Actress, Meredith Baxter, is 62 and has been married to three different men. She recently publicly announced that she has been dating a woman for seven years now and is very happy. Meredith said that before the last seven years, it never crossed her mind that she would want to be with another woman.
CNN recently did a news report on this discovery of men and women not realizing or admitting their true sexual identity until later in life. Another man, Howard Selekman, was married to the same woman for 32years. Howard has known he was attracted to males since he was 8 years old. Knowing this, he still wanted to marry a woman and have children. Him and his fiancee’ went to a psychiatrist and his fiancee’ told the doctor that she believed love would overcome all their problems. The doctor replied that love would not overcome ALL their problems. Most doctors believe that you don’t choose your sexual preference, you are who you are when you are born and you don’t have a choice to change that. You may deny your true feelings and choose to go another way but in the end, like these older people, the truth will come out.
I think these “older people, coming out later in life” is common right now but only because it was not accepted as easily when they were younger like it is now. If they were to tell their parents that they were gay when they were in their twenties, their parents would have probably disowned them. Now that they probably have twenty year old kids, if you break the news to them, they probably accept the news because in this day in time, it’s just not uncommon like it used to be. So I would say, many years from now, 60+ year old people won’t need to wait that long to “come out” because we no longer live in such a judgemental world like it used to be.
