When Suzette Mullen finally acknowledged her complicated feelings for the woman she considered her best friend, she felt the weight of a significant question: Am I gay?
Ms. Mullen, then 54, had been married for more than two decades to her husband, whom she loved. They lived together in Montauk, N.Y., and had two adult sons.
She didn’t have anyone she could talk to about the feelings she had been harboring. So Ms. Mullen, an author and editor with a law degree from Harvard, went online, searching “late in life and coming out” and “How to know if you are gay?” on Google.
She quickly found communities of women, on websites like Facebook, with some of them asking similar questions. In response to a post Ms.