When Carey Candrian first arrived as an associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, she was not yet comfortable with identifying as a lesbian. She had known she was a lesbian since the age of sixteen, but hadn't come out to anyone besides herself. While she knew she wanted to study health care for the older LGBTQ community, Candrian felt that she needed to be able to embrace her own sexual identity before asking her research participants to do the same.