This Pride Month, the Opinion columnist Charles Blow dives into the stories of people who embraced fluid sexual identities later in life. He argues that despite the increasing number of people who come out as queer during adolescence, some don’t recognize or reveal an attraction to the same sex until their 40s or 50s. In this audio essay he shares their stories and his own.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of the audio piece. To listen to this piece, click the play button below.
Charles Blow: My name is Charles Blow, and I’m an Opinion columnist at The New York Times.
We’ve moved into an age when people appear to be coming out younger and younger. And in that environment — which is a great thing — we can lose sight of people who, for a variety of reasons, still choose to come out later in life.
I wanted to talk to more people who came out later in life because I came out later in life. I came out when I was about 40 years old. And it was a strange experience because it felt a little bit like you were a person out of time — that people around you had done what you were doing much earlier; they experienced the same feelings that you were experiencing as an older person, earlier.
And I kept thinking there must be more people like me. So I wanted to talk to those people. The question I asked everyone was “When did you come out?” And the follow-up was “Why did you wait so long to come out?”
Audio clip of Ken: I grew up in a small town in Arizona. The only known homosexuals that I knew there did not seem like me. So I didn’t identify with them.
Clip of Kelly: But there wasn’t an announcement, right? Like, I didn’t announce to my family. It was just, like, I’m with her. This is my girlfriend
Clip of Rosalinde: I have regrets. I wish I would have come out sooner.
Clip of Barbara: But I knew all along that I had these underlying feelings that were often there and that if anybody really could see inside me, my life would be ruined.
Blow: Many of these people, because they came out so late in life, they had lived, to some degree, heterosexual lives, including people having been married and had children. And that is a complicating factor about “How do you come out?”
Clip of Blow: How does it end? How does the marriage end?
Clip of Ken: I thought about it for a while and finally sat down with my wife and said, “We both deserve a chance to have a fuller relationship, romantic relationships, and this is not going to happen as long as we’re married and living together.”
Blow: Your freedom is on the other side of another person’s pain. And it is you who have created that pain.
I think that for the people who knew that they were somehow queer early in life, they would have loved to be able to come out earlier. There was something in their life where they felt like they just couldn’t do it. The other thing, however, was the people who realized a same-sex attraction late in life — one that they had not experienced or acknowledged or known about earlier in life.
Clip of Jenna: So I was 40, and I think that what started out as a friendship — it suddenly hit me that there was more to it than that. I don’t view it as living a lie in any way or as hiding a part of myself. It was kind of like unlocking a door that I knew existed but I’d never had occasion to open somehow.
Blow: And that was a particularly interesting and fascinating phenomenon because we don’t think of sexual attraction as being able to change at all from the people who believe in the born-gay theory. There are some famous examples of people who came out late, people like Niecy Nash.
Clip of ET News: Niecy Nash has officially tied the knot with musician Jessica Betts, ET can confirm. The “Claws” actress broke the news via Instagram on Monday.
Blow: Niecy was one of these examples of a person who their entire lives considered themselves to be straight, never had what they registered as a same-sex attraction, and they develop a same-sex attraction to a particular person.
Clip of Blow: Can you tell me the first time that you knew that you had any same-sex attraction — what that was like for you?
Clip of Niecy Nash: I was sitting at Just BeClaws in Jersey City, having dinner with someone who I would categorize as a dear friend. And I don’t know, something happened between the crab claws and the Whispering Angel, and my eyes crossed, and my stomach got hot, my pits got sweaty. And I was like, wait a minute! I usually only ever feel like this for boys when I like them. But I was sitting across from Jessica, and I was like, I don’t even know what this is.
So I wasn’t living a sexually repressed life. Like, I was in love with the boys that I married, until I wasn’t. I wasn’t somewhere saying, “Man, I wish I can live my authentic self.” I’ve always been my authentic self.
Blow: A lot of times, I think, people think of people who come out late in life — and this is true of some people — that they are hiding a sexual identity, that there is homophobia that’s preventing it, there is fear that is preventing it, that they don’t have the courage.
What Niecy is talking about here is not ever being in that situation, that she’s always been her authentic self. It’s just that that expression now, at this later stage of her life, is that she’s attracted to and in love with a woman.
Clip of Blow: How do you identify within the L.G.B.T.Q. community?
Clip of Nash: Taken.
Clip of Blow: Taken. OK. OK. [Laughing]
Clip of Nash: I will say “taken,” baby. Because let me tell you something. I am living my own best life over here. You understand? I have found my person. And it has absolutely for me nothing to do with age or gender. It has everything to do with heart and connectivity.
Blow: I had not seen research on people who experience a same-sex reaction late in life for the very first time. And I was actually kind of surprised by that. And what I came to understand from the research was that this happens more often than we think.
And it is kind of a revolutionary idea, and it is a bracing idea because it challenges all of us. Because when you hear it, you think, “What do you mean I can wake up at 60 and be gay?” It is a shocking thing. And for people who don’t want to open the door to the possibility that things can change because it may open the door to the devastating impacts of people who want to try to change people, then it is also a shocking revelation.
I came out as bisexual later in life, around 40 years old. I had been married to a woman who I had told early in our marriage that I had attractions to both men and women. We stayed together because we loved each other. I thought I would be married for the rest of my life. But the marriage did not last. We had three children, and for me, the biggest thing, one of the biggest parts of this was making sure that the children were OK.
And they were, and that is part of the freedom — knocking down the scary monster that says that maybe things aren’t going to be OK, they’ll fall apart. But very often they don’t. And in my case they didn’t. And that was the beginning of a more honest, open, true life.
I would like people to hear these stories and read about these stories and realize that if you are still not out, No. 1, you’re not alone, and No. 2, it is not too late. And on the other side of coming out, even at an advanced age, is a joy, a beauty, an honesty, a truth that will allow you to, for the first time, completely be alive.
Thoughts? Email us at theopinions@nytimes.com.
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Sonia Herrero, Isaac Jones and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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