It’s never too late and you’re never too old – at least according to the nonagenarians who are coming out, completing PhDs and publishing their first books in their 10th decade
The moment Maybelle Blair took a decision – one she didn’t know she was about to take – she says she “felt like all the blood rushed away from my head, down to my toes. I didn’t know what was happening”. Blair, the former baseball player in the postwar women’s league which inspired the 1992 film A League of Their Own, was on stage at the 2022 Tribeca film festival in New York, since she had been involved in Amazon’s TV adaptation. She looked around and wondered why she was still hiding. Although her sexuality had not been a secret among her teammates, she decided there and then to publicly come out at the age of 95.
“Out of the clear blue sky, I just blurted out ‘I want everybody to know’,” she says. “I was in the closet for 95 years. That old door blew open. I was sitting there, my eyes wide open, mouth open probably. I thought, ‘Oh my God, after 95 years, you said that?’ And I did. I wasn’t afraid any more because I was so old and it really didn’t matter, except for my family, what people thought.”
