Growing into desire as a queer late bloomer

For a long time, the story most people have been told about queerness is that of revelation. There is a “before” and an “after”, and it is assumed that there is a sudden knowing, a clean break from how things were earlier, and eventually goes on to a life begun anew. That’s a rather linear narrative, and it isn’t how desire is experienced by many people, especially those who identify as a queer late bloomer. 

“Most people understand that they have a desire which is not allowed,” says Maya (she/her), who works with the Vikalp Foundation, an organisation that advocates for the rights of marginalised women and gender/sexual minorities in Vadodara. “They may not have the words that we use (to label queer identities in English), but they definitely understand it; at least they understand this chaos, this stirring.” 

Desire does have language, but it may not always be the kind that fits neatly into modern, identity-driven labels. For individuals discovering sexuality in adulthood, language arrives only after the feeling does.

For instance, many Indian languages are not organised around the same binaries that English demands. Malayalam routinely treats inanimate objects as gender-neutral, whereas Assamese is often far less rigid about gendering than other Indo-Aryan languages. Meanwhile, Hindi, Marathi, and Gujarati, insist on assigning gender almost everywhere—nouns, verbs, adjectives—often defaulting to the masculine in mixed or ambiguous situations, leaving little grammatical room to name anything outside the binary.

This raises an almost wry question: Is gender here describing lived human experience, or is it simply a grammatical habit that language refuses to let go of when speaking of it?

Even so, Hindi’s much-discussed “pronoun problem” is not really a problem at all, as Dr. Ian Woolford, a lecturer and discipline lead in Hindi language in the Department of Languages and Cultures at La Trobe University, writes in the Melbourne Asia Review. Take the third-person pronoun “voh”, which can mean she, he, they, this, or it, depending entirely on context. Gender comes afterwards, through agreement, structure, and what the sentence is forced to settle into. Desire works much the same way. It is felt first and only later do we look around to see what grammar is available to us—what kind of love is legible, what kind of relationship can be performed without inviting alienation, bullying, rejection, or social exile. The rules come our way through institutions, family, and socially-sanctioned forms of relationship. What we call “maturity” or “choice” is often just the moment desire learns how to conjugate itself for survival.

“Fifteen years ago, desire—especially queer desire—existed largely without vocabulary or visibility,” says Vithika Yadav (she/her), a social entrepreneur who co-founded Love Matters, India, and Teenbook, and also serves as the Chair of the Global Advisory Board on Sexual Health and Well-being. “Silence and secrecy were used to express and negotiate intimacy.” Today, she notes, many adults entering their first queer relationships do have words for pleasure, for consent, and boundaries. However, that doesn’t mean it’s easy. What people struggle to unlearn are roles that have been conditioned into them.

This is the gap Maya is pointing to—one that many queer late bloomers recognise long before they act on it. The chaos arrives not because desire is unnamed, but because it is over-determined by being forced into structures that cannot contain it. The stirring and the knowing are primal experiences, but permission to act on it comes with agency, if at all. “In that sense, there is an understanding in a way that is different from ours,” continues Maya. “They know that this is an attraction, and it is a sexual pull as well. Love and desire are understandable, and the problem isn’t having words, but the great fear of what if it gets known.”

When the first queer relationship arrives in adulthood

That is why acting on one’s queerness for the first time as an adult—entering a first queer relationship in adulthood after fitting into normative roles—is often less a rupture than a continuation of that dormant desire. 

“There is a sense of fear, of wanting to hide, due to the stigma,” explains Maya. “It’s not like people didn’t know queer love earlier in life. It’s just that culturally we live in such women-centred spaces and women have always experienced deep friendships.” 

What gets mistaken for innocence or ignorance is often something else entirely: intimacy without socially-sanctioned legitimacy. Speaking about dating apps, Vithika reflects that visibility can be both liberating and overwhelming for those navigating adult queer relationships for the first time. “On one hand, these platforms offer validation and vocabulary,” she says. “On the other, they can create pressure to perform desirability, leaving little room for uncertainty or learning. For many late bloomers, the challenge isn’t access, but permission to go at their own pace.”

Learning desire without a roadmap

For many, this delayed permission shows up not just emotionally, but physically. Physician and public health expert Dr. Varuna Srinivasan (she/they) sees this tension play out in the body itself among queer adults who carry years of suppression, expressed through a disconnection from their own bodies. “One of the biggest beliefs late bloomers carry is that desire should be immediate, stable, and self-evident,” she says. “If it feels tentative or shifting, they assume something is wrong with them.” Hesitation, ambivalence, or slowness are often treated as failures, rather than as the natural aftermath of having learned to monitor, restrain, and doubt one’s own wanting.

This is why urgency can be as alienating as denial. What people need, says Vithika, is not acceleration but care. “[They need] time, tenderness, and a sense of community,” she says. “Spaces where there’s no pressure to rush or compare.” Coming into oneself later in life is not a delay or a deficit. “For many,” adds Vithika, “it’s the first time they’re choosing freely.”

Long after desire has been felt, there remains the question of where that desire can live publicly, as well as what happens when it arises under scrutiny. For those navigating coming out later in life, desire is not just personal but public. 

