What Late Bloomers Should Know
by Maureen Considine
Olympia Nurse Practitioner
Summary of her speech to PFLAG Olympia on April l3, 1996
PFLAG has been intentional in its efforts to serve sexual minority youth and their families. It has also widened its inclusive embrace to reach out to bisexuals, to the transgendered community, and to all their families.
Yet I seldom hear or read about those of us who came out later in life, acknowledging ourselves to be lesbian or gay. We late bloomers are beautiful and important flowers in the dazzling and diverse garden of this organization.
We late bloomers are aIso a diverse group. Some of us knew very early about our sexuality, but we turned off the inner voice. We may have had an occasional inkling, but because we were raised in a culture that assumes everyone is straight--or should be--we were able to shrug off those moments of wondering.
For some of us it took meeting a particular person, or some other critical incident, to get a more complete sense of self. Whatever the earlier circumstances, because we are older now, our lives are more complicated.
For example: we often have an entourage about us--spouse, children, in-laws, employer, and others. We are more likely established in our careers, which can be both an advantage and disadvantage. Also, other people in our lives who felt they knew us may be unsettled by a new understanding of who we really are.
Through much of our lives, we have been accustomed to living with heterosexual privilege. Yet now it is like having it ripped away, replaced with an alien worker's "green card." We have known what full inclusion feels like, and yet now it is out of reach.
Often, when we are faced with something beyond our grasp that makes no sense, we try to make it simple. Yet who we are as sexual beings is anything but simple. The richness of our sexuality is wonderfully complicated. Unfortunately, in our Euro-centric culture, we feel very little comfort with complexity.
I like to visualize our sexuality as an atom. Our gender, determined at the moment of conception, is the unchanging nucleus. All other aspects of our sexuality form the electrons, in constant motion about that center. These movable factors include our gender identity, gender roles: gender orientation, reproductive systems, sexual responses, body image, sexual behavior, relationships, sexual beliefs and values. All these factors are moving in separate orbits, each with its own shape and velocity, dynamic and alive; not things you can nail down to a grid or graph, like the Kinsey Scale.
Thus it is no surprise that at various times in our lives, we may come to see ourselves in a new light, responding in new ways to life's changing stimuli. Coming out at any stage provides some relief and peace. It also creates some measure of upheaval, both for the one coming out and for those around them. As one woman said, ''Sometimes, to make themselves more comfortable, rather than wrestle with their own demons, people try to persuade you to go back to the place that was less scary to them."
People may say "You're in a phase," or "You're being trendy," or "You're doing this to hurt us." Wrong!
Are there advantages to persons who come out later in life? Yes, along with the pain, there are benefits. For one, while growing up, we didn't think the anti-gay slurs we heard were about us. We have known what full inclusion in families and communities felt like; so now we are unwilling to settle for less. With longer life experience, we are more able to honor the complexity of who we are.
As a Catholic child I learned about limbo, the place where babies go when they die, a place of true happiness but apart from ever seeing God. I was happily married for l7 years and it felt like heaven. But at age 42 when I fell in love with a woman and honored that voice coming from the center of my being, for the first time in my life I saw God's face.
© 1996 Maureen Considine (reprinted with permission)
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