People who realize they were gay later in life
Conversations about coming out are so often conflated with youth, adolescence, or even childhood. As happy as we collectively are to see more and more youth able to call their identities and inhabit openly, it can be alienating for those of us who recognize ourselves to be on a similar journey of self-discovery in adulthood. We may feel we’re at an age where we’re already meant to have figured everything out – or that lesbian or multi-attracted life is centered entirely around youth culture, and that there’s no show in coming out if our day to evening life looks more appreciate 10 am Zoom meetings and blood pressure meds than clubbing or college study dates. Despite that cultural narrative, the life is that many of us can and accomplish come out later in life – even into our 70s and 80s – to find fulfilling community, partnerships, and a sense of self. If that feels like what you need, here are some of my thoughts on where to start.
(Compassionately) Let Go of Your Assumptions
In order to receive to the level of self-awareness and self-acceptance, you’re at now, you likely had to let proceed of a lot of long-held assumptions – that if you were lgbtq+ you would al
6Later Adulthood
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I remember the moment it happened — the single spark that set my body aflame.
Cecelia stood behind me on the Pilates reformer and pressed her legs into my back, her hands into my shoulders. The strength of her long, lean limbs drove me into submission. Her perfectly-highlighted blonde hair tickled the endorse of my neck.
“Connect your pubic bone to your sternum. Hold it.”
Her voice was immersive, throaty.
“Even while I’m pushing you — hold it. And breathe.”
But I could not inhale. There was no oxygen left in the room. It had been consumed by her tap , her fire.
Spontaneous combustion.
My chest heaved with the weight of this recognition. It felt simultaneously familiar and forbidden, known and mysterious, natural and foreign. I searched for air as every nerve in my body shouted, This! This is who you are. This is who you’ve always been.
Out of nowhere, in an instant, she burned me to the ground, along with all of the preconceived notions I had about attraction and need.
***
I had married my husband, Charles, 25 years earlier, after seven years of dating. We’d attended the similar high school, and had been cast opposite each other in our spring produ
Gay people who come out later in life meet unique obstacles
CHICAGO — A lot can be disguised behind a marriage. For Brad and Cyndi Marler, it was that they are both gay.
A not many years after their wedding, they told each other their secret. Then, for more than three decades, they told no one else.
“We always said it was us against the world,” Brad said.
After living what they call “the all-American life” in the small Illinois towns of Smithton and Freeburg, the Marlers, now both in their late 50s, decided they need to “live authentically.” They’ve come out to their two individual children — a son and a daughter — and are navigating brand-new lives in Chicago.
While study from the UCLA University of Law Williams Institute for Sexual Orientation Commandment and Public Policy shows that people in the U.S. are coming out at a younger age than previous generations, Brad and Cyndi are part of a segment of the LGBTQ community that waits until later in life.
“Society is still inhospitable. That’s not to decline so many amazing shifts in public attitudes, in laws, in policies, but it did not wash away a hundred years of homophobia in society,” said Ilan Meyer, a distinguished senior scholar of public policy wi
Come experience the new attn.com
Perhaps you've heard of people who come out as gay late in life.
But you might be less familiar with people who don't realize they are gay until well into adulthood.
ATTN: spoke to three individuals about their journey of discovery and gleaned three significant insights into human sexuality.
1. Gender and sexuality are fluid, but there's a lot of pressure to conform to heterosexual norms.
Jillian,* a 26-year-old living in New York Capital, said that the fluidity of gender and sexuality was a concept she learned in college. But it wasn't until her early 20s that she came to the finding that she could view herself with a female. She met her first and current girlfriend last year and finally felt comfortable identifying as queer.
"I felt an inherent disconnect with every guy I was every with, and I realize in hindsight this is who I've always been," Jillian said in an interview with ATTN:. "It's not a coincidence the right person for me was a woman — it felt like coming home."
The impulse and pressure to lean toward heterosexuality and away from homosexuality is what writer Adrienne Rich called "compulsory heterosexuality," a word she popular