When It Comes to Coming Out, How Late Is Late Enough?
In this moment, I am 37 human years old. 259 in dog years. I’m impossibly ancient to the first-year college students that I teach, and too young to have an opinion worth a damn to the Boomers and beyond. My 20th high school reunion is this year and I am still 20 years out from retirement (gods willing and the creek don’t rise). I am an early career professional with a decade of experience.
We area all victims of time’s elasticity. And it’s still a bad time to be queer.
I came across the term “late in life lesbian” when I started living out last year. It’s a term that makes my head tilt like a dog in the presence of a high-pitched noise. I wondered what I was late for. I wanted to know who decides what late means. Many people in the Facebook groups I joined for late in life queers had stories that sounded like mine — married to dudes, mothers of children, kinships and friendships that would be altered once this new information about the self was revealed.
In these groups, coming out is commemorated not in a one-time grand reveal, but incrementally over years with new haircuts, pictures at Pride parades, difficult conversations, first girlfriends, requests for therapist recommendations, keys to apartments, reading Untamed, and tears. Oh, the tears. So many tears, each bearing the weight of realizing that coming out is not a celebration, but an act of destructing a life built around safety and shoulds.
We are in a very special historical moment when one generation can see a crack in the door where it’s safer to come out. Pockets of young people in the US have role models like JoJo Siwa, queer clubs at school, queer TikTok, drag queen story hours, brave adults in their lives who have already come out, and TV parents like Beth Pearson on This Is Us. But violence and prejudice against queer youth is still very real, and for too many vulnerable young people, coming out puts them in serious danger. The Ali Forney Center in NYC reports that 90% of the homeless youth they serve cite homophobia and/or transphobia as the reason for family rejection, and face abuse at other shelters for the same reason. The CDC recognizes bullying, abuse, and violence against queer youth as an ongoing problem that has wide-ranging effects on health and education. There are serious consequences for being openly queer in parts of the country where religious beliefs, cultural attitudes, and lack of resources for youth results in prejudice and discrimination. Conversion therapy is still a thing.
Yet, this is progress. There have been legislative and cultural gains, but the tragic 20th century indignities of the AIDS crisis, 3-article laws, DOMA, private nightclubs, and “don’t ask, don’t tell” are still fresh in the memories of people who lived out in opposition to the norm for decades. I know a lesbian who was arrested at 17 years old in 1975 for holding hands with her girlfriend in an Illinois town not far from where I live. Some of my friends in decades-long committed relationships could only refer to their partner as “Friend” on emergency contact forms until 2009. I am still cautious about where I stop in small towns on road trips. These moments, humiliating and innumerable, aren’t things I had to think about when the world saw me as straight. My relative safety was guaranteed, and I could move through the world secure in the knowledge that I was normal.
I learned how to be a wife and mother, like many people my age did, from TV sitcoms. I knew that sitcom families were made up of dad, a mom, and two or more kids. Sometimes grandparents, aunts, and cousins would pop in, but that was more for comedic effect than anything else. The teens of the family rushed through crushes and breakups, pining over each other’s friends in madcap school adventures. The long-suffering moms and derpy dads fought, made up, and fought again over life’s mundane irritations like broken washing machines, forgotten anniversaries, and keeping the family dog from eating everyone’s slippers. I didn’t know there was any other way to live. I didn’t have any (out) gay family members. I went to Catholic school for 12 years. If I saw any gay people on TV, they had no career, no family, abused drugs or alcohol (or both), or appeared for one Very Special Episode never to be seen again. To be called “gay” at school was an unequivocal insult whether you were a boy or girl. I had a very clear picture of what my life was supposed to look like: find someone to marry that you can tolerate enough to put together furniture without killing each other because that’s true love.
So, that’s what I did. And I was queer the whole time.
That’s what makes the concept of coming out “late in life” strange to me. I’ve known I’m gay most of my life, even when I didn’t have words like queer or lesbian or bisexual, which is what I told the man I’ve been married to for the last decade I was the night we met. I was 20 human years old that night. We would marry 1,846 days later on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. Our relationship didn’t end because of my sexuality, which is an easy conclusion to draw when I tell you that I started living out a few years ago. The reality is that my decision to live out — to actually tell people that I’m gay, to put my name on the “out list” at work, to go to queer clubs and date other queer people — left being a Sitcom Mom incompatible with the kind of life I actually want to live.
There are two concepts I learned as an academic that help what I’m about to say make more sense.
First, there’s this idea of compulsory heterosexuality. It was a term created by Adrienne Rich, a late in life lesbian herself, three years before I was born in 1980. The term is a bit contested these days, but I find it really useful for understanding why people come out “late” in life. When you break it down, compulsory (aka “have to”) heterosexuality (aka “be straight”), is a way of organizing assumptions about relationships. We assume people are straight unless told otherwise. The entire wedding industry is built around heterosexual couples with queer marriages being a quirky niche. The whole concept of “coming out” is something that gay people do because it’s outside of the norm. There’s no clear path on how to live any other way because our world is so strongly constructed in the assumption that romantic relationships are between men and women.
