“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.
“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!”
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.
[M]ost 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 . . . 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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
My heart is with those struggling to come out later in life. Despite the pain of the journey, I would do it again.
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