Sometimes, I wonder if my Great-Aunt was some flavor of queer. Maybe a lesbian or maybe asexual. I don't know. What I do know is that she had a roommate at some point, and my grandfather was technically her brother because her parents adopted him from his family as they were driving across Nebraska during the Depression. But a big part of the reason they adopted my grandfather, as I understand it, was so my Great-Aunt could have a baby to raise. She was 20 at the time.
And I never asked her about it when she was still with us because 1) she was extremely hard of hearing and did not wearing hearing aids, so it was easier to have conversation at a minimum, and 2) I did not grow up in a family where, "So, like, was my Great-Aunt queer?" is a question you can just toss into the room. Hell, when my mother brought up that my Great-Aunt had had a roommate at one time, I asked, "Like, a roommate, or do you think they were a couple?" And my mother replied along the lines of, "Ugh, why does everyone assume roommate means more than roommate?" And, woman, I definitely recall one of my aunts (not the great-aunt, obvs) bringing her "roommate" to a visit, and YOU were the one who said "roommate," and my aunt was the one who went, "SHE'S MY GIRLFRIEND." So, there's literal recent history about why I asked.
Anyway, I wonder because I loved her. She was teeny-tiny and drove an avocado green Pontiac GTO until she was something like 90. She had a white poodle she named Shadow, and she made me a yarn-and-hanger duplicate when I was a kid. It was one of my favorite gifts ever. She had to move into my grandparents house when she was 98 and hated every second of it, but she LOVED to see me when I showed up. When she passed, she left me a 1917, leather-bound 2-volume copy of Les Mis, which I think is from the second printing of the book ever in the United States. She taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Nebraska when she started as a teacher, and she passed away at 100. I miss her.