By Kathryn Welch
Every New Year’s Eve, my friends and I have a tradition whereby we each choose a word with which we would like to define the year ahead. Sometimes our words are wildly ambitious, sometimes they’re silly (one friend chose “jackpot” in a year they were hoping to make it big), and other times they’re more prosaic (“routine” and “calm” have both featured). 2025 was the year I turned 40, and as we counted down to the chiming of the New Year’s bells, I chose “authentic” as my word for the year. I talked about how I wanted to make decisions based less on how I wanted to appear to others. I had recently quit drinking alcohol, which I used as an example of the sort of decisions I wanted to make more confidently in the coming year. A little voice in the back of my head was also wondering, though, whether this could be the year I finally found the courage to come out and claim a bisexual identity. In truth, I doubted it, but declaring 2025 as my year of authenticity gave me a fingerhold to start to wonder whether this could be the year.
I’ve always been bisexual: an overwhelming crush on a girl at Brownie Camp aged ten was one of my defining coming-of-age experiences. I vividly remember the sharing of secrets, the swapping of t-shirts at the end of our week together, and passionate and clingy telephone calls from a 1990s phone-box once we returned home. But growing up as a chronically obedient child in a time and place that, if not actively homophobic, made it very clear that it would be much better if I were straight, it never felt like a realistic option to be anything else. As the child of two police officers, I grew up in a home where being “good” (a quality prized above all others) meant coloring inside the lines, conforming to social norms, and excelling within firmly-defined understandings of behavior and success. Growing up under the UK Government’s Section 28 law, which explicitly banned local authorities from “promoting homosexuality” or teaching about it in a positive light in schools, made being not-straight seem wrong, or at the very least, something that required a bold, rebellious attitude that I emphatically didn’t have. And I did like boys, after all. So when I met and married a gorgeous and brilliant man in the years shortly after university, my assumed heterosexuality felt increasingly set in stone. I’d missed the boat for sexual experimentation, and with it—so I thought—my opportunity to claim a queer identity.
It took aging—and the benefits of almost two decades of that marriage to an unfailingly supportive, uplifting champion—for that assumption to start to shift. I had actually taken the first tentative step out of the closet in 2022, when I secretly ticked the “bisexual” box in the Scottish National Census. Though I did it so secretly, it still gives me enormous satisfaction to see ‘my’ number counted amongst Scotland’s first-ever national record of the nation’s sexual identity, and to know that there’s a formal record, somewhere, of a queer identity I thought I might never say out loud.
I’m aging well, I think. I was a chronically shy teenager and an awkward 20-year-old who was desperate to fit in. As I hit my thirties, though, I was increasingly surrounded by brilliant, bold, powerful women a decade or two older than me, who proved an endless source of inspiration. The exact opposite of the well-behaved cultures I’d grown up with, these were women matured through a lifetime of activism. They had marched, fought, protested, and organized, not least to repeal that poisonous Section 28 that had remained law through the entirety of my school years, from 1988 to 2003. Now in their fifties and sixties, these women offered a glorious example of a courageous life that gave very few fucks, yet who were immersed in creating a good life defined not by law and order, but by social justice and solidarity. In them, I found alternative role-models for the kind of life I wanted for my second half. I envied their courage, their commitment to their values, their radical sense of ambition and their willingness to break the rules. I began campaigning on issues of reproductive justice, for feminist politics, and on wider campaigns around social equity and, tentatively, LGBTQ rights.
And so to 40, and to the year of #authenticity. As I settled into more queer and activist spaces, it came to feel increasingly ridiculous that I was hiding my bisexuality—allowing myself to be assumed to be an ally, or feeling embarrassed to be happily married (and to a man!) in queer spaces where I’d found nothing but friendship, acceptance, and community. A few days before my fortieth birthday, I took a deep breath and came out to my husband (whose straightforward, unruffled acceptance underlined all the reasons I made a great decision to have married him), to my Pride community, and then to friends, in a gradual, ongoing, never-not-scary process.
In some ways, nothing’s changed. My relationship is as solid and monogamous as ever, my friendships are as unfailingly loving as they’ve always been, and I remain involved in queer activism in broadly the same ways I have been for years. And yet in others, everything is new. I feel seen and known as my whole self for the first time in my adult life. I’m seeking out more opportunities to build a visible queer community, and to identify myself proudly as bisexual—in a way that isn’t invalidated by my marriage to a man, and that in many ways was enabled through the confidence and security grown through a long-term loving relationship.
I’m able to look ahead to a second act of life that looks a little more like those queer and feminist elders I’ve looked up to for so long: one that is boldly committed to the pursuit of social justice, that couldn’t care less about seeking approval or awaiting permission, and that defines a good life not by externally set laws, rules and norms, but by an internal moral compass that is set to care, solidarity, and community. And that perhaps helps clear the path for the next generation of young people—to show them that a good life comes in many forms, that joy, success, happiness, and authenticity can be theirs, and that you’re never too old to claim the identities that fit your soul.
Here’s to the glorious process of aging!
Kathryn Welch lives and works in Scotland, where she crafts things, organizes some projects, and tries to make good things happen.