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 boy was expected to play hockey. Instead, he fell in love with figure skating, and the bullying began almost immediately.

Stef shares his decades in survival mode, the breaking point that led him to write his entire life story and hand it to a therapist, and the piece of homework that sent him back onto the ice and back to himself. We talk about learning to be alone before finding love, the pressures of image and perfection in gay male culture, chosen family, and the movie that opened the door to fatherhood in his fifties.

Today Stef hosts the Together Moving Forward podcast and speaks on moving from survival into self respect, self love, and pride. His story is a reminder for all of us that it is never too late to come home to who we are.

Resources and Mentions

• Together Moving Forward podcast, hosted by Stef Vachon: https://www.youtube.com/@TogetherMovingForwardPodcast
• Reinventing Your Life by Jeffrey Young and Janet Klosko, the book Stef's therapist recommended: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/43866.Reinventing_Your_Life
• Lion (2016), the film that opened the door to fatherhood for Stef and his husband: https://youtu.be/-RNI9o06vqo?si=YvZBBnQhp24aX3XY
• Heated Rivalry, the series we cannot stop talking about (hear our full episode on it with Barb Rowlandson): https://youtu.be/7ws7-FvaW38
• This Time I Know It's for Real by Donna Summer, Stef's coming out song: https://youtu.be/U4_X2p6rPJI?si=-J9S3QpetZS5lu3n

Connect with Stef

• Website and podcast: togethermovingforwardpodcast.com
• Instagram and social media: @togethermovingforwardpodcast

If Stef's story stirred something in you, that feeling is worth paying attention to. Our 3 Day Clarity Experience is a live, guided event for women who are questioning, wondering, or somewhere in the middle of figuring out who they are. Over three evenings together, July 21 to 23, we create a safe and welcoming space to help you find clarity about your own journey, surrounded by women who understand because they are walking it too.

You do not have to have it all figured out to join us. You only need to be curious about what your most authentic life might look like.

Learn more and register at https://annemariezanzal.com/3-day-clarity-experience/

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 six lovely dates?

Along the way, Barb teaches the WIN language formula for hard conversations, Tonda shares her hard-won wisdom on representatives, resentment, and why community will pick you up when heartbreak knocks you down, and Anne-Marie reminds us that bed death is not a lesbian thing, it is a long-term relationship thing. Expect honest talk, big laughs, and one unforgettable New Year's Eve story from the Lipstick Lounge.

If you are questioning your sexuality or reconsidering who you are, you do not have to figure it out alone. Join Anne-Marie and Barb for the Three Day Clarity Experience, July 21 to 23, a safe and supportive space to explore your questions alongside women who understand. Our last event welcomed 54 women and many called it life changing. Save your seat at https://annemariezanzal.com/3-day-clarity-experience/

New episodes of Coming Out and Beyond drop weekly. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube https://youtu.be/NXWUe52DKmM so you never miss a conversation, and if this episode spoke to you, consider leaving a review. It helps other women find us.

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 responses that wound, the ones we have all heard, like this is just a phase, you are so brave, and I will pray for you. And they move toward something more hopeful, the real allyship that defends us when we are not in the room, that learns our partners by name, that follows up two years and five years and ten years later, because coming out is not a single moment. It is a lifelong unfolding.

Whether you are walking your own coming out path or you love someone who is, this conversation offers language for the difference between the ally sitting safely in the chair and the ally who steps into the room beside you.

If this conversation stirred something in you, and you are sensing there is more clarity waiting for you in this chapter of your life, we would love to welcome you into the Three Day Clarity Experience. It is a gentle, guided space to listen to yourself and begin to understand what is true for you, in community with women who understand. There is no pressure here, only an invitation. You can learn more and join us at https://annemariezanzal.com/3-day-clarity-experience/

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 in the back of her car and walking across legislative plaza into a Glennon Doyle book reading just days before the world shut down for COVID.

The conversation moves into the tender territory of telling her wife, "I need to let you know that I'm trans," after almost 25 years together, and the grief work both of them have navigated in the six years since. Anne-Marie and Dahron, both former hospice chaplains, talk about ambiguous grief, the courage it takes to trust your own inner voice, privilege and representation, and what it means to be married to several different people over the life of one marriage. It is an honest, hope filled conversation about becoming the self you could never have imagined.

