6 Movies And TV Shows That Best Represent Coming Out As LGBTQ+ Later In Life

Thankfully, there's an ever-growing number of TV shows and movies where members of the LGBTQ+ community are positively represented. We've seen many coming out scenes grace our screens over the years, with the likes of TV shows "Glee," "Sex Education," "Euphoria," "Sex Lives of College Girls," and "Stranger Things" and movies including "Crazy Rich Asians," and "Love, Simon," all featuring LGBTQ+ characters who feel proud to tell their stories and live as their authentic selves.

But not everybody feels they can come out when they're younger. For a whole host of reasons, including just not feeling comfortable yet, many people find themselves closeted until they're older. But, just as we're finding many celebrities coming out later in life, we're also starting to see more TV and movie characters coming to terms with their sexuality or sharing their stories with loved ones when they're older. And that's just as important as seeing people proudly share that they're a member of the LGBTQ+ community when they're in their teens or even younger. So, to celebrate that there's no such thing as the "wrong time" to share that truth with the world, we're looking at some of the TV shows and movies that best represent coming out a little later in life.

In "Jane The Virgin," Yael Grobglas's character Petra Solano comes out as bisexual and embraces a relationship with Rosario Dawson's character Jane Ramos. Before that, we'd only seen Petra in relationships with men. But the show's creator Jennie Urman explained to BuzzFeed News that writing Petra as bisexual (which there are many misconceptions about, by the way) allowed the show to explore important new storylines. "It really opens up a whole new avenue of storytelling, and romance," Urman shared. "There's something about her that's always conflated sex with where you're going to end up, and what you're gonna get, and different power dynamics. With J.R. we wanted Petra to be on her heel, and for Petra to suddenly realize that she wasn't quite in control."

Petra isn't the only slightly older (Grobglas was born in 1984) character who identified as bisexual in the show, though. Tyler Posey also starred in the dramedy as Adam, who gets into a relationship with Jane and opens up to her about his bisexuality. One of the most important storylines then became Jane's reaction to Adam's truth, as it tested just how progressive and open-minded she really was. "[People are] wanting to see different relationships on TV," Urman told the outlet of why having two bisexual characters come out was so important. "You want to put out things in the world that you want to see, and that will help guide diverse representation in terms of what relationships [look like]."

One of the most iconic sitcom episodes ever, "Ellen: The Puppy Episode" saw Ellen DeGeneres officially come out to the world via her character, Ellen Morgan. The episode aired in 1997, when DeGeneres was around 40 years old, and saw the character explicitly confirm that she is gay. The episode has been much talked about over the years and is arguably seen as one of the most important LGBTQ+ TV moments in history. The reason it's so important? Because it marked the first time on U.S. TV that a leading character in primetime had come out and also marked the first leading primetime character to be played by an out gay actor.

DeGeneres looked back on the ground-breaking episode on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" in 2022, admitting that although she got a lot of backlash at the time, sharing her truth was well worth it. "It really goes to show you how important it is to be your authentic self, and how important it is to accept others as their authentic selves," DeGeneres shared on the talk show (via People). "I didn't see a lot of people like me on television when I was a kid."

In 2018, "Grey's Anatomy" aired an extremely important scene during the episode "1-800-799-7233" (titled after the National Domestic Violence Hotline) that saw Alex Blue Davis's character Casey Parker share that he is trans. It hadn't been confirmed that Casey was transgender before the poignant moment, as Casey decided it was the right time for him to share his story with Bailey, played by Chandra Wilson. "I'm a proud trans man, Dr. Bailey. I like for people to get to know me before they find out my medical history," Casey said in the episode.

"Grey's Anatomy" showrunner Krista Vernoff spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the critical moment in the show and how the team knew the storyline had to be done properly after years of trans characters being vilified and made the butt of the joke on the small screen. "My goal as a storyteller was to help illuminate that experience as an ally," Vernoff told the outlet during the 2018 interview. Blue Davis, who was born in 1983, also spoke to the outlet about the importance of representing the trans community in the best way possible, sharing, "People can see trans folks in a new light: these are people who walk among us and are human beings who have lives. They're not defined by being trans."

Of course, "Brokeback Mountain" is one of the most iconic movies when it comes to LGBTQ+ characters who came out later in life. The movie centers around two cowboys, played by the late Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, who come to terms with their sexuality later in life. The relationship between the two, thought to be in their twenties, develops after they sleep together during a camping trip — despite both identifying as straight before that. Gyllenhaal's Jack Twist initially comes on to Ledger's Ennis Del Mar after the two have been drinking and, although Ennis was initially reluctant, the two end up developing a very close bond.

Speaking during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter a decade after the 2005 movie's release, Gyllenhaal opened up about the gay love story and how the two characters were initially bound together by their loneliness, falling in love despite their sex. "Hopefully it can create an equality of an idea: that is, it's possible that you can find love anywhere," he explained. "That intimacy exists in so many places that convention and society won't always allow us to see. And we won't allow ourselves to see, because of what criticism — and danger, really — it might provoke."

"The Danish Girl" movie, based on the book of the same name, tells the embellished real story of Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener. Eddie Redmayne, who was born in 1982, stars as Lili, who comes out as transgender and sets about living their life as the sex they feel they should have been assigned at birth. Although the movie got some backlash over Redmayne, a non-trans actor, playing the role, there's no doubt that the movie still tells an important story and acts as an invaluable source of representation for many members of the LGBTQ+ community. 

The movie's director, Tom Hooper, opened up about the casting process and how important it was to get that visibility for the community, explaining how they tried to accurately portray how difficult life would have been for Lili, who lived in the 1920s. "We felt that actually, in the 1920s when there was no language to describe what she was going through — you know the word transgender wasn't in use — it was her way of making sense of it, of explaining it to other people," Cooper told IndieWire when asked about how Lili and her Einar (Lili's name pre-transition) were referred to as two separate people. "Inside there was this battle between her masculine side and her feminine side. And so it was really in honor of the language that the real person used that we kept that."

Focusing on a 32-year-old woman coming to terms with her sexuality, "Am I OK?" offers important and explicit representation for members of the LGBTQ+ community who didn't come out when they were super young. The movie stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy, who realizes that she's not having meaningful relationships with men because she identifies as a lesbian. After discovering the part of herself she never truly realized until she was in her 30s, the movie, directed and produced by the openly gay Tig Notaro, shows what happens when Lucy starts to live life as her true self.

"Am I OK?"'s writer, Lauren Pomerantz, told Entertainment Weekly that she wrote the movie based on her own experiences with her sexuality. "I took my whole coming out late story, and I used that, and I really based it on a real-life friendship with my best friend Jessica [Elbaum], who is also a producer on this movie," she shared. Johnson has also revealed why she signed on for the poignant movie, telling Variety in 2022,  "It's a story and subject matter that I thought was really cool, in the shape of a female buddy comedy, but there's some very real and honest and difficult internal landscapes happening within these women."