Why after 20 years married to a man, I became a LOL (that’s Late Onset Lesbian)… and wed a woman

Clear blue skies, the low winter sun lighting up the sea, even the unusually balmy weather seeming to conspire to give the occasion an extra blessing; it was a wonderful day.

This was my second wedding, in December, with almost 40 years between the two.

At the first, barely out of our teens, the tousled-haired boy I met at university and I were pronounced husband and wife.

Devoted: Ginny Dougary (left) and her wife MJ

This was in a follow-up ceremony to the one at the Town Hall where, legally, we had to be declared each other’s wives.

I first started noticing articles about a fascinating, apparently new, phenomenon called Late Onset Lesbianism some years ago now, and thought ‘Hang on, they’re writing about me’. And, with my fondness for a silly acronym, instantly declared that, in that case, I must be a LOL.

The accompanying photos tended to be of a small number of well-known women, where one member of the couple had either been married to a man with whom she had a family or who had previously been viewed as heterosexual.

Mary ‘Queen of Shops’ Portas with fashion writer Melanie Rickey; Susie Orbach, the psychologist and writer, with novelist and lesbian Jeanette Winterson; TV presenters Sue Perkins and Anna Richardson, the latter having previously been in a relationship with a male film director for 18 years; Sex And The City’s Cynthia Nixon, who ran for New York Governor, who was in a long-term relationship with the father of their two children, before she fell in love with a gay woman, Christine Marinoni, with whom she now has a son.

And now into the pantheon of amazing LOLs, we welcome brilliant actress Fiona Shaw who has been forever ‘out’ but has just opened up, movingly, about the contentment of domestic life with her new wife, Dr Sonali Deraniyagala, an economist, who lost her husband, their two young sons and her parents in the tragic Boxing Day tsunami in her home country of Sri Lanka in 2004. 

The two women met in New York; Shaw was in a play and wanted to meet Deraniyagala because she so admired her memoir, Wave.

I, too, admired my, er, my . . . well, I still find it hard to say ‘wife’. MJ (short for Mary Jo — a name that does not suit her) has a wonderful voice, a huge heart and a charismatic personality. 

She has been a political activist, an entertainer, composer and choir director.

She and I met around 20 years ago at a time when what had been a long and fulfilling marriage for more than two decades had run out of steam.

My husband and I had children, a comfortable house and garden, careers and a large circle of good friends; we appeared to be living the happily married dream. The point is that we had been happy for a very long time, and then — sadly — we were not. Fiona Shaw plays head of MI6’s Russian division in Killing Eve.

What this is not about, however, is a story where for all my adult life, I had been secretly attracted to and pining to be with a woman.

As a Late Onset Lesbian, not an Early Ongoing Lesbian (EOL), like all LOLs, I get a fair amount of the ‘So when did you . . . ’ (cue sympathetic, searching gaze) ‘first know that you were . . . ’

As I sometimes joke, I must be a bit lesbian — since I have now married a woman. But, unlike MJ, I do not, perhaps coming so very late in life to it, tend to think of myself as ‘A Lesbian’.

I would not at all, for instance, like to be referred to now as ‘the lesbian journalist, Ginny Dougary’. And it would be inaccurate anyway since I am obviously, if anything, bi-sexual.

Like the singer Alison Goldfrapp, who became involved with film editor, Lisa Gunning, said: ‘I think of everything as being about a person and a relationship and I am in a wonderful relationship with a wonderful person. It just happens to be with a lady. Why does it need a label?’

But then I think of all the ways in which lesbians do suffer — from being imprisoned and stoned to death in some countries to merely being taunted and beaten up in our own, and it seems important to be a bit brave and honest and to own the word.

My ‘one and only’, herself, having always thought of herself as gay, has her own experiences of being frightened of violence in words and action. 

When she toured in the South, in her native America, she and her former long-term partner never dared to hold hands in public since there was a real threat of them being set upon by homophobic upstanding Christians.

So is there any commonality in the women who, like me, have chosen in later life — having perhaps had children with their husbands — to be with another woman?

As it happens, one of my best friends married her long-term female partner in Sydney, two days after our wedding. 

We spent part of our honeymoon celebrating together. When I told her, years ago now, the news that I had fallen in love with a woman, her response was: ‘How clever you are with your timing.’

What she meant was that, unlike her, I had experienced all the advantages of being an unexceptional ‘ordinary’ Mum, with small children, not having to worry about being rejected or accepted by other school parents; not exposing my own boys to being bullied on account of their parents’ difference, and so on and so forth.

I was free to choose any school for our sons to feel comfortable in, not make a choice based on how likely they would fit in coming from what remains an unusual family set up.

I can still remember my friend telling us about her first experience with a woman — now almost 30 years later, her wife — and how every part of her body had been made to feel erogenous. 

As she told us how she was transported, the rest of us boring heterosexuals felt a shiver of intrigue, astonishment and a touch of envy.

What are the differences, I am often asked, between being married to a man and being married to a woman — as though I am Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, myself navigating the world first as a man then a woman.

But this is to suggest that each man has to stand for all men, and each woman likewise. When, in reality, it must surely depend on the particular man or particular woman you marry?

Well, in my old married life — my husband did all the cooking, as did my wife’s former partner. 

We still laugh that her mother thought we might starve, with neither of us having cooked. But, amazingly, that didn’t happen and although I swore this was not going to take place, I am now the one who prepares most of the meals.