Connect with Dahron Johnson on social media. Her name is spelled D A H R O N Johnson, and you can also find her as DJ Contraption on most platforms.

Feeling that quiet inner voice nudging you toward your own truth? Join Anne-Marie for the 3 Day Clarity Experience, July 21 to 23 at Authentically Us, three evenings of guided support for women navigating identity discovery in midlife and beyond. Save your spot here: https://annemariezanzal.com/3-day-clarity-experience/

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 work of coming home to themselves. They move through faith and the work of welcome, the cost of advocacy in Tennessee right now, and what it means to hold the whole person rather than the narrow slice the world finds convenient.

Then the conversation turns inward. Dahron walks us through the years of living with no language and no container to put herself in, the ballet class and the leotard, the three days she spent tucked into the corner of a closet, and the hope bargain she made with herself to survive. She tells us about the lung collapses and the tumor that kept whispering there was a self she had never let herself know. And she brings us to the end of a therapist's driveway, the left turn and the right turn, the moment fifty years finally crystallized into one decision. It is time to get this done.

This is a conversation about faith, courage, and the long road to naming ourselves. We are honored to share it with you.

If you hear yourself somewhere in Dahron's story, you do not have to sit with it alone. Authentically Us is our community for women finding their way toward a more honest life. It is a soft place to land, a space for your queerness to bloom, and a room full of people who understand the questions you have not said out loud yet. We would love to welcome you. Come find us at https://community.annemariezanzal.com/

This is Part One of our conversation with Dahron. The rest of her story is coming in Part Two.

Follow Coming Out and Beyond wherever you listen, and share this episode with someone who needs to hear it.

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 many of us know by heart, is my barista flirting with me, and we talk about strategic ambiguity, the cognitive itch that turns a maybe into a crush, and why two women who like each other can sit in a room and say nothing at all. From there we look at a girlfriend whose closest bond is with her straight married best friend, and we ask the harder question underneath the jealousy, are your needs being met in this relationship. We sit with a heartbreaking note from someone whose partner ended things out of religious guilt, and Anne-Marie and Tonda speak plainly about internalized shame, the cost of loving someone who is still in the closet, and the truth that you can be both gay and beloved by the Divine. We close with the "break" at seven months that is really a breakup, the anxious and avoidant dance, and Barbara's reminder that if someone tells you that you are too much, you are free to go find less.

A few invitations from this episode. If you are wrestling with the clobber passages and the old messages about faith and sexuality, we point you toward the resources at Cathedral of Hope in Dallas, a UCC congregation that does this work with real care: https://www.cathedralofhope.com/

If this season of your life has a catalyst of its own, Barbara and Anne-Marie created The Catalyst Chapter, a course to help you understand why this work can feel so hard and so holy, and you can find it inside Authentically Us and on the Anne-Marie Zanzal Coaching website, https://annemariezanzal.com/

We taped this on the first of June, so wherever you are, we hope you find your way to some community and some queer joy this Pride month, and if it is safe and right for you, we hope you let yourself be seen. We are so glad you are here!

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 most present and least spoken parts of the whole story.

In this episode, Anne-Marie and her cohost Anna Empey sit with the word estrangement and everything it holds. Anne-Marie shares her experience of becoming estranged from her child, the devastation of it, and the slow, tender work of repair she is in now. Anna brings her own story of leaving the LDS faith she was raised in and learning to navigate family through boundaries, distance, and a love that refused to disappear. Together they name the things the culture rarely makes room for. That we can grieve someone who is still breathing. That healing does not require reconciliation. That rupture is not failure, and leaving is not always abandonment. Sometimes it is the most faithful thing we can do for ourselves.

This is a conversation we offer without tying it up neatly, because some of it is meant to stay open. If estrangement is part of your story, we hope you find some company here.

This episode mentions a previous episode about grief and coming out. You can find that episode here: https://youtu.be/DnrRcKN8oT4

Find the episode where Anna shares her coming out story here: https://youtu.be/XD_5QNn5IM8

Learn more about "The Grief Handbook" by Bridget McNulty here: https://bridgetmcnulty.com/the-grief-handbook/

You were never meant to do this alone. Authentically Us is a community of women who came out later in life and who understand the grief, the boundaries, and the becoming. We would love to walk alongside you. Join us at community.annemariezanzal.com.

