3 Long Island LGBT seniors on what coming out was like for them

Coming out is rarely easy. But for older members of the LGBT community, it meant navigating a time when acceptance was less common and discrimination far more frequent than today.

The journeys of the following three Long Islanders were marked by both heartbreak and triumph. That included advocating for LGBT rights, coming out during a heterosexual marriage and challenging gender expectations in the workplace.

Their stories are different, but the advice they share is the same: be true to yourself.

Xena Ugrinsky

When Xena Ugrinsky’s daughter was about 8 years old, she asked her mother if she would always be gay.

“And I said, ‘Well, I will tell you that I fall in love with people, so I choose to be with women, but can I say for certain that I will be with a woman forever?’ and then I said, 'no,' ” recalled Ugrinsky, 66.

Born in Berlin, Ugrinsky moved to the United States with her family as a toddler. After a brief return to Germany as a child, she grew up in Amityville. Looking back, the departing  deputy mayor of Port Jefferson Village can now identify times she had “wicked crushes” on girls, such as her best friend in ninth grade, though she didn't understand the feelings at the time.

In high school, she began dating the man she would eventually marry.

After graduating in 1977, the two decided to run away to Florida with “25 cents between us” and got married the following year.

“We’re just like, ‘No one understands us, we’re gonna get out of here,’ and we ran away on Halloween night, and for two weeks, didn’t let anybody know where we were,” she said.

The pair worked a series of jobs and struggled financially as they tried to build a life together. Then she got pregnant at 19 with her daughter.

“When Christa, my daughter, was 2 months old, I said, ‘We need to go back to New York. One of us needs to go back and finish college, and it’s not going to be here in Florida,’ ” she said.

After moving back to Amityville, she and her husband got divorced when she was 23 years old.

Following the split, Ugrinsky fell in love “with a girl who loved books as much as I did." The relationship lasted more than two years, but the women both remained closeted. Ugrinsky recalled driving around town and telling her to “duck.”

She finally felt the need to tell her friends, who told her they had always known the truth.

“I’m like, ‘Do you know how much effort you could have saved me if you had told me?’ ” Ugrinsky said.

While she expressed concern that people would talk, her friends told her that they were talking anyway, and there was nothing she could do about it, “so live your life.”

Her parents found out after her father came to her apartment, which only had one place to sleep and saw her girlfriend there. He put “two and two together,” she said, though they “never really talked about it.”

It took her mother longer to accept.

About five years later, Ugrinsky asked her mother if she wanted her to have the kind of love that her parents had.

“And I said, ‘What if I will never have that with a man,’” she said. “And then she never said another thing about it."

Professionally, Ugrinsky remained closeted for years while building a successful career in finance and tech. 

She had earned her undergraduate degree in finance in 1985 and later an MBA in information systems, and said she worked at Citicorp and other companies for years before deciding she was done hiding.

“I’m wearing a suit and a skirt and nylons every day," she said. "I hated it."

In late 1996, Ugrinsky met Kathleen McLane, who would become her wife, at a networking event. When Kathleen started speaking, her voice went through Ugrinsky “like a bell, and it was like, I don’t know who this person is, but I need to meet her.”

In 2010, they decided to get married in Boston, where same-sex civil unions were legal, with Christa officiating, and Ugrinsky's granddaughter acting as ring bearer.

William Leonelli

By the time he reached his early teens, William Leonelli knew he was gay. But growing up in Brentwood in the 1960s and 1970s, he said, there was little visibility of LGBT people or communities.

“It was a different world,” Leonelli, now 71, recalled. The idea of connecting with an LGBT community felt like “a space shuttle ride away.”

At the same time, he wanted a family.

“I was struggling and also at the time, I wanted to have kids,” he said.

Leonelli married in 1980 and had three children. But after "doing what was expected," he struggled with who he was. That struggle intensified after he met someone at work he found “very attractive, very interesting.”

“I never acted on it because I also felt that I had made a commitment and I was going to live up to that commitment," he said. 

The prospect of leaving his children's home, he said, was “the most difficult part for me.”

Leonelli said he found it hard to be his usual “happy-go-lucky, smiling self” and eventually sought help from a therapist connected to the LGBT community.

