BETTER LATE THAN NEVER

We’ve all seen it or read it, a news story about someone coming out as queer late in life. It’s invariably cast as a feel-good piece, a tale with a long-delayed happy ending. Queer at last!

 

While perusing headlines on advocate.com last night, I clicked on an article about a Mexican Doritos commercial that ties in with the country’s much-celebrated Día de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) and features a much-much-delayed coming out. I watched, I smiled. I watched again. Go ahead, watch it yourself. I’ll wait right here. Otherwise, the rest of this post won’t make much sense.

 

My initial happiness watching the ad became tinged with a sense of melancholy. Thoughts of If only and What might have been floated about in my mind. 

 

From a Doritos commercial?! 

 

No, not exactly. Really, if I were some dead dude and my loved ones showed up to honor me with an offering of a bowl of snack chips while one dear relative munched out of the bag, wholly disinterested in the act of honoring, I don’t think I’d dazzle them with my ghostly appearance. 

 

Instead of getting a case of the munchies, my mind drifted to the fact there are still too many latecomers to embracing their own sense of Pride.

 

I remembered reading about Kenneth Felts, a Colorado man who came out at ninety. At the age of twelve, he knew he was gay. While in his twenties, he fell in love with a man but opted to live his life as a straight man, marrying, having a daughter, divorcing. Felts acknowledged he’d lived “deep in the closet, behind rows and rows of clothing. I [was] way back there.” It seemed nothing could coax him out. He’d even cast off his gayness by attributing it to a separate part of him—“Larry,” not Ken. When his daughter came out to him as a lesbian twenty years ago, he didn’t come out to her. 

 

How lonely must that closet have been?

 

Now that he’s out, Ken proudly wears a rainbow hoodie most days and connects with a queer coffee group that meets online due to COVID, a reality for many of us and our groups, but sadder in my mind for Ken whom I wish so much to have that open, communal experience of just hanging out with others like him. What if he’d come out in 2019 at eighty-nine? He’d have had a few in-person coffee chats before lockdown.

 

Those of us who are queer and have come out to at least one other soul know, when the process goes okay (or, fingers crossed, better than okay), there is so much relief, a burden lifted, an end to lies, an acceptance of self, further boosted by the acceptance from another. Even if our coming out stories are from decades ago, we can recall what whirled within us before then—all the angst, the self-hatred, the bargaining and wishing we weren’t who it seemed we were. All of us would probably say we dealt with those thoughts and emotions for too long. I took my first tiny steps out of the closet at twenty, then retreated when things didn’t go so well, and didn’t try longer strides until moving 1,400 miles from home at twenty-four. I thought I was late for the party, but I got there sixty-six years ahead of Ken.

 

Happy for Ken, for sure, and all the other seniors who finally come out in an era when it’s easier to do so. Still, I think about those other news stories of men who’ve spent decades in prison for crimes it’s ultimately proven they didn’t commit. Freedom now, yes. But they can’t make up for lost time.

 

I wonder about all the Uncle Albertos in the world who go to the grave still closeted. I ache for them. Even if they were to meet a Mario in some afterlife, hatred and intolerance along with fear and self-preservation radically compromised life on Earth, possibilities deemed impossible. 

 

I think of my great uncle who died a “lifelong bachelor” in his late eighties. He had a long career as a pilot in the Royal Air Force and was held as a prisoner of war by the Nazis. He was tight-lipped about his war experiences, only once opening up ever so slightly while sipping a third scotch. Those of us in the cottage that day listened with mouths open, eyes bulging, imagining how this very proper English gentleman got through it all, wondering about other horrors of war he would never share, no matter how freely the scotch was poured. 

 

I suspect so much of his life was suppressed. This bachelor never ever dated a woman. He lived with and took care of his mother, a longtime widow, until she died. He was apparently quite close with a German “friend,” with whom he went into business, but something went wrong…with the business or the friendship or both. My family has never talked about it.

 

After I came out to my parents, I once asked if maybe Uncle Phil was gay. My mother went so far as to say, “We wondered” and mentioned his “friend,” but the conversation puttered out. Maybe there was a bowl of Doritos that caught everyone’s attention. If there were French onion dip set out as well, no wonder I never got a real answer.

 

Around the same time, my mother fretted about how public my gayness might become. “Don’t tell your grandfather,” she said. “He thinks the world of you.” Stupidly, I honored her request. Quite frankly, I think my grandfather, a sports-loving, beer-drinking man who worked on the railroad his whole life, would have taken it far better than my mother. He laughed with joy every time I showed up for a visit and cherished our one-on-one time as much as I did. He had that same happy laugh whenever my great uncle—his brother-in-law—dropped by. When they were both in their eighties and my grandmother died, the two men grew even closer without having to cater to her every demand. They were best friends, the rough-around-the-edges Canadian railroader and the dashing, immaculately dressed English chap. 

 

I’m certain I could have come out to my grandfather. I’m certain Great Uncle Phil could have, too. It’s lovely imagining for a moment Uncle Phil with his own partner in some more accepting parallel universe. But that’s a flight of fancy. The reality is that there really is a time when it is too late to come out. My great uncle is buried alone at Beechwood Cemetery in Ottawa, one of the finest cemeteries in Canada, I’m told. I don’t know how that amounts to anything.