When I look back on my own story and reflect on why it never occurred to me to live out even though I knew I was gay, it’s clear: there was no other option. Every story I heard about relationships and love came from church, TV & movies, and the models I had in my real life. I could know that I was attracted to people of all genders, but that didn’t have any actual bearing on how I lived my life until I came out. And in that way, I understand the spirit behind the term “late in life” as coming out after when you’re supposed to have that figured out as a teen. But all that goes out the window if you consider the second concept: queer time.
Most people could rattle off the “milestones” that indicate someone experienced a normal, well-adjusted adult life: graduate high school, date some people, college/military/trade school, first real job, date more seriously until you find “the one,” get married, have kids, build a career, grandkids, retire, die. This is what’s known as “chrononormativity.” While there are always exceptions to the timeline, what we understand culturally as normal adulthood follows a pretty predictable path. Think about how stigmatized teenage parents are. Or how hard it is to change careers at 50. These folks are operating out of order according to what should be a successful life.
Unfortunately, there have been real barriers to reaching these milestones for out queer people, like legislation against marriage and adoption for same-sex couples. This led to many queer people finding and celebrating life success outside of this structure, defining work and family on different terms. Disrupting the norm meant that the way things should be no longer held the same power to determine if one was doing life “right.” In fact, not reaching all these milestones or making up your own is often seen as a point of pride. In other words, there is no “late” when it comes to living authentically in the queer community.
At least, that’s what I always thought.
Because the term “late in life lesbian” always bothered me, I set out with my researcher brain to find the patterns in the story. What does “late” mean and who decides that? Is it after high school or after retirement or somewhere in between? Is there an age limit? How late is late enough?
I read the stories in the Facebook groups I was in, listened to podcasts, and read the classics — Untamed and The Fixed Stars. The pattern in the story was disturbingly familiar to me as a before and after success story. I’ve been researching the before and after weight loss success story for a decade, and my main problem with it is that it divides a life into two parts: before and, predictably, after. And this is a problem because real life isn’t like the movies.
Every Before and After story pits the new self (After) against the old self (Before). Before self, as the villain, has to be bad. After self, as the hero, has to be good. Before and After stories pit one self against the other in a moral battle of correct living…and After always wins. Because it has to. Because that’s how the story goes.
But life isn’t a story. It’s a series of experiences that we tell stories about. That’s an important distinction because how we tell a story matters. I know it matters because I built my life around getting as close to the stories I heard about what it means to be normal. I bet you did too. And now I’m rewriting those stories about what I deserve, what matters to me, and how to show up as the role model I needed when I was a teen.
To live out after building a Sitcom Mom life means, for me, is like shattering a glass globe and then picking up the shards one by one asking, “should I put it back?” It’s painstaking and tedious and impossible. In between the broken pieces are all the moments I missed out on and will never get back, like going to Pride in my 20s (or anything else in my 20s), and the wounds of not feeling brave enough to have lived like this all along. It’s reckoning with living my entire adult life in the shadow of what might have been, rebuilding on a shaky promise of what life could be if only I could start over again.
I recently pitched a podcast that features stories of people coming out later in life. I wanted to share my story, as always, and added that I’ve been studying coming out stories with a perspective that might help people avoid that Before and After feeling because it divides and diminishes the rich complexity of this experience. The reply I received shook me:
I considered replying, privately, that there’s a difference between having a niche and gatekeeping. I also considered how this is exactly what happens when we try to quantify experience that falls outside normal markers of time — it creates unnecessary divides that drive competition rather than foster compassion. I started sharing my own coming out/living out story because I couldn’t find stories that captured the complexity of what I’ve been living. The “late in life” narrative trope separates a bad straight life from a good gay one and leaves a lot of people wondering if they’re queer enough to matter. The worst part about this response is that it made me indignant because I didn’t wait until I was over 50 to live out. (I’m not proud of that.) And it’s because of that feeling that I decided to write this instead.
No matter when you come out, someone is going to tell you it’s not the right time: it’s too early, you waited too long, you just haven’t found the right person yet, wait until the kids are out of the house, wait until your parents are dead, you haven’t lived enough to know for sure, you’re still married, you just got divorced, it’s just a phase, you don’t know how long this relationship is going to last, other people lived their entire lives in the closet, other people get gold stars for living out since they were teens, it only counts if you’re over 50.
Resisting the Before and After version of the coming out story makes room for everyone to share experiences that matter most. Life is not split down the middle by mistakes and reclamations. The most radical coming out story is one that shares what the experience means for you now, in all of life’s messy, heart-wrenching, always-on-time glory.
Kate Browne is a queer writer and speaker.