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Carolyn Polley-Peters was 14 years old, sitting an exam in her high school classroom in Mackay, North Queensland, when the thought first occurred to her.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was looking out the window and I watched the girls playing basketball, and in my head I said, \u2018Gosh, girls are just so much more beautiful than men or boys\u2019,\u201d recalls Polley-Peters, who is now 59 and living in Sydney\u2019s inner west.<\/p>\n
\u201cI went, oh, that\u2019s a bit of a strange thought. And then I shelved it.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Despite](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/396aa935214c67feaccad9d5724c235d3dc6a827.jpeg\")
Despite having a happy relationship, beautiful son and thriving career in music, Carolyn Polley-Peters always felt like something was missing. Janie Barrett<\/p>\n
After leaving school at 16, Polley-Peters moved from Queensland to Sydney, joined a band, married a man she loved and had a child at 24. \u201cThat\u2019s your trajectory as a woman,\u201d she says. \u201cYou fall in love, you get pregnant, you have a child and everything else kind of just falls into place, but that didn\u2019t happen for me. There was something very wrong, but I couldn\u2019t figure out what it was.\u201d<\/p>\n
It would be another 17 years before Polley-Peters would come out as a lesbian, aged 41.<\/p>\n
Related Article Women who come out later in life, sometimes referred to as \u201clate in life lesbians\u201d (and accompanying acronym LILLE) have had increasing visibility over the past 20 years.<\/p>\n Today, there are plenty of celebrities who have come out in midlife, including Natalie Bassingthwaite, Cynthia Nixon, Rebel Wilson and Niecy Nash-Betts.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also an entire genre of memoirs dedicated to women who had a \u201cdelayed\u201d coming out, including 2025 bestseller All the Way to the River, in which Elizabeth Gilbert recounts her falling in love with her best friend. Glennon Doyle\u2019s 2020 memoir Untamed, in which she writes about leaving her husband for professional soccer player Abby Wambach, also became a rallying cry for women who felt unsatisfied and constrained by their lives.<\/p>\n But these women aren\u2019t a trend. Together, their stories weave a tale about what happens when you finally give yourself permission to be precisely who you were all along.<\/p>\n The fluidity of sexuality<\/p>\n According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which released its first published estimates of LGBTI+ populations in 2024<\/a>, 4.5 per cent of all Australians 16 years and older are LGBTI+.<\/p>\n Studies have shown<\/a> that women in particular are more likely to change how they identify as they age, and that for women more than men, sexuality is fluid.<\/p>\n Dr Lisa Diamond has been researching women\u2019s sexuality for more than two decades and in 2008, published a study<\/a> where she followed a group of 79 women for 10 years to track changes in their sexuality. She found that as women age, they have more opportunities to become expansive in their thinking and exploration of sexuality.<\/p>\n \u201cWe live in a society in which heteronormative ideas about relationships dominate,\u201d explains Dr Priscilla Dunk-West, a sociologist from Victoria University. \u201cWomen who might be in their 40s or 50s or 60s today may have been raised at a time when LGBTQ+ marriage equality didn\u2019t exist and\/or homosexuality was deemed illegal. Although it can be tempting to think that much has changed in our society, we still have strong social norms about gender and sexuality, including what we expect from relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n For many women who come out later, it was an absence of queer examples to look to that left them assuming they were straight. Chelsea Heath<\/a>, 32, grew up in the only biracial family in her small rural town in Victoria.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a bit of a lonely experience,\u201d says Heath, a comedian living in Brunswick who married a man when she was 25.<\/p>\n \u201cIn my teen years, I was really heavily involved in the church and I have no doubt that really repressed my sexuality. Being black, being the eldest child in my family, all these factors definitely contributed. I just didn\u2019t have the opportunity to actually sit there and think about my sexuality.\u201d<\/p>\n The complexities of coming out in midlife<\/p>\n Part of the intrigue that surrounds this particular group is the fact that many of them had happy marriages, and by the time they came out, their children (if they had them) were grown. This can create unique complexities for women navigating the transition.<\/p>\n Artist and mental health worker Claerwen Leahy from Brunswick met her husband young when she was 23. \u201cHe was very handsome and very charismatic, and I really fell in love with him,\u201d the 54-year-old says. \u201cWe had a really great relationship, we\u2019re a very good team, and we had three beautiful kids together.\u201d<\/p>\n They were married for 22 years when Leahy realised the intense female friendships she kept were more than just platonic. \u201cI was not very tuned into my own body. I grew up in a house where sex was sort of, not something that we talked about, it was seen as shameful,\u201d she explains, saying that she and her husband initially decided to open their marriage before she realised she was a lesbian.