Coming Out Late — and Finding a New Life in Midlife
nytimes.com“I’m from Harlem. Born, bred, toasted, buttered, jelly-jammed and honeyed in Harlem.” That’s how Audrey Smaltz, a former model and fashion industry veteran who turned 86 this month, introduced herself to me years ago at a Midtown Manhattan reception.
It was her catchphrase. She was the grande dame of the room, floating through it, incandescent, fun and unabashedly flirty. “I had fabulous men in my life,” she told me recently, but in 1999, the Olympic basketball star Gail Marquis, 17 years Smaltz’s junior, asked her out to dinner.
Smaltz didn’t think of it as a date and said she had no interest in women at the time. But when Marquis kissed her good night, Smaltz recalled, “it was like kissing a man.” She said, “I couldn’t believe myself,” then laughed, punctuating the thought: “Whoa!” They married in 2011.
Smaltz’s story defies the contemporary norm: A decade ago, Pew Research Center found that “12 is the median age at which lesbian, gay and bisexual adults first felt they might be something other than heterosexual or straight” and “for those who say they now know for sure that they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, that realization came at a median age of 17.” Last year, Gallup found that about one in five Gen Z adults identifies as L.G.B.T.
