Pardon me for jumping in so late, but I’d like to respond to Grienspace’s original query. I was 29 when I came out, and it was as big a surprise to me as it was to anyone else! I know one person who came out, then advised her mother to come out, too. Yes, Mom was also gay, and didn’t know it. I think sexuality is more hard-wired in men than in women. Don’t get me wrong – there are ABSOLUTELY lots of gay women who start hankerin’ after girls very early on in life, and never look back. However, as has been stated in earlier posts, sexuality is a spectrum, and for women who are not way over on one end of the scale or the other, it may just be easier to recognize and acknowledge one’s attraction to men than it is to recognize one’s attraction to women because it is what we expect and what is expected of us. (Yes, there are self-described lesbians who are capable of being attracted sexually to some men some of the time. It just isn’t their primary orientation. I know women who are fairly bisexual when it comes to their physical desires, but who identify as lesbians because they prefer the social and romantic aspects of lesbian partnerships. In short, men are okay to have sex with, but women are more fun to wake up with in the morning.)
Also, before single parenting and lesbian parenting became acknowledged phenomena, women who were strongly driven to become parents may have just been more likely to get into relationships with men because they didn’t see any other way to get what they really wanted. Later, when they recognized that something major was missing in their lives, they came out.
Finally, (and this next comment’s pretty harsh, but please don’t scorch my ears off), I think that there are some women who enjoy the security of being with a man and are willing to live a lie in order to while sleeping around with women on the side. I, for one, regard this as cowardly and appalling. (This is not to say that there are not gay men who do the same thing, because there are.) However, I do not think that this is the kind of situation that Grienspace was talking about.
Putting that aside, I do think that women as well as men are recognizing their sexual orientations earlier on in life due to media exposure and the increasing normalization of gay sex. Consider the recent spate of gay kids taking their dates to the prom, and gay/straight alliance clubs in high school. As being gay becomes safer, girls as well as boys will stop thinking of homosexuality as something scary and foreign, and will be more likely to recognize and act upon their own lesbian potential where it exists. So my guess is that there will be less of the “Granny coming out” phenomenon in the future than there has been in the past.
