Late Bloomers
Explores the challenges and joys-of coming out as an older man.
By Richard Gollance explores the challenges—and joys—of coming out as an older man.
Recently, while waiting for my #5 Three-Decker Combo Sandwich at Greenblatt’s take-out counter in West Hollywood, a bright-eyed seventysomething man approached me with a big smile, as if he knew me.
“Richard, how are you? You look great. How long has it been?”
I tried to tread conversational water until he said something that would help me identify him. “Boy, I don’t know. A long time.”
The gentleman suddenly remembered his manners and gestured to the white-haired man standing beside him. “Richard, this is Jimmy. We’ve been together five months. The happiest five months of my life.” They exchanged loving smiles.
“That’s great. Congratulations.”
“So how did your paper turn out? Did I give you what you needed?”
And then I realized, to my amazement, that this vital and happy man was “Laurence Wilkinson,” whom I had interviewed six years earlier for a gerontology paper when I was a social work grad student. The assignment had been to profile an older adult (minimum age: 65) and I wanted to write about an older gay man. Through friends in the community, I was offered four candidates who would be willing to talk with me. One of them, Laurence Wilkinson, had just come out at age 66. The idea of waiting so long before living out your true nature was so confounding to me, I had to learn more about him.
Laurence was remarkably candid during our interview and revealed himself to a surprising degree. Yet despite his declarations of joy and liberation at finally coming out, he struck me as a sad and tragic figure. After a bitter divorce from his second wife, he was reduced to living in a studio apartment in a lower middle class suburb. Years of heavy drinking had taken its toll and his health was precarious. His eagerness to please during our conversation seemed to bespeak a lonely and isolated life. He was nothing like the man I was talking with in Greenblatt’s.
Going into our interview six years ago, I had certain assumptions about what kind of man comes out at age 66. I imagined that he had had secretive, perhaps anonymous sexual encounters, most likely in public places. Or maybe he had had a secret boyfriend of long standing. (Shades of Susan Hayward in Back Street.)
None of this turned out to be true. With great pride, Laurence explained that his religious beliefs had not allowed him to cheat on his wives. “When I took the vows, I took them seriously.” For the duration of two marriages—one lasting 10 years, the other 22 years—Laurence had had gay fantasies, but had never acted on them. Four years separated his two marriages. During that time, he lived a “gay life.” He went to gay bars, drank heavily, and hated himself. There were no significant relationships: “It was just sex.” He married his second wife at the age of 36 in the hopes that it would “cure” him.
Throughout Laurence’s narrative, I was struck by his lifelong inability to connect authentically with other people. His first marriage ended with a phone call from his wife to announce that she had moved out and was divorcing him. Laurence recalled, “I didn’t see it coming.” A week later, he woke up in a psychiatric hospital. He underwent electroshock therapy, but didn’t cooperate with the psychiatric staff. “I was afraid they would find out that I was gay.” He signed himself out, against medical advice. His second marriage also ended with a surprise phone call from his wife. “I thought we had a happy marriage.” Shortly after, he suffered his second nervous breakdown.
His few gay relationships also left him alienated. His first gay sexual experiences were with a cousin when he was 12 years old. He liked the feelings, but was consumed with too much guilt to continue. Several months after graduating high school, he joined the Army and was stationed in Germany. There he fell into a sexual relationship with the division’s cook. It was in the early 1950s, at the height of the McCarthy era. Someone reported their relationship, and the cook was dishonorably discharged. For reasons that are still not clear to him, Laurence was allowed to resign with an honorable discharge. The two men never saw each other again. As Laurence related his experiences to me, they often seemed like a compendium of everything that could go wrong for a closeted gay man during the second half of the 20th century.
