Coming Out & Beyond | Support for Women Questioning Their Sexuality

SUMMARY

How does someone go from quietly questioning her sexuality to sharing her story in The New York Times? In this episode of Coming Out and Beyond, Anne-Marie Zanzal is joined by Tonda McKay and Barbara Rowlandson to reflect on a feature about Shelly, a woman navigating marriage, divorce, and coming out later in life. Anne-Marie explains how the article developed, the steps taken to protect the privacy of her support community, and how Shelly became its central subject.

The conversation moves beyond the headline to the emotional realities of questioning sexuality in midlife: grief...

Summary:

In this episode of Coming Out & Beyond, Anne-Marie Zanzal is joined by her wife, Tonda McKay, and Barbara Rowlandson to answer real questions from Reddit about lesbian dating, intimacy, and relationships later in life.

One question comes from a woman in her 50s who has recently embraced her lesbian identity and developed feelings for the only openly lesbian friend she knows. Unsure whether her attraction is genuine or influenced by familiarity, she wonders whether to reveal her feelings and risk changing their friendship. The hosts discuss navigating attraction, coming out to friends, and recognizing...

Content note: this episode includes discussion of conversion therapy and religious trauma.

Two hundred episodes. We still can't quite believe it either. To celebrate this milestone, and National Coming Out Day, Anne-Marie Zanzal gathers three of her all-time favorite guests around the mic: her wife Tonda McKay, coach and therapist Barb Rowlandson, and coach and business consultant Anna Empey.

Anne-Marie shares how the show began, with Anna nudging her for three years to start a podcast until a pandemic finally changed her mind. Then each woman tells her own coming out story, from oldest to...

What is the difference between a coach and a therapist, and how do you know which one you need? Anne-Marie Zanzal welcomes back her frequent guest and longtime business coach Anna Empey, owner of Business Inspired Solution, for an honest conversation about the kinds of support available to women coming out later in life.

Both women have spent years in therapy, and both are clear that it matters. They talk about what licensed therapists do that coaches cannot, why anyone leaving a high control religion deserves a therapist who truly understands religious trauma, and how a good...

This week on Coming Out & Beyond it is the three of us again: Anne-Marie, dating and relationship guide Barb Rowlandson, and Anne-Marie's wife and resident realist, Tonda McKay. Twice a month we set the dating talk to the side and answer the questions that come in from all of you. This time they gathered around one tender thing, which is how you actually step into queer community when you are starting at the very beginning.

The women who wrote in were standing at the door and could not quite walk through it. One had not dated in...

Note for Listeners: This episode contains explicit language and conversation about sex and sexual pleasure. Listener discretion is advised.

What if the best sex of your life is still ahead of you?

In this episode of Coming Out and Beyond, Anne-Marie Zanzal and dating coach Barbara Rowlandson sit down with Susan Bratton, the intimacy expert to millions and one of the most prolific and widely read sex educators in the world. Susan has spent more than two decades teaching the kind of sex education most of us were never given, the kind rooted in pleasure...

This month on Coming Out and Beyond it is our monthly dating and relationship show, and Anne-Marie is joined by her co-coach Barbara Rowlandson, a psychotherapist and dating coach, and her wife Tonda McKay. Before the questions, the three of them catch up on a summer of kayaking, wineries, and a 2,500 mile road trip through Michigan that somehow ended without a single argument. Anne-Marie and Tonda talk honestly about what ten years together and five years of marriage have actually asked of them, because the falling in love was real and so was the work.

Then we...

This month's episode with Anna Empey is the one we have all earned after a tender chapter of heavier conversations. It is lighter, there is a lot of laughing, and it is about the signs. Not the ones we noticed at the time, but the ones we can only see now, the ones that were quietly flashing the whole time while we went about our lives.

Anne-Marie and Anna compare notes on the intense friendships they once organized their whole worlds around, and on the celebrity crushes they were so sure were nothing more than admiration. They...

This is the start of something new. The episodes you have told us you love most are the ones where the three of us sit down together, so we are making them a monthly gathering. Once a month, Tonda, Barbara, and I will open the letters and answer the questions women are actually asking: the real ones, the tender ones, the slightly awkward ones, and the ones you would only ask us at two in the morning with the door shut.

If you are new to the show, here is who you are sitting with. I came...

Some mornings change everything. Marissa Mitchell was 39, a teacher and army veteran in southern Indiana, married to her junior high sweetheart and quietly certain that the distance she felt in her marriage was a problem she could fix if she only tried harder. Then one ordinary morning, about a week into summer break, she woke up understanding something that reordered her whole life. She was in love with a woman, and she had been moving through the world as someone she was not.