Actually, I enjoy this — to the extent that I rather regret all the years when I didn’t. In that marriage, it was a very Boys’ Own household of Dad and sons watching the football, while Mum tended to work in the study.

My husband and I made a great social team, inviting people round a lot. My Mrs is less sociable (maybe because she is always entertaining in her job) but rises to the occasion. 

An important factor is that my wife (you know, it’s beginning to sound less odd the more I use it) and I have a very strong shared interest which means we play together as well as work together.

She and I are co-founders of a prison charity, Liberty Choir, where we create choirs in prisons which are a mixture of prisoners and volunteers from MJ’s community choirs. 

I love singing and some weeks, get a chance to do it half a dozen times in the various community and prison choirs.

We fell in love through singing and met when I was in one of MJ’s choirs around 20 years ago.

It is not uncommon for people to have a crush on their choir director but at some point I realised that my admiration had turned into something deeper and quite different.

What were these feelings I had? Why did my heart beat faster when she was around? Why did I think about her all the time when we were just friends?

All the clichés of falling in love, and the only reason it wasn’t blindingly obvious was because she was a woman. 

Then we kissed and suddenly everything was crystal clear. Now we are each other’s songbirds, love birds, birds of a feather.

What I notice since people have been aware that I am with a woman, is how many well-known women (no, absolutely not telling) confide in me that they, too, have had female lovers — sometimes long ago.

Women are apparently more given to being sexually flexible than men, whatever their age. 

I go with the theory that we are all on a barometer — at one end is the unequivocal person who is 100 per cent gay, and at the other — the purist heterosexual.

In between the two absolutes, is a whole range of men or women who might lean more one way than the other.

I sometimes wonder if any of this would have happened if my mother had still been alive. 

When she died, and I emerged from the long months — years, really — of being sucked into the undertow of her dying, I missed her dreadfully. But with the grief, came a sort of wild freedom to be or do anything I wanted.

The fact that I didn’t know what I wanted was less important than the significance of someone to whom I spoke daily and had gone to the hospital every week for her chemo, was now gone. 

When you are in that intensely bereaved state, how starkly do you feel this truth: you are alive, and then you are dead.

A female partner can, in my experience, encompass many different people; she can be an aspect of a mother, a sister, a best friend as well as a lover. 

She has her soft side and is unafraid to be unashamedly romantic. But she can also be tough, sometimes as hard as nails. 

(You should see the look in the men’s eyes in Wandsworth Prison when MJ tells them off.)

I love the interest and nuance of this multi-faceted combination; it expands my own emotional range and responses. I learn a lot from being with her.

Happy: Fiona Shaw (right) with her wife Dr Sonali Deraniyagala

Dr Deraniyagala, Fiona Shaw’s new wife, lost her whole family in that tsunami and wanted to take her own life in her loss. 

She found the chance to love again and it happened to be with a woman.

MJ and I were in New York when the planes hit the Twin Towers in 2001.

We watched the television footage in horror and then went onto the roof top and saw the plumes of smoke and a gap where those landmark buildings had stood the night before.

On the streets, in that deathly sky’s silence, we passed men and women ashen-faced, their bodies covered in the fall-out from the towers. 

We found a Unitarian church and sat in silence and wept. Everyone we spoke to knew someone who had died in that tragedy. They were alive, and then they were dead.

Being in a city that I had lived in and loved — with my former husband just after we married — transformed by a tragedy of that magnitude does tend to make you focus on carpe-ing the bloody diem.

If it is true that all that will survive of us is love, then maybe it is the right thing to do to seize love and happiness when, against all likely odds, they present themselves to you.

At my second wedding were MJ’s 88-year-old mother and her baby great nephew. For this momentous occasion, her older brother came to visit for the first time since she has been in this country. 

He formally welcomed me into their large Italian-American family. The words were heartfelt; they counted for something. 

My sons were best men along with MJ’s brother; her niece was best woman alongside two of my oldest female friends — one from childhood.

In attendance, were many of mine and my ex-husband’s friends who had celebrated his marriage to his second wife and arrival of their son — all of which happened good long years ago now.

My boys’ speeches were great and full of love and affection for MJ as well as for their Mum. People ask me (not so often nowadays): ‘How did your sons handle it?’ 

Well, they were upset at their mum and dad breaking up, of course, and no divorced parent escapes feeling guilty about causing that distress. 

There is, after all, a reason why people battle on being unhappy and unsatisfied in a marriage for the rest of their lives rather than risk change.

But as far as my sons’ feelings about their mother having a girlfriend are concerned, I can honestly say they were relaxed about it.

With a gay godmother, a gay nanny, and with our many gay male and female friends — they were not brought up to think that being gay (which is why that insult is so pathetic) is shameful. 

In fact, what I notice, as my friends do, is how fluid their generation are in comparison to our own.

If women choosing women in later life is ‘A Thing’, I don’t believe it’s because — as one surely forlorn chap put it — ‘men are so sh*t’. Absolutely not, at any rate, in my case.

I had a wonderful marriage and then I didn’t and now we are both lucky to have another go at it. 

An old friend said what made her teary at this wedding was ‘not so much you but looking at MJ’s face and knowing that she must have spent nearly all of her life never dreaming that this day would be possible’.

As our wedding invitations said, Amor Vincit Omnia — and love really does conquer all.

Daily Mail