What It Meant to Come Out at 40

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.

What It Meant to Come Out at 40

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

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?”