In this conversation, one we are revisiting from Season 1, Marissa tells the story of...

It is the second Friday of the month, which means Anne-Marie is back with the company she loves most: her fellow coach Barbara Rowlandson and her wife Tonda McKay. This is the monthly conversation so many of you tell us is your favorite, where we take the real questions women ask about sapphic dating and answer them with honesty, humor, and a lot of love.

This month we open four questions from the Late Bloomer Lesbian forum. What do you do when you are in your late thirties, newly aware of who you are, and embarrassed that...

What if fear is not a stop sign but a signal that you are growing?

In this month's first Friday conversation, Anne-Marie is joined by regular guest Anna Empey, business development consultant and LGBTQ+ coach, for an honest look at fear. Not how to get rid of it, because we cannot, but how to stop letting it make our decisions for us.

Together they explore why the brain works so hard to keep us in our comfort zones, even the miserable ones, and why so many women stay in marriages, jobs, and closets for years...

This week we return to one of our most beloved conversations from the archives, my talk with Dr. Mallory Hanfling, a fellow later in life queer woman, therapist, and the creator of the term Firefly.

Mallory shares her story with such honesty. She married a kind man, built a genuine friendship with him, and still felt that something was quietly wrong. Like so many of us, she searched everywhere for an answer. Individual therapy, couples therapy, sex therapy, endless blood work, and doctors who offered birth control and even exploratory surgery. She was looking for a physiological...

What if the single biggest factor in whether we come out, when we come out, and how we heal along the way is the community around us? Dr. Mallory Hanfling returns to the show, this time with research in hand. Mallory recently completed her PhD in human sexuality, and her dissertation explored how community mitigates the impact of compulsory heterosexuality on the Firefly experience, the journey of those who discover something new about their sexuality or gender after committing to a relationship that appeared straight from the outside.

Mallory shares why she coined the term Firefly, what...

Content note: This conversation includes language that references homophobic slurs and a discussion of suicidal ideation and mental health struggles. Please listen with care, and reach out for support if you need it.

What happens when the thing you love most is the very thing the world tells you is wrong?

This week we sit down with Stef Vachon, a proud queer man, husband, father, keynote speaker, and former international professional figure skater with over 30 years of experience performing around the world. Stef grew up in a small French speaking town in Quebec where every...

It is the second Friday of the month, which means Anne-Marie is joined by dating coach Barbara Rowlandson and Nashville photographer Tonda McKay, to talk all things sapphic dating and relationships. This month the trio takes on four real questions from women navigating the queer dating world. How do you slow down when every connection turns intense within weeks? Are you a jerk for losing interest when someone shows up looking nothing like their photos? What do you do when you want more intimacy than your partner does? And how do you recover when a promising connection ends after...

When you come out to someone, you learn very quickly to tell the difference between the half embrace and the full embrace. The half embrace turns the conversation back to your husband, your children, your family system within the first thirty seconds. The full embrace simply asks, how are you doing.

In this episode, Anne-Marie sits down with frequent guest Anna Empey for a tender and honest conversation about what we wish straight allies actually knew. Together they unpack why coming out is never about sex, but about identity, love, community, future, and wholeness. They name the...

In Part 2 of this conversation, Anne-Marie Zanzal continues her talk with Dahron Johnson, a trans woman, advocate, lifelong cyclist, and chair of the Metro Human Relations Commission in Nashville, who came out in her late forties after decades of quietly knowing.

Dahron shares the rush of the days right after she realized a change had to be made, from calling care providers within 48 hours to playing the "wait list shell game" that shortened a six month wait down to six weeks. She remembers her first public moment out in the world, changing into a brand new outfit...

Dahron Johnson grew up surrounded by voices. Thousands of books in her parents' home, two people who met in divinity school, and a faith that taught her every person is fearfully and wonderfully made. And still, for decades, she could not find the words for who she was.

In this episode, Anne-Marie sits down with her dear friend Dahron, a clinically trained chaplain, a tireless advocate, and the first openly trans person to speak from the floor of the Tennessee House. The two of them share roots in the North, in the church, and in the long...

This month we return to our lesbian dating and relationship conversation, the one we share on the second Friday of every month, and by popular request Tonda is back at the table!

Anne-Marie is joined by her wife, Tonda McKay, our longtime out lesbian and resident truth teller, and by Barbara Rowlandson, fellow coach and the woman who helps lead our Authentically Us community. Together we work through four real questions pulled from the Lesbian Dating Advice subreddit, and the conversation moves from laughing out loud to genuinely tender.

We start with the question so...

TW: This episode includes honest discussion about grief, estrangement and suicidal ideation. Listener discretion is advised.

