health.

A journal like this one was how his wife learnt about his same-sex attraction. ( ABC News: James Hancock )

Website visitors are being surveyed about their experience of anxiety and depression, as part of a broader research project at the University of New South Wales.

Mr Hawk said there was a knowledge gap when it came to same-sex attracted men living with wives or girlfriends.

"They've been very, very difficult to reach traditionally, and very few services have kept going really," he said.

"The only one standing is GAMMA [Gay and Married Men's Association] NSW providing face-to-face services."

He said about half of the men accessing the site had identified as bisexual, with an even mix of people from right across Australia.

But funding for the website will eventually run out, and Mr Hawk is hopeful governments will come on board and support its continued development.