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 then turns to something the two of them know intimately. What is it actually like for someone who has been out for forty years to fall in love with a woman who is only just beginning her journey? Tonda speaks honestly about boundaries, patience, and trust, about learning that her new partner's grief was not about her, and about why being older changed everything. Her advice is tender and unvarnished, full of hard-won wisdom about red flags, self-respect, and why some loves are worth holding onto.

It is a episode about two women of the same age meeting from opposite ends of the same experience, and the contentment they found together. As Tonda puts it, there is absolutely nothing wrong with loving who you want to love, and love really does win eventually.

You can learn more about Tonda's photography work at https://tondamckay.com/

If Tonda and Anne-Marie's story stirred something in you, you do not have to walk your own journey alone. Authentically Us is a warm, grounded community for women exploring identity and coming out later in life, a soft place to land among others who understand. Whether someone is newly questioning or further along the path, community is where the healing happens. Come find your people at community.annemariezanzal.com.

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 Google search — only a Yahoo users group called Lesbian Support, a tiny LGBTQ shelf at the local Barnes and Noble, and a book titled From Wedded Wife to Lesbian Life that he devoured in his minivan. Fifteen years later, after years of sobriety, therapy, and working with gender dysphoria that had been quietly rising for most of his life, Keith came out again — this time as trans.

In this conversation, Anne-Marie and Keith move slowly through the territory many of our community members know well. The double masking of sexuality and gender. The way the body keeps the score when we suppress what we know to be true. The role of community in healing what Anne-Marie has called the relational wound of queerness. The strange terrain of passing, of invisibility, of gaining male privilege as someone who lived nearly five decades culturally read as female. The both/and of every part of this work.

Keith also offers his perspective on imposter syndrome — particularly the queer imposter syndrome that visits so many people who arrive at their identity later in life and wonder if they are queer enough, trans enough, allowed enough to claim what is theirs. His approach, informed by internal family systems, is one of curiosity rather than combat: getting to know the inner critic, learning what it is afraid of, what it has been trying to protect. (Listen for Keith's nod to Marlin from Finding Nemo as the inner critic we can all probably recognize.)

Anne-Marie and Keith also talk practically about how to find safe community when you are exploring something new — including the often-overlooked support of 12-step affinity spaces — and how to find a therapist or coach who actually understands later-in-life identity work, because the rush to be an ally is not the same as the experience to do the work well.

This conversation is for anyone listening who came in for the sexuality piece and has started to wonder if there is something else underneath. It is also for anyone who has been on this path for a while and could use the company of someone who has walked the long version of it.

Connect with Keith

You can find Keith at keitharon.com and on Substack at Big Blue Sky Dragonfly (keitharon.substack.com), or by searching his name on LinkedIn. If you are curious about working with him, his website is the easiest place to start.

Join us in community

If Keith's words about the necessity of community landed somewhere tender today, we want you to know there is a place for you. Authentically Us is Anne-Marie's ongoing community on Mighty Networks for women navigating identity, sexuality, and the questions that arrive in midlife. It is warm, it is unhurried, and it is full of people who have wondered the same things you are wondering. We would love to have you. You can learn more at https://community.annemariezanzal.com.

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 Pilates instructor, the Catholic upbringing, the husbands who said "if you ever leave me, you'll leave me for a woman" long before either of them understood what that meant. They talk about the catalyst relationship that ripped Katrina's world open, the friend group that quietly disappeared, and the children who grieved in their own ways and on their own timelines.

They also talk about what comes after the hurricane. The chosen family. The intentional life. The unexpected softness of a world without raised voices. And the lesson Katrina says took her the longest to learn: that the first betrayal in any coming out story is the betrayal of self, and the becoming begins the moment you stop.

If you've ever wondered whether you're the only one who has felt this way — Katrina's answer, and the heart of this episode, is no. You're not. You never were.

Where to find Katrina:

• Hurricane Lessons is available at bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and independent bookstores everywhere
• Substack: Surrendering to Sappho
• Instagram & Facebook: katrina.anne.willis

Ready to write your own next chapter? Authentically Us is Anne-Marie's private community for women navigating exactly the kind of transition Katrina describes in Hurricane Lessons — the questioning, the becoming, the quiet rebuilding of a life that actually fits. You don't have to figure it out alone, and you don't have to wait until you have language for it. Join us at https://community.annemariezanzal.com