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Carolyn Polley-Peters was 14 years previous, sitting an examination in her highschool classroom in Mackay, North Queensland, when the thought first occurred to her.
“I was looking out the window and I watched the girls playing basketball, and in my head I said, ‘Gosh, girls are just so much more beautiful than men or boys’,” remembers Polley-Peters, who’s now 59 and dwelling in Sydney’s internal west.
“I went, oh, that’s a bit of a strange thought. And then I shelved it.”
After leaving faculty at 16, Polley-Peters moved from Queensland to Sydney, joined a band, married a person she cherished and had a baby at 24. “That’s your trajectory as a woman,” she says. “You fall in love, you get pregnant, you have a child and everything else kind of just falls into place, but that didn’t happen for me. There was something very wrong, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.”
It could be one other 17 years earlier than Polley-Peters would come out as a lesbian, aged 41.
Women who come out later in life, typically known as “late in life lesbians” (and accompanying acronym LILLE) have had rising visibility over the previous 20 years.
Today, there are many celebrities who’ve come out in midlife, together with Natalie Bassingthwaite, Cynthia Nixon, Rebel Wilson and Niecy Nash-Betts.
There’s additionally a whole style of memoirs devoted to girls who had a “delayed” popping out, together with 2025 bestseller All the Way to the River, through which Elizabeth Gilbert recounts her falling in love together with her finest buddy. Glennon Doyle’s 2020 memoir Untamed, through which she writes about leaving her husband for skilled soccer participant Abby Wambach, additionally turned a rallying cry for girls who felt unhappy and constrained by their lives.
But these girls aren’t a development. Together, their tales weave a story about what occurs once you lastly give your self permission to be exactly who you have been all alongside.
The fluidity of sexuality
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which launched its first published estimates of LGBTI+ populations in 2024, 4.5 per cent of all Australians 16 years and older are LGBTI+.
Studies have shown that girls particularly usually tend to change how they determine as they age, and that for girls greater than males, sexuality is fluid.
Dr Lisa Diamond has been researching girls’s sexuality for greater than 20 years and in 2008, published a study the place she adopted a bunch of 79 girls for 10 years to trace adjustments of their sexuality. She discovered that as girls age, they’ve extra alternatives to grow to be expansive of their considering and exploration of sexuality.
“We live in a society in which heteronormative ideas about relationships dominate,” explains Dr Priscilla Dunk-West, a sociologist from Victoria University. “Women who might be in their 40s or 50s or 60s today may have been raised at a time when LGBTQ+ marriage equality didn’t exist and/or homosexuality was deemed illegal. Although it can be tempting to think that much has changed in our society, we still have strong social norms about gender and sexuality, including what we expect from relationships.”
For many ladies who come out later, it was an absence of queer examples to look to that left them assuming they have been straight. Chelsea Heath, 32, grew up in the one biracial household in her small rural city in Victoria.
“It was a bit of a lonely experience,” says Heath, a comic dwelling in Brunswick who married a person when she was 25.
“In my teen years, I was really heavily involved in the church and I have no doubt that really repressed my sexuality. Being black, being the eldest child in my family, all these factors definitely contributed. I just didn’t have the opportunity to actually sit there and think about my sexuality.”
The complexities of popping out in midlife
Part of the intrigue that surrounds this specific group is the truth that a lot of them had completely satisfied marriages, and by the point they got here out, their kids (if that they had them) have been grown. This can create distinctive complexities for girls navigating the transition.
Artist and psychological well being employee Claerwen Leahy from Brunswick met her husband younger when she was 23. “He was very handsome and very charismatic, and I really fell in love with him,” the 54-year-old says. “We had a really great relationship, we’re a very good team, and we had three beautiful kids together.”
They have been married for 22 years when Leahy realised the extreme feminine friendships she stored have been extra than simply platonic. “I was not very tuned into my own body. I grew up in a house where sex was sort of, not something that we talked about, it was seen as shameful,” she explains, saying that she and her husband initially determined to open their marriage earlier than she realised she was a lesbian.
Leahy says the expertise of popping out and separating from her husband was isolating. After 27 years of supporting her husband and youngsters she felt she was beginning over, and telling her ageing dad and mom was difficult.
“It’s a pretty unique experience coming out to your dad who’s in his 90s,” she says.
“I was told that I was selfish that my duty was to my husband and my children. And look, this is someone who’s in shock, and from a very different generation. But they still haven’t really accepted it.”
Her expertise led Leahy to begin a help group for fellow late in life lesbians. “I just wanted to start what I would have liked to have had when I came out.”
Things went a little bit otherwise for Rose O’Brien, who got here out when she was 42, after sharing 27 years and three kids together with her ex-husband. The 60-year-old incapacity employee stayed dwelling together with her household for two-and-a-half years after the connection ended, and has maintained an in depth relationship together with her ex, even after assembly her spouse, Di.
Today, O’Brien nonetheless considers her ex-husband “her absolute rock” and says he now shares small traditions and inside jokes with Di.
Second life intercourse lives
Beyond the logistical hurdles one would possibly encounter popping out in midlife, many ladies agree that their intercourse lives have been remodeled. “I called it doing my bachelors of lesbianism,” says Polley-Peters, who met her now-wife LJ 4 years after popping out.
“When I fell into a romantic thing with a woman for the first time, it’s like all of those feelings that I hadn’t had for such a long time just flourished. I’d said I felt like I was empty. Well, now I was full.
“I was like a teenager in a 40-year-old woman’s body.”
Leahy describes it as much like “a dimmer switch that was turning up over my life”. For Heath, she was Dorothy in Oz. “When I was in the hetero world, everything was grey, I felt nothing,” she says. “And since I had my true awakening of realising I was a lesbian, I’ve slowly crawled my way back to where the colour is. And the colours are where the dykes are.”
The significance of visibility
On Saturday, February 28, one of many 170 floats that can proceed down Oxford Street for Sydney Mardi Gras will likely be led by 57-year-old psychologist Jane O’Keeffe, founding father of The Itty Bitty Titty Committee. The group is geared toward rising lesbian visibility, serving as function fashions for lesbians who will not be but out, newly out, or who’re much less assured of their sexuality.
“I just love that we have a mix of women who are varying degrees of feeling out,” she says. “I was speaking to one woman, and she’s got a male partner and child. She’s been in the float for three years now and over the years she’s said, ‘Oh, I think I’m a lesbian’, but she’s just not going to come out at the moment.”
For these girls, O’Keeffe says, there’s a way of validation in being seen by neighborhood, even when they don’t really feel protected popping out.
O’Brien has adopted a equally protecting function, changing into an integral member of Dykes on Bikes in Victoria. “We’re known to be the guardians or the protectors of community, and I take that extremely seriously. I love being out there,” she says.
For all these girls, popping out was, in a approach, a tuning in to their true selves. “I feel so comfortable in the queer community and I finally felt like I was able to be understood by other people and express myself in a way that I’ve never been able to before,” Leahy says.
Heath agrees. “Being a lesbian is the best gift,” she says. “My queerness is my freedom.”
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