I’m an older gay man who came out at age 40-years-old after eighteen years and two children in a heterosexual marriage, and I find this story particularly common for men in my generation and perhaps one or two generations younger.

For men, we are beaten to death by “the masculine ideal,” and any departure from it often comes at great costs. I speak with man men from the Middle East and other repressive societies and they still struggle with the same thing.

I think it is changing for younger men, but I know of many, many men who didn’t come out until mid-life or later, the oldest being about ninty-years-old after his wife of fifty-two years died.