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A collection of stories on the challenges and joys of coming out later in life.

By Charles M. Blow

Produced by Vishakha Darbha

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........

© The New York Times