'Before You Know It': To Be Gay, Over 55 and Very Much Alive

At the end of Before You Know It, a documentary that premiered this week at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas, a title card dedicates the film to the estimated 2.4 million gay, lesbian, straight and transgendered seniors over the age of 55, a number that its director suspects isn’t accurate.

“To be honest, those statistics are just for those who are self-identified and out, right?” director PJ Raval tells TakePart. “There’s probably a number of those that are still closeted [and] if they had the proper support system, would include themselves in that number.”