Finding your people late

I walked into the back room of a pub in Northcote on a Wednesday night, forty-seven years old, in the only "going-out" shirt I owned, and stood at the door of a queer book club with my hand on the doorframe like a kid at his first day of school. The room was full of people who already knew each other. A man at the table looked up, registered me, and said, with no fuss at all, "You must be Robin. We saved you a chair." I sat. I did not speak for the first half-hour. I was so grateful I could have wept into my pint of light beer.

That night was the start of finding my people. It was not a montage. It was one Wednesday, then another Wednesday, then twelve Wednesdays. The community did not arrive. I joined it.

The grief of the missing twenty years

Before I get to the practical part, I have to name the thing that nobody else seems to want to name out loud, which is the grief.

When you come out at forty-five or fifty or fifty-five, you walk into queer community spaces and you immediately notice that most of the men in your age bracket have been here for thirty years. They have shared references you do not have. They went to the dance parties of the early nineties. They lost friends in the AIDS crisis. They were at the marriage equality rallies in 2004 when nobody was listening. They have a layered, scarred, beautiful relationship with this community that you do not, because you were in the suburbs raising your kids and renovating your kitchen.

The grief sits in the gap. It says: I should have been here. I should have done this when my body still looked like a body and my hair was thick and my knees worked. I should have been twenty-three at the dance party. I should have lost the friends and gone to the rallies. I should have done the apprenticeship of being queer and instead I came in at the master class with no toolbox.

The grief is real and you have to let it have its hours. You also have to not let it run the rest of your life, because the alternative to coming out late is not coming out at twenty. The alternative is not coming out. And not coming out, for a man whose body is telling him this is the truth, is its own slow form of harm.

So you sit with the grief. You name it. You tell one person. And then you start doing the actual work of arriving, late, with the body you have, in the year you are in.

Where to actually look

The instinct, especially in the first few months, is to download the apps and assume that is where queer community happens. The apps are part of it. They are not most of it, and for a man over forty-five they are often the worst part of it. The apps were optimised for hookups and twenty-eight-year-olds. You can find people on them. You will not find a community there.

Community happens in the analogue places. Slower, quieter, repeating-weekly places. Here is where I have actually found people, in rough order of how well it has worked for men in their late forties and fifties.

• Community sport. Out for Sport, the Tigers (gay rugby), Different Strokes (queer swimming), the Pink Flamingos (queer tennis), masters'' divisions of mixed-skill leagues. The over-forties divisions exist. The bodies are not all twenty-five. The locker room is the unlikely heart of mid-life queer friendship.
• Choirs. The Melbourne Gay and Lesbian Chorus and its equivalents in every capital. Median age skews older. No audition required for many of them. Two-hour rehearsal weekly, gigs every quarter, deep friendships within six months.
• Queer professional networks. Out for Australia, Pride in Diversity, industry-specific groups (queer lawyers, queer doctors, queer engineers). Lower-pressure, slightly polished, useful if you are still working and want to meet people in your decade.
• Bushwalking and outdoors clubs. Vic Gay Bushwalkers and equivalents. Saturday day-walks, average age fifty-something, the social density of being in a small group on a track for six hours is very high.
• Pride community groups in your local council area. Most metropolitan councils run one. Quieter than the apps. Full of people who, like you, decided the apps were not it.
• Social apps for older queer men specifically. Silver Daddies and similar. Not for hookups particularly, in my experience, but for finding men in your bracket who want a coffee and a chat.
• PFLAG. Yes, PFLAG. It is for parents and friends of LGBTIQ+ people, which technically does not include you, but late-arrival men are welcome at most chapters, and the parents in those rooms are some of the warmest people you will meet.
• Volunteer work for an LGBTIQ+ organisation. Switchboard, JOY 94.9, Thorne Harbour Health, Pride events in your city. Showing up to set up chairs at six pm on a Saturday is one of the fastest ways to meet people who will become friends.

