The Future of an Older Gay Man
Opening The Closet at Eighty
What’s next?
A friend recently dropped by my office. He is eighty-one and married with six grown children and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren! I will never be around long enough to see the Greats, and we have often joked about what a late start I got in the “grandparent” business!
He knows that I was married for fifteen years before I realized I would never be a happy person unless I ended the marriage, came out of the closet, and lived an open and authentic gay life. No divorce is easy. If you throw being gay and finally honest into the mix, you can imagine the anger and frustration of an ex-wife.
My husband of now thirty-plus years says that I didn’t come out of the closet, I blew the doors off! Perhaps he is right. I recognized that I was attracted to men. I realized how unhappy my wife and I both were. I wanted both of us to have something better. I wanted my children to have a happy father.
Leaving my marriage to my wife was as hard as you can imagine. No longer being home with my children was very difficult for them and me. Even now, over thirty years later, I see the damage I did to their perceptions of love and marriage and how my absence hurt them.