There is a kind of loss that arrives without a funeral. No casserole on the doorstep, no card in the mail, no ritual to mark it. It is the loss of people who are still alive, of communities that keep meeting without us, of the versions of ourselves we performed for decades. It is called estrangement, and for those of us who came out later in life or left the faith traditions that raised us, it may be one of the...

In this revisited Season 5 favorite, Anne-Marie sits down with photographer Tonda McKay, who also happens to be her wife. Tonda came out at eighteen as a good Southern Baptist girl whose prayer partner became her first love, and she has spent the decades since building a life as a long-out lesbian in the South. She shares what those early years held: the isolation of believing she was the only one, the family rupture when her mother said she was dead to her, and the slow, joyful discovery of community through a liberal church softball team.

The conversation...

This week on Coming Out & Beyond, Anne-Marie sits down with Keith Aron (he/they), a trans and queer transformational coach, writer, proudly witchy weirdo, and self-described honorary tree. Keith writes the Substack Big Blue Sky Dragonfly, where he explores the sweet spot between belonging and authenticity — and his story is one Anne-Marie has been wanting to share for a long time.

Keith came out as a lesbian in 2001, while living in conservative Northern Virginia, married to a man, and parenting a young child. There was no social media then, no community waiting on the other side of a...

A decade ago, Anne-Marie and Katrina Anne Willis met inside a small Facebook group that no longer exists — a quiet corner of the internet where women who had Googled "late in life lesbian" found each other. They were both raising kids. Both married to men. Both trying to understand a feeling they didn't yet have language for.

This week, they finally meet face to face.

Katrina is the author of Hurricane Lessons: A Memoir of Betrayal and Becoming, released April 7th by Sibylline Press. In this conversation, she and Anne-Marie trade their parallel stories — the Pila...

A woman in our community wrote in and asked: "What if my lesbian sex experience doesn't live up to the hype? Does that make me not gay?"

That question deserved more than a one-line answer. So Anne-Marie brought in two of her favorite humans to tell the truth — the kind of truth nobody hands you before you get here.

Her wife Tonda McKay has been out for forty years and brings the long view: what the community looked like before midlife women started arriving in big numbers, and what she's watched shift since. Co-coach Barb Ro...

Join the 3-Day Clarity Experience, May 5–7. A live space for women in the long middle who are ready to stop doing it alone — not to get a fix, but to sit with the questions alongside a community of women in exactly the same place. Standard admission is $47, or $87 for VIP, which includes a private 45-minute call with Anne-Marie. https://annemariezanzal.com/3-day-clarity-experience/

The fantasy is that one day you wake up and everything snaps into place — the marriage, the friendships, the way you dress, the way you pray. What nobody tells us is that for most of us, be...

Something in you already knows.

Maybe it's been whispering for years. Maybe it got louder recently. Maybe you can't quite name it yet — but you know something is asking to be looked at.

If you've been sitting with questions about who you are, who you love, or what this next chapter of your life is actually supposed to look like, the 3-Day Clarity Experience was built for you.

Three evenings. One guide. A real map forward.

Live on Zoom, May 5–7, 2026 - 7:00–8:15 PM CST

In this week's episode of Coming Out & Beyond, Anne-Marie traces the winding, decade-long road that led her from a single paragraph in an Oprah magazine to finally saying the words out loud — and finding the woman who would become her wife along the way.

She begins in 2006, when an article about women who had left marriages with men to be with women cracked something open in her — a joy she couldn't explain and quietly tucked away. She walks listeners through every moment she tried to surface that truth: a therapist who made her feel like she'd failed a li...

You're finally dating women — and maybe dating in general for the first time in decades. The apps are confusing, the feelings are big, and it can be hard to know when to trust your gut and when you're overthinking it.

In this episode, Anne-Marie sits down with resident dating authority Barbara Rowlandson — therapist, dating coach, and marriage officiant who has literally married hundreds of couples — for a candid, practical conversation about red flags in the world of lesbian and queer dating.

They cover the warning signs that show up before you've even met in person: profil...

Coming out names something true. But it doesn't hand you a place to land.

In this episode of Coming Out & Beyond, Anne-Marie sits down with returning guest Anna Empey — LGBT coach, business development consultant, and community builder — for an honest, tender conversation about what it really takes to find your people after you've found yourself.

Anna knows firsthand what it costs to lose the communities you thought you'd hold forever — her faith community, her family connections, her sense of where she fit. And she knows what it took to build something new, not because it was ea...

Five weeks before her wedding, Danni Hoshino was lying in bed next to her fiancée when something shifted. She asked herself a question she had never quite let herself ask — and then she knew.

