It was one evening in 2019 when Tony Kaye, then 63, sat down with his wife of forty years and told her that he is gay. “It was a very tearful and difficult conversation, but she was wonderful,” he explains over the phone. “I just kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’. She said, ‘Look, there’s no point saying you’re sorry, you can’t help who are.’” Two weeks later, Kaye and his wife told their two sons, and in the coming months, the rest of the family and his friends, who all supported him.
For Kaye, a retired GP in Manchester, it wasn’t until he reached 50 that he accepted he is gay, having first realised he was attracted to men in his twenties. He describes an “internal turmoil that was just tearing me apart”, lasting for years. While the intimate side of his relationship had deteriorated, he had a great marriage.
“It reached a point where I just couldn’t really handle it anymore,” he explains. So Kaye, who is Jewish, went to talk to a gay reform rabbi, and was put in touch with one of his congregants, who had come out as gay and left his marriage. “That was the springboard to me actually deciding that I’ve got to tell my wife,” he explains.
The experiences of LGBTQ+ people, like Kaye, who have come out later in life are intensely personal, each one varied and complex. For Kaye, as a young child in the 1960s, male homosexuality was still punishable with imprisonment in the UK. “There were all these constraints and expectations put upon you to conform to society,” he says.
Coming out was “the right decision, however painful it was”, says Kaye, who received support from the LGBT Foundation. “I just felt a massive weight lift. I didn’t have to hide anymore. It was a wonderful feeling of just being open and honest, for the first time in my whole life really.”
Shortly before his 40th birthday, Gamal ‘G’ Turawa came out as gay. It was 2002, and he told a colleague where he worked at the time in London’s Metropolitan Police, becoming the force’s first openly gay black officer. “It suddenly became easier,” says Turawa, having gone through a breakdown in his thirties. “I realised in that breakdown that I was trying to be what I thought people wanted me to be.”
Similar to Kaye, he describes how “all of these things collided in one perfect storm that just made me feel, ‘I can’t do this anymore’”.
Growing up in England in the 60s and 70s, Turawa explains how he knew “there was something there” with his sexuality as a kid, but that he thought it was a “phase”. Male homosexuality was, only partially, decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967 – for two men above the age of 21 having sex in private. For decades afterwards, in specific circumstances, prosecutions were brought against thousands of gay and bisexual men. The age of consent, set at 16 for heterosexual acts, was not equalised until 2001.
Turawa, now 58, lived in shame. “Shame kicked in because because I’d been brought up in an environment where it wasn’t acceptable to be gay,” he explains. “I came from a very strong Muslim background. I didn’t see any black gay role models around. I just thought I was in this world all by myself and there was no one I could turn to.” During his younger years, he also lived in Nigeria, where gay sex is punishable with up to 14 years’ imprisonment or, in states under Shari’a law, with death.
Turawa’s story is now the subject of a BAFTA-nominated documentary The Black Cop, which examines institutional racism and homophobia in the Metropolitan Police. What does coming out mean to him? “Authenticity,” he says. “It’s lovely to be me. It’s nice to be real, to not have to hide. There are so many joys from it.”
Research suggests that more people are coming out year on year in the UK. The Office for National Statistics found that, between 2015 and 2019, the number of people aged 16 and over who identify as straight decreased from 95.2% to 93.7%. In the same period, those identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual increased by 0.4%. In the US, a recent Gallup poll also indicated that LGBTQ+ people are coming out younger: 21% of Generation Z Americans (born 1997-2003) identified as LGBTQ+, compared with less than 5% of Generation X (born 1965-1980).
This chimes with progressive legislative changes in the UK and US. In 2003, Section 28 was at last repealed in England and Wales. Introduced in 1988, at the height of the AIDS crisis, this clause banned the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities at a time when negative attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people intensified. In 2005, the Gender Recognition Act meant that people could legally change their gender in the UK, while in 2014, same-sex marriage became legal in England, Wales and Scotland. Still, this wasn’t introduced in Northern Ireland until 2020.
Positive representations of LGBTQ+ people in the mainstream media have also increased in recent years, from the RuPaul’s Drag Race franchise to Netflix’s Sex Education, coming a long way since the UK’s first pre-watershed gay kiss on EastEnders in 1989.
For Kate Hutchinson, 51, a regional officer for LGBTQ+ educational charity Diversity Role Models, it was increased visibility of transgender people in the media, including journalist Paris Lees, that was partly behind her decision to come out as a transgender woman in 2012.
“I worried that people wouldn’t believe me because it felt so late and because of everybody’s preconceived ideas of who I was,” says Hutchinson, who lives in Wrexham. “But it set me free, I began to realise being able to be open about my identity unlocked confidence and potential that was never realised before.” She briefly came out in the late 1990s, but went back into the closet because of transphobia.
Conservative religious attitudes have posed a barrier for other LGBTQ+ people on their journey to coming out. Elsa Kiyé Martins, 39, came out as bisexual in 2019, following some years of “deep reflection” during which she reconciled her Christian faith with her sexuality, aware that she would face rejection from some people.
“I made peace with my faith,” she says. “I go to churches which are affirming. I don’t seek validation where I know validation is not coming from…I’m at peace with saying, saying it out loud: ‘I’m bisexual.’ And you know what? I love it. It makes me smile. It gives me joy.”
For Nicholas McInerny, a scriptwriter based in London, coming out as gay at the age of 45 meant the end of his marriage of nearly 20 years to his then wife, with whom he had two daughters. He has no regrets, but describes difficulties in the immediate aftermath. “I was breaking up a marriage, a successful marriage, there was a great deal of guilt around that.”
Today, he maintains a close relationship with his two daughters and is on good terms with his ex-wife. In 2014, McInerny married his husband and now runs the Rainbow Dads podcast to support others like him. “I really felt like I’d found my truth,” he says. Coming out also improved his life professionally. “I’ve written much better, much more personally, and much braver.”
While separated, Kaye remains married to his wife, with whom he shares a “deep-rooted friendship”. He hopes, one day, to meet a new partner.
“Despite all the negativity that I have felt about feeling lonely and isolated, I don’t regret it,” he says. “Because I feel that now I can be completely true to who I am, completely honest. That has brought massive relief to me emotionally. I don’t have the inner turmoil – I can even make flippant jokes about it.”