I’m New Here: A Story of Coming Out Later in Life
Leaving behind cis-het life, finding authenticity
Content warning: suicidal thoughts (brief indirect mention, second paragraph from the end)
The end
It is 2 March 2024. Today is a strange day for me.
A year ago today, I lit the fuse on the bomb hidden under my life and blew it sky high.
A year ago today, aged 46, I came out as no longer straight. And the first person I had to tell was my wife, ending the relationship that had been the centre of almost my entire adult life.
This is not all about my marriage, but it starts there, inevitably. We met in 2000. I was 23, she 31. We were together for 23 years. Most of my adulthood. Half of my life.
For most of that time, it was a great relationship. But in the last few years something had changed. We couldn’t seem to see eye to eye any more, no longer had the same patience for each other’s needs. It wasn’t all bad: we faced the first pandemic lockdown united as a couple (and, with our 12-year-old, as a family). We kept regrouping, reaffirming that we wanted to be together, recommitting to fixing it. We never quite seemed to live up to that commitment.
There were many reasons. Anyone who has been in a very long-term relationship that ended will know: it’s never just one thing. But in the end there was one thing that couldn’t ever be patched up, couldn’t even be thought of as something that might be fixed. It was me: who I am.
Around November 2022, I started to become more conscious of something that was happening with me. A sense of a shift in sexual orientation. An end to attraction to cis women. Attraction to other people who were not cis women — trans and non-binary people, genderfluid and genderqueer folk, sometimes cis men.
By January 2023 I was certain this was no passing fixation, no unusual mid-life crisis. And once I started facing it, I quickly saw it hadn’t come out of nowhere. I started to understand it had been developing over several years — about the same time frame, of course, that the marriage had been in trouble.
Looking back over that time, I now saw many incidents, feelings, emotional responses to things that, at the time, I had glimpsed only out of the corner of my eye, quickly looking away. (Some day I’ll write about those things. Not yet: still too hard to explain, hard to do without infringing on others’ privacy.)
Maybe it had been my subconscious protecting my conscious mind from revelations I wasn’t ready for, knowing that once I saw them clearly, everything would have to change. Maybe it was cognitive dissonance: you don’t just wake up one morning in your 40s after a dream or early-hours thought that jars with your sense of self, like Well, that’s that — better tell everyone I know and love. You think What the hell was that? and go on with the life you already have, the one that makes sense.
But moments kept occurring that told me something profound had changed, and now I was able to recognise them as they happened.
The dominos fell dizzyingly fast.
By February, the pressure I felt to act, to make the changes I knew I would have to make to my life, was unbearable. Never a great sleeper, now I had given in to insomnia. Getting up at 3am after two hours’ sleep, walking by the river, watching fishing boats heading out to sea under a cold winter moon which I was pretty much tempted to howl at.
I couldn’t eat: my wife and son didn’t notice I was serving myself half-portions, taking a few mouthfuls, returning the rest to the pan. A physiological response, fight or flight: I’m about to do something that will make me unsafe; I have to be ready. I lost nearly 10kg in six weeks: just as well I was still carrying extra pandemic weight and could spare it.
I couldn’t plan exactly what I would do, what I would say, when. But it was pressing down hard, the moment approaching fast.
The evening of 2 March 2023, a year ago almost to the minute as I type this. We were at a stand-up comedy gig. During the interval, a minor disagreement arose, quickly degenerated. Again, anyone who’s been in a failing long-term relationship knows that pattern. A trivial few cross words can grow, feeding off unresolved past resentments and quarrels.
But this time, before I knew I was going to do it, I heard myself saying the words.
I think the marriage is over.
Not in anger or hurt, as they’d sometimes been hurled between us in the past, but with certainty, knowing there was no going back.
Still I couldn’t form the words to explain why.
The rest of the show passed. One of my favourite comedians, but I had no idea what he was saying. Conversation continued in the car home, turned uglier. She slammed into the house. I bought alcohol, drove to the seafront and downed it, drove back (I know, I know) towards morning, feigned sleep for a couple of hours.
By now I was physically shaking uncontrollably. She woke up. We waited till our son left for school, made coffee, sat on the bed. And eventually I forced out the hardest words I’ve ever spoken and told my wife of 23 years that I was no longer straight.
The beginning
Trauma. Turmoil.
