Opinion | Coming Out Late — and Finding a New Life in Midlife

“I’m from Harlem. Born, bred, toasted, buttered, jelly-jammed and honeyed in Harlem.”

That’s how Audrey Smaltz, a former model and fashion industry veteran who turned 86 this month, introduced herself to me years ago at a Midtown Manhattan reception. It was her catchphrase.

She was the grande dame of the room, floating through it, incandescent, fun and unabashedly flirty.

“I had fabulous men in my life,” she told me recently, but in 1999, the Olympic basketball star Gail Marquis, 17 years Smaltz’s junior, asked her out to dinner. Smaltz didn’t think of it as a date and said she had no interest in women at the time.

But when Marquis kissed her good night, Smaltz recalled, “it was like kissing a man.” She said, “I couldn’t believe myself,” then laughed, punctuating the thought: “Whoa!”

They married in 2011.

Smaltz’s story defies the contemporary norm: A decade ago, Pew Research Center found that “12 is the median age at which lesbian, gay and bisexual adults first felt they might be something other than heterosexual or straight” and “for those who say they now know for sure that they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, that realization came at a median age of 17.” Last year, Gallup found that about one in five Gen Z adults identifies as L.G.B.T.

Today, we can lose sight of the people on the other end of the plank: people like Smaltz — and me — who, for a variety of reasons, come out later in life. I’ve recently spoken to several people from across the country with similar experiences, and their stories were not only illuminating and educational but also uplifting.

Audrey Smaltz on whether she ever felt shame about her same-sex love: ‘Never! Ashamed? I was telling everybody. I was only sorry I couldn’t tell my mother and father because they were gone.’

In my interviews, Smaltz’s experience wasn’t uncommon: In particular, most of the women I spoke to professed no previous same-sex attraction, instead explaining that they fell in love with a woman, not that they were seeking relationships with women in general.

The film and TV star Niecy Nash-Betts recalls being out to dinner with someone she simply considered to be a female friend, the singer Jessica Betts, when “something happened between the crab claw and the Whispering Angel.” Nash-Betts continued: “My eyes crossed, 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.”

In 2020, at 50, Nash-Betts married Betts, then 41. Nash-Betts calls Betts her “hersband.”

When I ask Nash-Betts, who has had two different-sex marriages, how she identifies in the L.G.B.T.Q. community, she responds quickly, “taken,” and laughs, explaining, “I have found my person, and it has absolutely nothing, for me, to do with age or gender.”

This eschewing of traditional labels repeated itself in my interviews. As Smaltz joked, “I’m not a lesbian; Gail is.” She laughed but continued, “I’m in love with a lesbian.” She said she doesn’t think of herself in that way because “I don’t love a whole lot of women. I just love Gail.”

Niecy Nash-Betts on reactions to her falling in love with a woman: ‘People who really love you only want for you to be happy. And a lot of times, when you’re unhappy with a choice that somebody is making that doesn’t directly affect you, that’s not about them; that’s about you wanting to control them.’

Jenna von Oÿ, who co-starred on “Blossom” and “The Parkers,” echoed that sentiment, telling me that she may have had a “mild attraction” to women all along but “falling for my partner was my first indication that it was really an authentic, very deep love that exceeded mild attraction.” Von Oÿ told me she was 40 when she met her same-sex partner.

Lisa Diamond, a professor of developmental psychology, health psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, has documented this phenomenon in her book, “Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire,” arguing that research shows that “one of the fundamental, defining features of female sexual orientation is fluidity,” in which some women experience a “situation-dependent flexibility” when experiencing desire, regardless of their overall sexual orientation.

This is one reason Diamond argues that the “born this way” argument needs to be retired because evolving scientific research challenges the concept, finding that genetics are part of the sexual attraction equation but not solely determinative. Sexuality is complex. Perhaps more intriguingly, she argues that the “born this way” framing is unjust to the broad range of queer identities and realities.