His wife noticed his change of demeanor, and after she “did some digging," discovered the therapist’s background and confronted him.

“I was struggling with the issues about my kids, so I was not really ready necessarily to move this forward," Leonelli said. "But once she found out, I didn’t feel it was fair to her."

Around 1999, Leonelli moved out of his house. It was then his children, ages 16, 11 and 4, started to “really see the full effect of what was going on and really starting to understand.”

Once he moved out, he felt free to start dating, and he met his current partner, Sal Serafino, at a bar.

“We would meet up at this place that I had been introduced to by another friend, and whenever he saw me, he would make the time to come over and talk, and … he then got to a point where he was trying to figure out when I was there because he would always show up when I was there,” he said.

Leonelli, a human services assistant professor at St. Joseph's University, now lives in Huntington with Sal.

He received advice from one of his cousins, he said, who reminded him that he raised his kids to be accepting of people, and doubted they would turn their backs on him.

“And she was absolutely right,” Leonelli said.

When it came to his extended Italian family, he found himself to be in a “very fortunate” position of acceptance. His grandmother, who died in 1958, taught her family that everybody, regardless of their background, had a place at their table.

The first time Leonelli brought Sal to a family barbecue, relatives welcomed him immediately.

That acceptance left a lasting impression on Sal. Even now, 27 years later, Leonelli said his partner still talks about how warmly his family embraced him.

“If that topic ever comes up,” Leonelli said, “he always talks about how accepting my family was.”

Lori Cohen

When Greenport resident Lori Cohen was a senior in college playing softball, she realized she wouldn't mind if her close female friend kissed her.

“I played sports my whole life, I was a tomboy, but I never really thought about it,” said Cohen, 65.

Cohen, who identifies as a lesbian, had dated her high school's quarterback and said she had genuine feelings for him. But she found herself forming a deeper "emotional connection” with her female friend.

While nothing serious ever developed between them, the experience helped Cohen better understand her identity by the time she entered SUNY Buffalo School of Law  in 1984.

“In law school ...   everybody pretty much knew,” she said.

After landing her first job as a public defender and moving back downstate, she told her parents, who quickly accepted her.

At work, however, Cohen initially had some hesitation about coming out of the closet.

“It took me like a month, and then I was like, ‘This is crazy. I’m not going to pretend I’m [something] I’m not.' And that was it,” she said.

Cohen not only accepted her sexuality, but embraced it. In the 1980s, she served as a lawyer for ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, an organization that fought stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS, and advocating for treatment research funding.

“Lawyers often say they become lawyers because they want to change the world, and I was lucky enough to represent people who did change the world,” she said.

Cohen was also working for a big law firm, “and it wasn’t like I was in, but I wasn’t out, and then I got arrested at a demonstration with ACT UP, and it was on the front page of the newspaper,” she said.

In 1989, after leaving the firm, Cohen represented five ACT UP demonstrators who protested at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, disrupting Mass in opposition to Cardinal John O'Connor’s stance against teaching safe sex in public schools and distributing condoms to prevent AIDS.

Although Cohen said she was not worried about losing her job, she left the firm in 1991 to start her own practice.

She had known her future wife, Laura Held, for years before they became a couple in 2002. 

“Our law firm used to have a big party every year that everybody came to … and so when I sent her invitation, I wrote, ‘Oh, we should have lunch sometime,’ and then she called me to have lunch, and that was it,” she said.

Laura introduced Cohen to North Fork Women, an organization that fosters social community among lesbians on the North Fork, and provides healthcare grants. Cohen became its president from 2014-2017 while still running her firm.

After retiring from law in October 2019, Cohen was diagnosed a month later with breast cancer, undergoing a bilateral mastectomy in February 2020.

Once she recovered, Cohen was “looking for something interesting to do.”

The Southold-based Little Ram Oyster Co., owned by couple Elizabeth Peeples and Stefanie Bassett, were looking for part-time help, so Cohen applied.

“I love the job,” she said. “It’s physically demanding, but I get to do it with two of my closest friends.”

Cohen described her experience being openly gay as “lucky,” with supportive parents and working with many women in her field.

“Have people said things behind my back? Yeah, I don’t care,” she said.