I told my son too. He and my wife just wanted to know, If it’s been going on all that time, why the hell didn’t you say something sooner? Hard to convey that my knowledge of the long lead-up to this was all after the fact. I hadn’t intentionally hidden anything; I’d put it into words as soon as I was able to.
Finding somewhere to move out to took longer than expected. I stayed with family, in the bedroom I’d left at 18. I still hardly slept or ate. My wife needed people to talk to, I accepted that, but it meant I had little control over my coming out — who knew, how it had been framed to them — and that increased my anxiety hugely.
Then I dropped a drawer on my foot, broke my toe, lost the toenail. And a close relative died in April and I had to organise a funeral. If this was a TV show, you’d say it had jumped the shark.
But out of the chaos and trauma, something else began to emerge. If you’ve come out, I guess you know.
Burden lifting. Unmasking. Liberation.
It felt slow, but looking back, it was breathtakingly fast. It seems that as long as you’re open to it, the human brain can accommodate revolutionary changes to who you are in just weeks.
I found that all I’d had to do was say I wasn’t straight and I was issued with a perfectly functioning gaydar. I discovered something an older lesbian friend had told me about: the mutual recognition when you make eye contact with a stranger and you both just know: I see you.
Casting off one kind of conventionality, I began to see this went beyond sexuality, taking in aspects of gender identity. I’d never consciously been concerned about living up to stereotypes of masculinity. But even as Not That Kind Of Guy, I was amazed to realise how stifled by it I’d still been, how deep my discomfort went with cis — especially cis-het male — norms.
For a long time I continued to say I’m still sure I’m cis, but … Then a bi-gender trans masc friend tactfully pointed out that comfortably cis people don’t tend to feel the need to say it, but that at some point most trans or non-binary people my friend knew had. So, well, was I sure? That gave me pause. I’m still working through it.
Organising my aunt’s funeral meant I was regularly in London. As the turmoil settled a little, the possibilities of the capital started to seem attractive.
At first I was afraid — I was petrified (ha ha). I couldn’t just walk into a queer venue dragging my straight baggage behind me, claiming to belong. I didn’t have permission to be there. They’d know. I’d be hounded out.
But in London there would be anonymity, unlike in the smaller city where I live. At home, I’d walk into any of the few LGBTQ venues and six people I went to school with would turn around, greet me by name. Not that I had anything to hide now, but I wasn’t ready for that bright a spotlight.
So, late April, texting my friend V for moral support, I walked alone into an LGBTQ bar in central London. Modest goals: prop up the bar for at least one drink; don’t take out the I SHOULDN’T BE HERE placard; say hi to someone. Last text from V before I put my phone away: You’ve got this.
I might spill the real tea another time (follow me!) but a couple of hours later I messaged back: OMG I kind of totally have : O
Back at the beginning, I had genuinely thought I might end up an asexual hermit, happy enough to have spoken my truth but expecting nothing more. Suddenly, new relationships were possible.
Burden lifting. Unmasking. Liberation.
I went to my first Pride march. I moved beyond ‘not straight any more’. It isn’t easy to pin down what I am — not straightforwardly gay, or bi or even pan. And the labels are so often about the comfort of others anyway. But when a label does feel useful and positive, I’m embracing ‘queer’.
I feel more authentically me than ever before. It’s changed how I carry myself, how I interact. Before, I held so much back. People generally liked me but few really knew me. A description that dogged me was aloof. I hated it, never thought I was above anyone — but too often it seems that’s how I came across.
That’s changed utterly: now I’m an open book, confidently so. It’s deepened some existing relationships, and I’ve formed more meaningful new ones than in the previous two decades.
I’ve started to find queer community where I live, not confined to trips to London. And moments of queer joy. The dance floor where I saw hardly anyone I knew but still felt fully at home with the strangers around me. The Ladyhawke gig, all her lesbian fans and me, singing the words to each other, the cis-het-looking dudes beside us all but invisible.
Some scarily low lows, too. Posting a cry for help on social media one evening in August, in a brief moment of clarity before I did something stupid. A friend insisted I ring the Samaritans. There was no answer. That appealed enough to my dark sense of humour to help the moment pass.
And I will always regret the pain I caused to the loved ones who were the collateral to all of this. But in this last year I have never doubted even for a single moment that I did the right thing. It was what I had to do, the only thing I could have done. I can never regret or apologise for that.