<\/p>\n Leahy says the experience of coming out and separating from her husband was isolating. After 27 years of supporting her husband and children she felt she was starting over, and telling her ageing parents was challenging.<\/p>\n Related Article \u201cIt\u2019s a pretty unique experience coming out to your dad who\u2019s in his 90s,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cI was told that I was selfish that my duty was to my husband and my children. And look, this is someone who\u2019s in shock, and from a very different generation. But they still haven\u2019t really accepted it.\u201d<\/p>\n Her experience led Leahy to start a support group for fellow late in life lesbians. \u201cI just wanted to start what I would have liked to have had when I came out.\u201d<\/p>\n Things went a little differently for Rose O\u2019Brien, who came out when she was 42, after sharing 27 years and three children with her ex-husband. The 60-year-old disability worker stayed living with her family for two-and-a-half years after the relationship ended, and has maintained a close relationship with her ex, even after meeting her wife, Di.<\/p>\n Today, O\u2019Brien still considers her ex-husband \u201cher absolute rock\u201d and says he now shares small traditions and inside jokes with Di.<\/p>\n Beyond the logistical hurdles one might encounter coming out in midlife, many women agree that their sex lives were transformed. \u201cI called it doing my bachelors of lesbianism,\u201d says Polley-Peters, who met her now-wife LJ four years after coming out.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I fell into a romantic thing with a woman for the first time, it\u2019s like all of those feelings that I hadn\u2019t had for such a long time just flourished. I\u2019d said I felt like I was empty. Well, now I was full.<\/p>\n \u201cI was like a teenager in a 40-year-old woman\u2019s body.\u201d<\/p>\n Leahy describes it as similar to \u201ca dimmer switch that was turning up over my life\u201d. For Heath, she was Dorothy in Oz. \u201cWhen I was in the hetero world, everything was grey, I felt nothing,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd since I had my true awakening of realising I was a lesbian, I\u2019ve slowly crawled my way back to where the colour is. And the colours are where the dykes are.\u201d<\/p>\n The importance of visibility<\/p>\n On Saturday, February 28, one of the 170 floats that will proceed down Oxford Street for Sydney Mardi Gras will be led by 57-year-old psychologist Jane O\u2019Keeffe, founder of The Itty Bitty Titty Committee. The group is aimed at increasing lesbian visibility, serving as role models for lesbians who are not yet out, newly out, or who are less confident in their sexuality.<\/p>\n \u201cI just love that we have a mix of women who are varying degrees of feeling out,\u201d she says. \u201cI was speaking to one woman, and she\u2019s got a male partner and child. She\u2019s been in the float for three years now and over the years she\u2019s said, \u2018Oh, I think I\u2019m a lesbian\u2019, but she\u2019s just not going to come out at the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n For these women, O\u2019Keeffe says, there\u2019s a sense of validation in being seen by community, even if they don\u2019t feel safe coming out.<\/p>\n O\u2019Brien has adopted a similarly protective role, becoming an integral member of Dykes on Bikes in Victoria. \u201cWe\u2019re known to be the guardians or the protectors of community, and I take that extremely seriously. I love being out there,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n For all these women, coming out was, in a way, a tuning in to their true selves. \u201cI feel so comfortable in the queer community and I finally felt like I was able to be understood by other people and express myself in a way that I\u2019ve never been able to before,\u201d Leahy says.<\/p>\n Heath agrees. \u201cBeing a lesbian is the best gift,\u201d she says. \u201cMy queerness is my freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n Make the most of your health, relationships, fitness and nutrition with our Live Well newsletter. Get it in your inbox<\/a> every Monday.<\/p>\n Save<\/p>\n You have reached your maximum number of saved items.<\/p>\n Remove items from your saved list<\/a> to add more.<\/p>\n Default avatarCourtney Thompson<\/a> is a Lifestyle Reporter at the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.From our partners![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/2c8ca97e0bd5cc80d5eefd18cf848023b3049679.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Chelsea](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/4448a4473fbeb0ddad0105cc3b89a40773c58cef.jpeg\")
Chelsea Heath grew up in a small town and never questioned her sexuality until her mental health deteriorated to the point of self-intervention. Joe Armao<\/p>\n![\"Claerwen](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/3cdbbc5fb93e9ed631eed475793ca19bc1bb2f14.jpeg\")
Claerwen Leahy was in a \u201cperfect\u201d marriage for 22 years before she realised she was gay. Justin McManus<\/p>\n![\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/1c43620eb221dd49fcd5fe2f7b82c62f973549bc3f920a6bfc9f44e51c2e0246.gif\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Rose](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/e38fbfe71867a5cd2d09eded281058faebfba67a.jpeg\")
Rose O\u2019Brien is still close with her ex-husband, and happily remarried to her wife, Di. Enrique AscuiSecond life sex lives<\/p>\n