<
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/mar/19/people-who-started-again-in-their-90s-nonagenarians>
"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.”
The audience cheered. “Afterwards, I sat down and I had a beer and I tell you,
I have never been so happy in all my life. I was a new girl at 95.” She laughs,
speaking on the phone from California. “So you might have me for 95 more
years.” It changed her life, she says. Now 97, she has been embraced by the
LGBTQ+ community and invited to events, but what means the most to her is the
people who tell her they have been inspired by her. “That made me feel so
wonderful. So many people have told me how I helped them come out, and their
families understand now what is going on in their lives.” She hasn’t had one
person, “to my face anyway”, say anything negative."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