In popular culture, too, this pattern plays out in ways that mirror the private journeys described. Take the example of Real Housewives of Beverly Hillsstar Kyle Richards, who publicly acknowledged “questioning” aspects of her sexuality after nearly three decades of marriage, describing the process as confusing under intense media scrutiny.  

Actor and reality TV personality Chrishell Stause has similarly shared the evolution of her romantic life, including her marriage to non-binary musician G Flip after earlier heteronormative partnerships. 

The public reaction to both reflects a broader discomfort when women’s desire does not line up with expectation. These stories underline that delayed, ambiguous, or evolving desire is not rare. It is a negotiation with the self and with society alike, and a reminder that revelations are rarely clean or privately contained.

“I would rather talk of love rather than a relationship,” says Maya. “Love is an overarching thing and a relationship does not necessarily include love.” It’s a distinction that allows the space for queer lives lived in-between. For loving someone while remaining married to someone else, or continuing an intimate relationship without cohabitation or even showing loyalty towards someone who can never be introduced as a partner, can persist across secrecy, distance, and time. In such a queer world, love is not invalidated by the absence of structure. Structure, on the other hand, is often negotiated for survival, a reality many queer late bloomers realise.

Navigating queer relationships later in life

“People negotiate their relationships in ways that fit into society, so that society doesn’t stare at them or stigmatise them,” says Maya. “Some abandon their marriages and move on with their partners. Some continue to live longing for the partner or for the desire.” She goes on to tell the story of two women, married and with grown-up sons, who rented rooms near each other’s homes. She describes them as “working-class, adult women with responsibilities and familial constraints”. They continued in their marriages, while finding ways to live their desire for each other. “Once women grow older and have more control over their lives—mobility, money, work—they are also able to live out their desire,” furthers Maya. “Age has little to do with it. The crucial change is access.” Access to space, privacy, and choice—the material conditions that make agency possible. 

This reshaping often requires unlearning deeply embedded roles. Vithika notes that many adults entering queer relationships later in life carry a long history of performance. “The habit of being the giver, the responsible one, the mature one, the emotionally balanced one, rather than allowing mutual vulnerability,” she explains. The most persistent patterns to shake are shame, self-erasure, and duty. Letting go of the belief that love must involve struggle or sacrifice to be real is often the hardest shift. “Learning to stop prioritising others’ comfort over one’s own needs—and to trust that pleasure is for both—takes time.”

This is why feeling safe enough to act on one’s agency is rarely a linear step forward. “The feeling of safety actually takes a backseat when you are very much in love and finding your desire,” says Vithika. “You don’t think in terms of safety until you decide to take a step, because initially secrecy is what gives you safety.” Coming out, it turns out, is rarely a single act. It is uneven, situational, strategic—especially for those coming out later in life. “For women, they pass off as close friends,” says Maya. “So it’s not like you come out permanently. At some places you come out, at others the equation still passes off as friendship. Coming out or staying hidden is not uniform; you dwell between the two.”

Learning queerness in adulthood

This dwelling in the in-between often shows up as over-adaptation. “People learn to tolerate discomfort, deprioritize their needs, and blur their own boundaries in order to stay legible or loved,” explains Varuna.

But living in this in-between carries costs—emotional, relational, and structural. “Abandoning marriage is often seen as damaging the marriage,” says Maya. “[For women], being in love with women also comes with a lot of criticism from family. You get isolated.” The “damage” is almost always attributed to the woman who leaves or loves differently, and rarely to the structures that made love unliveable, or to families who chose withdrawal over care. The result is rejection, isolation, and an accumulating grief for an unlived life. “It does cause a lot of grief to not be able to introduce your partner as your partner,” adds Maya. “Sometimes it is useful not to declare it, but it still causes grief.”

This grief is not only emotional, but logistical too. “From finding a house to dealing with caste and interreligious issues,” explains Maya, “in same-sex relationships there is nothing palpable to hold on to, to say: we are in a relationship. Sometimes it feels very fragile.” This puts immense pressure on the relationship itself, making it a tightrope walk that requires constant negotiation.

Excitement, fear, and guilt often come into the picture together. As Varuna puts it, “Wanting something new doesn’t negate what came before, even when people feel pressured to perform a complete transformation. Sometimes lives look the same on the outside while everything shifts within.”

What it means to be a queer late bloomer

What emerges across these conversations is a redefinition of “coming out” itself. As Vithika shares, coming into oneself later in life is not a delay or a deficit. “For many,” she says, “it’s the first time they’re choosing freely.” Not choosing visibility at all costs or certainty on demand, but choosing care, pace, and mutuality.

And perhaps that is why Maya resists the idea of “firsts” altogether. “When you say ‘first’, I feel stuck with that idea,” she says. “First never happens, because desire is messy and it isn’t even desire for a specific person, but a certain kind of life.” 

What remains, then, is not a clean beginning but a series of choices made under constraint, which are shaped by fear, care, grief, and hope. To live queerly, for many—especially a queer late bloomer—is not to arrive fully formed, but to keep choosing a life that feels closer to the self, even when it cannot yet be named, recognised, or held without cost.

Curated by Gaysi Family