"At just 17 years old, Thompson married a youth pastor six years her senior due to pressure from a non-denominational evangelical church she described as "close to a cult." "The message from my church was: 'You find a man, you marry a man, you have his babies, you stay married forever, whether you're happy or not,' " she says. "Look around and pick a man," they would tell her."
"Angela Thompson soaked in the garden tub of her new apartment in Columbia, South Carolina. With a freshly cut bob and a lease penned in her name, she reflected on the 30-year marriage she had just left behind. "I put down a deposit, I got the utilities and I furnished the [apartment] off Facebook Marketplace," she told Uncloseted Media and The 19th. During Thompson's marriage, however, something felt terribly wrong, and she turned into a shell of herself."
"'I started researching the [LGBTQ] community for my child who came out to me,' she says. 'That's when I found my people. I found people like me. And I didn't know what that meant.' After questioning for a few years, Thompson slowly started to come out. 'When I told my [ex-] sister-in-law I was gay, she said, 'That makes sense. I've noticed on social media over the last couple of weeks that you look happy. You look like a full person,' she says. 'And she was right.'"
Angela Thompson entered a marriage at 17 under pressure from a non-denominational evangelical church and raised four children over three decades. During the marriage she experienced deep internal conflict, emotional shutdown, and a persistent sense that something was wrong. At 48 she researched the LGBTQ community after a child came out and realized she was a lesbian. She began questioning, slowly came out, and found people who reflected her identity. Coming out led to visible changes in her wellbeing, and she later married a woman and pursued an independent life.
Read at Advocate.com
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