Women's History Month Spotlight: Terry Karlin On coming home to yourself — at 64
There's a version of Terry Karlin's life that looks, from the outside, completely ordinary.
She lived in her Lakewood childhood home for 54 years. She went to college. She got married. She took jobs that felt safe. She built a life she could explain to people.
But underneath all of it, something was waiting.
Terry was 15 when her father died of cancer. "It literally blows up your world," she says. That kind of loss at that age doesn't just break your heart — it teaches you to be careful. To not want too much. To keep yourself small enough that nothing can shatter you again.
So she did. Even when she earned a theatre degree from CU Boulder, she underplayed it. Even when she felt something stir in her Women's Studies classes — reading Audre Lorde, studying feminist psychology, feeling a pull she couldn't name — she let it pass.
She now recognizes a connection with a woman in theatre as a crush, but at the time, her feelings “went right over her head.”
"I use the word 'repressed' rather than 'suppressed,'" she explains. "Suppress means you know it and push it down. Repressed means you don't even know."
If that distinction lands somewhere in your chest, you're not alone.
For many queer women — especially those who came of age before there was language, visibility, or safety around same-sex love — the truth didn't arrive all at once. It arrived slowly, sideways, in ways the mind quietly redirected before the heart could catch up.
And in an era before same-sex marriage was even legal and LGBTQ+ representation was practically nonexistent, shame clouded Terry’s acceptance of herself.
In the late 1980s, after her marriage ended, Terry found herself on the edges of the Denver LGBTQ community during the height of the AIDS crisis. She attended naming ceremonies; rooms full of people standing together, speaking aloud the names of everyone they had lost (Denver recorded 358 AIDS cases between 1980 and 1990, though the city did not publish data on the number of deaths.)
Terry felt the weight of that grief. She felt the fierce, tender love those communities had for each other. She met women from the Denver Women's Chorus who made her feel, for the first time, like an authentic life was possible for her.
And still, she couldn't let herself cross the threshold.
"I could never say, 'I'm one of these people.'"
She was already one of them. She just couldn't know it yet.
It wasn't until her early 60s that the truth finally began to surface. And it wasn't until 64 that Terry Karlin came out as a lesbian.
With encouragement from her sister, she joined Meetup and searched for lesbian social groups. She found one called "Middle Aged and Newly Gay" — and walked into a circle of women who were navigating exactly what she was. Women who were figuring out first loves and first heartbreaks and first Pride parades while also managing mortgages, health insurance, and decades of complicated personal history.
"It's like being a teenager at the same time as being 64," she says, laughing.
If you know, you know.
Coming out later in life carries a particular kind of grief alongside its joy — the mourning of time, of years spent not quite knowing yourself, of milestones that passed without you. That grief is real, and so is the joy that lied around the corner.
She moved into an apartment community for people over 62, where she discovered she wasn't the only one. Several of her neighbors were lesbians who had also come out later in life. The conversations she'd been waiting decades to have were suddenly happening in the hallway.
"My whole life just opened up," she says. "It helped my self-esteem — not only about knowing who I was, but I made friends. I was a good person. People cared about me."
Through The Center on Colfax, Terry found something she hadn't realized she was still missing: visibility.
She started attending Lesbian Lounge on Monday mornings, where she found other lesbians over 50, many of whom also came out later in life. She helped bring lesbian-themed films to the community calendar, auditioned for talent shows, and went on a lesbian cruise.
She became, fully, herself.
"If you're female and over 50, you are so invisible in this society," she says. "And then gay? Let's just add that."
She pauses, then smiles.
"But there's a whole place just for lesbians every Monday."
For Women's History Month, we're honoring women like Terry — not because they made headlines, but because their courage is the kind that happens quietly, privately, and completely on their own timeline.
Why Stories Like Terry's Can't Be Left to Memory
Terry's story is personal. It is also irreplaceable.
Queer history is sparsely documented. It lives in the people who were there, and when those people are gone, it often goes with them.
And that’s why The Center on Colfax's Colorado LGBTQ History Project matters so much.
As an ongoing effort to collect, preserve, and share the stories of LGBTQ Coloradans before they're lost, the History Project . The project maintains a growing oral history catalog with over 100 recorded testimonies, has donated 30 archival collections to the Denver Public Library and other institutions, and houses the Terry Mangan Memorial Library, the largest LGBTQ+ lending library in the state. It also offers walking tours of Denver's Capitol Hill neighborhood, school curriculum partnerships, and community exhibits — including Lavender Hill: Then and Now, which traces Denver's queer cultural history from its earliest days through the present.
The naming ceremonies Terry attended in the late 1980s happened because communities refused to let the dead go unnamed. The Colorado LGBTQ History Project is that same refusal, in archival form.
Stories like Terry's — of community witnessed but not yet claimed, and of a whole self found at 64 — are exactly what this project exists to capture.
If you have a story to share, or want to get involved, explore the Colorado LGBTQ History Project at lgbtqcolorado.org/programs/lgbtq-history-project.
A Word of Love and Support
If you're reading this and something in Terry's story feels familiar — if you're somewhere in the middle of your own slow becoming — we want you to know that this community is here. Not just when you've figured it all out. Right now, exactly as you are.
It is never too late to become fully yourself.
And when you're ready, there will be people here waiting for you.
The Center's Lesbian Lounge meets every Monday morning. We offer programs and events for all in the LGBTQ+ community. Find upcoming events and community programming at thecenteroncolfax.org.