My grandmother was gay.

[SoCalDem]

7. In "those days", every community had the "confirmed bachelors" or "old-maids" who shared a house

These people were probably gay.. they also were often pillars of society, school teachers, nurses, factory workers, ...you name it.. They were invited to Thanksgiving dinners, they babysat the neighborhood kids, they were loved/accepted by their communities.

Humans are social beings, who need affection/companionship etc, and they will always seek it out, find it and preserve it.

As long as they kept the charade going, everyone concerned was accepting.

I have a feeling that many, if not most of those relationships/shared housing situations were not platonic.

It's the coming out that made "the others" uncomfortable, and even though they may have suspected it, they had the luxury of not-knowing for sure, and could pretend that those unmarried among them had just not met the "right person" (of the opposite sex) yet.

As long as the couples lived a lie, and pretended, the others did not have to think about how narrow minded they might really be.