From personal experience I have noticed that some liberals away things like “how long have you known”, “why didn’t you feel comfortable telling us”, “you know you could have told us, right?”

Ah okay yeah that totally makes sense. Yeah I hear that message sometimes echoed in media and it really pisses me off. Like, hello, this was not a personal attack on you, the person probably hid it because they had genuine issues to worry about, not to send a personalized message to someone close to them via their natural-born sexual orientation. Insert eyeroll here.

They cannot fathom the reasons why anyone would not come out until 30 in this day and age. It’s a sign of how far removed they are from the experience of realizing and coming to terms with the fact that you’re homosexual/bisexual.

Yes EXACTLY. I appreciate you putting it that way; it is a long distance away, empathetically speaking, from understanding the experience of someone who is gay or bisexual. Sometimes I wish I could just.. pick up my mind, and plop it into someone else's (the straight person doing this) for a moment, so that they could understand my perspective.

They want to fit you into a narrative of the big bad world made you hide who you are so you couldn’t be your “true authentic self” and now thanks to people like us, you have no reason to hide.

Yep yep yep. I note that in the end, it all loops back to them. Seeing and understanding our homosexuality/bisexuality in reference to themselves. I think a really supportive straight person would like, be able to take a moment and look and imagine what the world might look from our perspective. I'm talking about perspective a lot but honestly it really does come down to perspective-taking, IMO, in order to act like a real ally...

I have also noticed the goal posts shifting in terms of what is considered late for coming out as a lesbian. In my day I knew no one coming out early 20s and now some people apologize and act like that’s super late. I have definitely noticed that a lot of lesbians act very embarrassed about how “late” they came out even when it doesn’t seem all that late to figure yourself out to me.

I think some of this pressure comes from younger generations, a la "I could access the internet at 10 years old; now that I know all these labels, I should just KNOW which one describes me!" Add to that, the facts that a) almost everyone young is chronically online and b) there's already this societal narrative about LGB people that "You just know. You just know when you're really young" and then us LGB who take a while to figure out, we risk feeling invalidated and left behind, lol, like we're not living up to this fucking stereotype that society has about us. (And I understand that some LGB people actually are that way, but like, the difference is descriptive vs. prescriptive. Let's not force every LBG person into a mold, just because a sizeable chunk are that way.)

I will say that personally I struggled a lot with acknowledging being gay with close liberal friends who knew me for a while because I was afraid of the narrative of “how/why did you hide yourself/who are you really?”

Yeah you know actually, I have struggled with this too. Especially with acknowledging to myself that I am lesbian. Because it meant acknowledging, accepting, that I really wasn't.. being open with myself, even, you know? It's a disturbing thought, lol.

edit: Sorry I wrote you an essay lol, this always seems to happen. You just have such good ideas to think about, haha.