On his own after his second divorce and newly retired at 64 after his third heart attack and the onset of diabetes, Laurence once again explored “gay life.” He was painfully lonely, but he didn’t know how to meet men. He didn’t want to go to bars because he had stopped drinking, and he was afraid of HIV. He tried a gay and lesbian ballroom dancing class, but quit after two sessions. He attended gay pride festivals, but remembers walking through the crowds alone and feeling even more lonely. The turning point for Laurence came when he heard about a Metropolitan Community Church in a nearby town and attended a Sunday mass. For the first time, he saw gay men with whom he could relate without alcohol and sex. More important, he finally found a way to integrate his religious convictions and his sexual orientation. He began to attend regularly, tentatively made a few friends, and decided to come out. He told a straight woman friend, then his closest daughter, and then his other children. The results were mixed, but positive enough to offer Laurence encouragement.
Laurence’s odyssey is not the story of every gay man who comes out late in life. “Bradford Coughlin” is an 82-year-old retired university professor who recently moved to a senior independent living residence in Marin County. He and his wife had a “deeply satisfying” relationship for 56 years. She died suddenly about two years ago. For the past year and a half, Bradford has been in a relationship with a man he met in a seniors’ activities group. Bradford’s homosexuality did not come as a surprise to him. He had been aware of his sexual attraction throughout his life and had enjoyed occasional one-night stands. For Bradford, living a heterosexual life appears to have been a conscious decision. “I grew up in the McCarthy 1950s. I was depressed by the prospect of living a lonely life and hiding my sexuality. And then the most amazing thing happened. I found myself falling in love with my wife.” Bradford reports that after his wife died “it seemed unlikely that I would fall in love with another woman, so I reverted to an earlier conception of my nature.”
From my experiences, I have not found a consistent pattern that applies to gay men who come out later in life. Some have lived lives of painful repression, others have denied even having had gay fantasies, and others claim the transition was not particularly difficult. Some have been married with children, others have been isolated loners, and most have fallen somewhere in between. I recently shared my observations with John Fournier, director of senior programs at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center. John agreed about the diversity of these late bloomers, but added: “If there is a pattern, it’s probably that they grew up in a time when there was such fear around being gay. You could lose your job or be put in jail or end up in an insane asylum. People kept it in, kept it hidden, because society was so against it. Maybe now, as they get older, they are feeling more comfortable and fighting the resistance and deciding, the hell with it, I’m 70 years old, and fuck them if they can’t take it.”
For many younger gay men in 2005, that enormous pressure to conform is hard to imagine. A gay friend in his 70s describes the 1950s and early 1960s as a period of “compulsory heterosexuality.” Older gay male clients have reminisced about the toll that the Eisenhower era took on their friends and lovers. Suicides, alcoholism, bitterness, and hostility were some of the less healthy ways many gay men coped with the socially sanctioned self-loathing. In that context, the decision to remain in the closet is not hard to fathom.
I came out in the summer of 1970 in New York City, when I was 20 years old. A year after the Stonewall Riots, it was a heady time of political activism, sexual camaraderie, and the burgeoning of a newly open gay community. I often think about how much more difficult my life as a gay man would have been if I’d been born 10 years earlier. If Stonewall had erupted when I was 29 years old, my sense of self would have already been well established. So much more damage would have already been done. I remember being at the 1987 March on Washington and looking around at the million gay men and lesbians marching for their rights. I thought, 25 years ago, you couldn’t have gotten 100 gay men and lesbians to publicly identify themselves. That is an enormous social change in a relatively short amount of time. Whatever short-range frustrations we might feel—and God knows, there are many—it is also helpful to remember the larger perspective. I am still blown away when I hear about parents driving their high-school age kids, too young to drive themselves, to the Friday Night Youth Rap at the Gay and Lesbian Center. Recent studies have confirmed that gay men and lesbians are coming out at a younger age than ever before. They will not experience the years of self-denial that were endured by the gay men who come out late in life.
There is also a more positive way to view the phenomenon of gay men coming out late in life: the possibilities for growth, evolution, and new experiences at any age. If we are open-hearted and brave, our lives can always remain works in progress. Life—with a spirit of adventure—doesn’t have to stop at a particular age.
Richard Gollance is a psychotherapist in private practice in Studio City, Calif. He is also cochair of LGAIN, the Lesbian and Gay Aging Issues Network of the American Society on Aging.
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