In this episode of Coming Out and Beyond, host Anne-Marie Zanzal sits down with Danni, a singer, songwriter, and guitarist who creates music under the name Light Bird. Her debut album, See Her, is a ten-song collection that moves through the uncertainty before transition, the fallout of coming out, and the unexpected beauty of finally living as yourself. They talk about what it...

What do you do when a single moment — a woman's hand on your thigh at a work dinner — unravels 45 years of the story you thought was yours?

That's exactly what happened to Kathy Houston. A West Point graduate, U.S. Army officer, 30-year retail leader, wife, and mother of two — Kathy spent decades doing everything exactly right. She married the day after she was commissioned. She left the military to raise her kids rather than deploy to Desert Storm. She built a career, a family, a life. And she had absolutely no idea she was gay.

Unti...

Are you ready to date — or do you just want to be? There's a difference, and this episode of Coming Out and Beyond is here to help you figure that out.

Anne-Marie is joined by the wonderful Barbara Rowlandson — dating coach, psychotherapist, and co-host of our monthly dating segment — for an honest, warm, and often hilarious conversation about what it really takes to step into the dating world as a woman who has come out later in life.

From the chaos of the "messy middle" to love bombing red flags, from building queer community to figuri...

Coming Out & Beyond has evolved.

This season is now exclusively for women questioning their sexuality, coming out later in life, and creating a life beyond—at a human pace, with honesty and community.

And if you found yourself here… you’re exactly where you’re meant to be.

If something in you has been quietly asking a question you haven't said out loud yet —

there's a free guide for exactly this moment.

No answers required. Just an honest place to begin.

Download our Maybe I Am Not Straight G...

What happens when the life you’re told to live is slowly killing you—and the life you’re afraid to live is the one that sets you free?

David Hulse has been a spiritual teacher for over 60 years. But his journey to get here took him through Pentecostal fundamentalism in Tulsa, Oklahoma, conversion therapy at 17, a church in the Jim Crow South at 19, and a marriage to a woman he thought would save him from himself.

In this episode, David shares how he moved from fear-based religion to expansive, love-centered spirituality—and what that path loo...

What Heated Rivalry Gets Right About Coming Out

You wouldn't expect a steamy male hockey romance to hit so close to home for later-in-life lesbians — but Heated Rivalry on HBO Max did exactly that.

In this episode, Anne-Marie and returning co-conspirator Barb Rowlandson break down why this show has gone viral across the LGBTQ+ community and beyond. From the real cost of staying closeted as strategy (not confusion), to the exhaustion of loving privately versus living openly, to why straight women are weeping at a gay hockey player kissing his boyfriend on th...

🔥 Ever get all dressed up for a date... and they never show? Ever wonder if you're too old for love at 43? Ever think maybe lesbian dating culture is just... toxic?

Girl, pull up a chair. We're talking about ALL of it in this episode — and trust us, you're not alone.

📞 FEELING STUCK IN YOUR DATING LIFE?

Dating is hard enough without doing it alone. If you're a sapphic woman feeling stuck, frustrated, or just plain lost when it comes to dating — whether you're freshly out, freshly heartbroken, or somewhere in between —...

It's the first Friday of the month, and that means we welcome back Anna Empey to the show! In this episode, Anne-Marie and Anna delve deep into their personal journeys of deconstructing their Catholic and Mormon faith, particularly in the context of their LGBTQIA+ identities. Each paints a vivid picture of what it was like to grow up in a home with conservative faith traditions, noting the moments when their "shelf broke" (a metaphor for losing faith), the emotional toll of leaving behind their faith communities and ingrained beliefs, and the impacts it had on their interpersonal relationships. Anne-Marie...

This week, we're revisiting an episode from Season 6 featuring GLAAD Media Award nominee, documentary photographer Morgan Lieberman. Morgan's project, "Hidden Once, Hidden Twice," published with NPR last June was recently nominated in the category of Outstanding Online Journalism – Video or Multimedia

Morgan's work has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Bloomberg, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angles Times, among others. Morgan's current documentary project titled 'Hidden Once, Hidden Twice' focuses on documenting the lives of older lesbian partnerships. This project was borne out of a desire for lesbian community and ou...

Authentically Us is a support community for later-in-life LGBTQ women at all stages of the coming out and beyond process. Coming out later in life is often accompanied by suffering. Whether you're looking to deconstruct messages from a conservative faith tradition, experience divorce-related guilt, or struggle with feelings of shame around your coming out or sexual identity, Authentically Us has the right kind of support for you. Monthly subscription to Authentically Us on Mighty Networks is $35/month, but you can try your first week for free. Find Authentically Us at https://bit.ly/Authentically-Us

Trigger Warning: This...