Modern Love · The New York Times

What Happened When My Dad and I Came Out to Each Other

February 18, 2026·38 min·2 clips

On the same call where her father came out as bisexual, Julia came out to him too — the secret they'd been hiding from each other for years.

Julia Stoller did not expect much mystery in her father. He was courteous and punctual, solidly Midwestern, not the kind of man she imagined kept secrets. She loved him through childhood without feeling she particularly knew him, and for years that distance seemed unremarkable. What broke it open came after she left for college, when her father made an announcement that shocked the family. By the time he called Julia directly to say he was bisexual, she had already been sitting with her own version of the same question. Julia was bisexual and stood at a crossroads: marry Caleb, a man she loved, and wonder whether that choice would close off a part of herself she had never said out loud. His call landed in the middle of that paralysis. Her father's words seemed to confirm her worst fear: that marrying someone of the opposite sex would leave no room for her bisexuality, that she was heading somewhere like where he had been. She found she needed to know everything about him: how he had arrived at this moment, whether his experience mirrored hers, what his life had actually looked like. The man she had always assumed was predictable turned out to be someone she did not know at all. Julia describes what that moment felt like, the way her father's news collapsed into her own unresolved questions so quickly that it was hard to separate them. Anna Martin moves through that sequence with her, slowing at the places where it gets tangled and giving Julia room to find her own words. The conversation pays close attention to what it is like to discover that someone you grew up beside had been working through the same questions without you. Julia's essay, From Bye to Beige and Back Again, prompted the conversation, and the episode follows the arc it maps: a family bombshell that became, over time, an actual relationship. What emerges is a picture of two people who had to stop pretending they had it figured out before they could really talk to each other. Humor runs through it — in the way Julia describes her father's squareness, in the dry acknowledgment of the timing — lightening things without making them feel less real. The episode does not rush toward resolution. It stays with the questions Julia still carries: about identity and marriage, about what it means to find out that a parent you thought you understood had been living a whole other interior life. What she built with her father, the conversation suggests, required getting to know him properly, which meant letting him get to know her too.

As heard by us

A tender Modern Love conversation about bisexuality, family secrecy, and recognizing yourself through a parent.

Julia Stoller's conversation with Anna Martin turns a family revelation into something more intimate than a coming-out story. Julia grew up seeing her father as polite, punctual, and a little square, then learned in college that she had barely known him.

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Why you'd press play

The moment Julia's father called to say he was bisexual, she was already quietly wrestling with her own.

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