As she explained in her 2018 TED talk, the argument is “unjust because it implies that L.G.B.T. individuals who fit a certain cultural stereotype, the ones who have been exclusively gay for as long as they can possibly remember, are somehow more deserving of acceptance and equality than someone who came out at age 60 or whose attractions have been more fluid or who is bisexual rather than exclusively gay.”

As a bisexual man, I find that Diamond’s analysis, breaking down the rigidity of the binary — which I have found almost tyrannical in its severity — resonates deeply. Those of us with identities that don’t fit the gay-straight, cradle-to-grave paradigm are persistently the focus of suspicion, including among other queer people, constantly being asked to explain, ever in danger of erasure.

As Diamond recently told me, stories of people who come out late, particularly those who previously thought of themselves as heterosexual, are a “threatening and terrifying notion.” For some, they pose “a kind of terrifying specter that whatever meaning you have arrived at about your own sexuality” may be impermanent.

Among those who came out later in life and who had been in heterosexual marriages, many of which had produced children, another recurring theme is concern about how their families could be affected.

Pierre Lagrange, an investor and a former hedge fund manager, was married to a woman for more than two decades before, at age 48, realizing during therapy that he was attracted to men, an attraction that he believed he’d had for a while but had ignored and suppressed.

Before coming out to his wife and children, he worried about the possibility of “breaking an amazing family.” But when he did and his wife and children responded with love and understanding, that burden was lifted.

Lagrange married Ebs Burnough, a filmmaker, the board chair of the Sundance Institute and a former White House adviser, in 2019.

That fear of losing one’s family is the same one that Barbara Satin, an 88-year-old transgender woman in Minneapolis, had on her path to disclosure: “I was fearful of losing my marriage, losing my family,” she told me.

When she lived as a man, she said, she was hiding her true gender identity, an identity she believed had been present in her since she was a small child. She said she decided to marry her wife based on the idea “that if I got married, I would have a family and that would take care of the feelings I had.” It didn’t.

When she was 60, she finally told one of her sons that she is a woman.

His response demonstrated the incredible durability of familial love: “He put his hand on mine,” Satin said, “and he said, ‘We have been waiting for you to tell us. Thank you.’”

During Satin’s journey of coming out and self-discovery, she moved out of the house she shared with her wife, who struggled with Satin’s transition. “She had married David. She had not married Barbara,” Satin said. But they’re now back together, working through a new reality, together.

Barbara Satin on first understanding that she was different: ‘I was born in 1934. We had no vocabulary around trans issues or gender identity. “Transvestite” was about the only thing that was in the dictionary. Today, that’s seen as a pejorative term. So I knew I had feminine feelings, girlie feelings, I guess. But I didn’t know what that was.’

Coming out takes different forms. Some people burst out; others spiral out, gradually. Some tell everyone all at once, perhaps on social media, while others tell people in successive, ever-widening rings, from the closest circle of friends and relatives to casual acquaintances and the general public.

Most of the people I spoke to were spirallers, like Lagrange, Satin and me, with their top-of-mind issue being the responses of spouses and children.

Throughout my conversations, the people I talked to said that their families surpassed their expectations, rising in love, circling in solidarity. But clearly, that isn’t everyone’s experience. While some are met by acceptance, others are entangled in acrimony. And in all these circumstances, it’s important to consider the journeys, sometimes the pain, of the spouses of those who’ve come out.

Ken Henderson, a 74-year-old gay man who is the director and chief executive of the Richmond/Ermet Aid Foundation, a San Francisco nonprofit that provides aid for H.I.V. services, hunger programs and support for homeless and disenfranchised youth and seniors, came out to his wife when he was 29, he said.

While they were still married, Henderson was dating men. One night over dinner, she asked if he was bisexual, and he acknowledged that he was.

He said she didn’t make a big deal about it, so he began to explore his same-sex attractions “a little bit more openly.” That was until he began dating a man who objected to Henderson’s being still married.

