This wasn't shocking to me when I figured it out, but my aunts are/were lesbians (ones dead, the other one is soon to be, so hence past tense in this post). Growing up in the 80s, 90s, light Catholic household (e.g., "we were Catholic" but not really, my grandmother was fairly devout but nobody else) it's not something you talked about or really thought about, I just thought my aunt Jean lived with her friend Jean (yes they both have the same name), like it was just two friends living together. It wasn't until I was like 13, in the late 90s, that I really thought about it and was like "... wait... are Jean and Jean ... lesbians ........." Mind you this was the 90s when "LESBIANS" to a 13 year old was like a WWF storyline or a subplot in American Pie or a shitty comedy movie.
I remember asking my sister who was probably almost 20 and she, naively, was also like "y'know...... I've never really thought of that.... ... maybe... y'know they've lived together for 30 years and... they own a house in Provincetown, so... maybe?" This is an apocryphal story but my sister has the distinct memory of, as a kid, thinking that our blood-related aunt slept in the bed in the master bedroom,a nd then that her friend Jean slept in a bed in the closet in the master bedroom. And years later, as adults, my sister was wondering aloud why she thought that Auunt Jean slept in the closet, and as my dad tells it, when we were kids my sister asked where Jean's bedroom was and my crass uncle replied "In the closet," and that turned into this thought in my sister's head as a kid that Jean, my aunt's friend, legitimately slept in a bed in the closet.
And then they ended up being among the first gay people in the US to be legally married a few years later, so there's that and that was pretty cool. It is pretty weird to think how quickly that all normalized, given how taboo it was when I was young.