The pattern, if you look at the list, is that none of it is glamorous. None of it is bars at midnight. All of it is regular, daytime, low-stakes attendance over months. That is what works for a man at fifty.

The awkwardness of being new

The hardest part is the first six weeks. You are competent at most things in your life. You run projects. You parent. You have opinions on cabinet hardware. And here you are, standing in a room of people who are at home in a way you are not yet, and you feel like a kid pretending to be an adult, except you are an adult pretending to be a kid.

The awkwardness comes from the gap between your social competence in your old life and your beginner status in this one. You do not know the references. You do not know the etiquette. You do not know if asking that question is fine or wildly out of line. You will ask the wrong question. You will get a small correction. You will go home and lie awake replaying it. Everyone in that room has done this themselves, and most of them remember it kindly.

A few practical things that helped me through the awkward stretch.

• Go three times before deciding if it is your scene. Once is not enough. The first time you are too overwhelmed to read the room.
• Do not try to be funny in the first month. Just listen and ask short questions.
• Have a script for "what do you do" that does not apologise for your old life. "I''m a project manager, married for sixteen years, came out at forty-five, three kids, live in Mitcham" is fine. The marriage and kids are not a stain. They are who you are.
• Find one person in the room slightly less new than you. They are usually the kindest. They remember being you eight months ago.
• Do not date anyone in the room for the first six months. The community will become your home base. Dating someone in your home base before you have a home base is how you lose both.

The body in the room

There is a body thing, too, that I had not expected and that is worth naming.

You walk into queer spaces at forty-seven and you become aware of your body in a way you have not been since you were fifteen. The body of a forty-seven-year-old straight-presenting suburban dad is not optimised for the visual codes of queer spaces, which still trend young and gym-shaped at the loud end. You will, in the first month, feel under-attractive, under-styled, under-cool, and under-everything.

Two things to know.

One, the loud end is not the whole community. The loud end is the photogenic end. The actual community, the one that holds people through illness and divorces and deaths, is mostly in pubs and choir rooms and walking trails, and the body codes there are normal-human-body codes.

Two, the body you have is the body you have. There is no acceptable response to it other than feeding it well, moving it regularly, dressing it deliberately, and letting it stand in the room. Trying to retrofit a thirty-year-old body at forty-seven is a doomed and unhappy project. Standing in your forty-seven-year-old body and being recognised by other men in their forty-seven-year-old bodies is the actual prize.

I have lost weight since coming out. Not because I was trying to be hot. Because I had stopped drinking the way I drank when I was hiding, and the food sorted itself out as a side effect. The body change followed the truth-telling, not the other way around.

The compensating gift

Here is the thing I want to give you if you take nothing else from this.

The grief of doing it late is real. The compensating gift of doing it late is also real, and almost nobody talks about it.

You arrive into queer community with adult tools. You have run hard projects. You have had your heart broken and put back together. You have buried people. You have raised children, or held a marriage, or built something at work. You know how to show up to a thing weekly for years even when the early weeks are awkward. You know how to apologise. You know how to forgive. You know what kind of friend you are and what kind of friend you are not.

These tools are the actual currency of mid-life community. The twenty-three-year-old version of you would not have had them. He would have had stamina and beauty and a willingness to stay out till four, and he would not have had patience, follow-through, financial stability, or the capacity to sit with someone in the hospital. The version of you arriving now has the second set, which turns out to be the set that builds the SOLID friendships of your fifties and sixties.

You did not miss the boat. You missed the early ferry. The boat you are on now sails to a different harbour, and the harbour is, if you let it, more honest than the one you would have arrived at at twenty-three.

A short list of what I have, four years in, that I did not have at thirty.

• Three queer friends I would ring at two in the morning and they would answer.
• A choir of forty-six people who know my name.
• A Sunday-walk group of eight men in their fifties and sixties.
• A partner I love and live with.
• A clear sense of which version of being queer is mine, and which versions are not.

None of that existed five years ago. None of it took heroic effort. All of it took showing up regularly to small unglamorous rooms and not giving up after week three.

Show up small. Show up often. Stay late.