Only then did Henderson conclude that he and his wife had to part ways, realizing then that he couldn’t have “the best of both worlds.” So, he told me, he sat down with her and said, “You know, we both deserve a chance to have a fuller relationship, romantic relationship, and this is not going to happen as long as we’re married and living together.”

“She wasn’t happy,” Henderson said, “but she understood and kind of agreed.”

Ken Henderson on what advice he would give his younger self: ‘Don’t be afraid of the labels. Just be who you are and live your authentic life. I look back, and I realize I used such strong rationalization, depression, all these mechanisms, trying not to be homosexual. And when I realized I was, I actually had a lot more fun.’

These conversations can be wrenching. I know: Telling my wife about my one same-sex encounter — which took place during my 20s, before our marriage — was one of the hardest conversations I’d ever had. One night as we returned from dinner, I told her that there was something I needed to say. As the tears began to streak my face, I told her that if we were going to stay together, she had to know the whole of me, and that included the fact that I had been intimate with men.

I told her that if she wanted to leave, I would understand. She said that she didn’t, that she wanted to be with me. We sat in the hallway that night, in the darkness, and cried together.

We stayed together for seven years after that. Until I wrote about my same-sex attraction in my memoir, in 2014, I had never told other members of my family, longtime friends or the broader world. I was 44 when the book was published. The regret I harbored about waiting to tell my wife was appended with the regret of having waited to tell the world.

And that is the thing: We can fret so much about people reacting out of their biases that we withhold from them the chance and the choice to transcend those biases. We lock our closets from the inside to shield ourselves from the possibility of trauma that our fears inflate, robbing ourselves of the life-affirming opportunity to be brave.

Take Kelly Nicole Kelly, a 37-year-old divorced mother of three living in Chicago. She is a school administrator who identifies as bisexual.

She said the person she worried most about disclosing her same-sex relationship to was her stepfather because he had been homophobic. But when he met her now-fiancée at Thanksgiving dinner one year, to her surprise, not only was he receptive, but he also became one of her and her fiancée’s “biggest supporters and champions.”

I thought that in these interviews I would hear more about pain and regret. Instead, I heard more celebration and excitement. There was less a sense of escaping from closets and more of emerging from cocoons.

Of course, there were the more familiar stories of people who understood their queerness early in life but hid it, those afraid for their physical safety and economic security, those who run away, in a sense, to hide their truth from their families and in order to live more openly and freely.

Lucius Lamar, a 55-year-old fine artist and interior designer from Oxford, Miss., who eventually “married the first boy I ever kissed,” said that when he and his husband lived in California, they maintained two apartments to conceal their relationship from visiting family.

Lamar explained that he’s “a product of this, you know, exotic, colorful Bible Belt,” where shame, guilt and “a lot of that psychic garbage” did “a little bit of a number on me.” He didn’t come out to his family until he was 45, he said, but the night he told them, he “slept like a baby.”

Lucius Lamar on coming out to his family after the funeral of a cousin who died by suicide: ‘I was hearing all of this conversation with relatives about “How did they not know he was in such despair?” and I thought about myself, and I thought, “I’ve kept so much of my life private. This is the time for me to tell them about who I am.”’

I heard this sense of victory in the voices of most of the people I interviewed. I think it was the grace and wisdom of age pushing through, of souls who in many cases had finally found their mates, who knew that time was fleeting, that much of theirs was behind them and that wasting any of the rest of it was an affront to the gift and joy of living.

As Lagrange said about realizing he was gay and coming out, “I remember this being an amazing opportunity to live a second life after a fabulous first one.” He added, “How lucky am I that I can have this whole new set of experiences, this completely new life discovered at 50.”

Smaltz echoed the idea of coming out later in life as a rebirth, telling me about falling in love with Marquis, “It was brand-new. It was like I was 21 or 23.” She continued: “It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. I’m so happy.”