“Top Gun” actress Kelly McGillis, who ultimate year came out as a lesbian, has entered into a affable union with girlfriend Melanie Leis, a New Jersey sales executive.

The solemnity was performed in a municipal court in Collingswood, N.J., at what place the couple lives, according to the wedding announcement in The New York Times. Leis, 42, works at Independence Communications, which provides Muzak to businesses.

The two met in 2000, when Leis was a bartender at a eating-house owned by the actress’s second husband, Fred Tillman, in Key West, Fla.,

Tillman and McGillis require two daughters together, Kelsey Laure, 20, and Sonora Ashley, 17.

McGillis, 53, is besides known for her roles in “Witness” and “The Accused” in the 1980s, and played a closeted Army colonel in Showtime’s “The L Word.”

Her latest film, “Stake Land,” premiered last week at the Toronto International Film Festival.

When McGillis came abroad, the actress said she was “done with the man thing.”

“I did that. I privation to move on in life,” the actress told SheWired.com, dictum that she was “definitely” looking for a woman.

McGillis joins a increasing number of women who emerge from the closet in midlife.

“Seinfeld” scribbler Carol Leifer, now 54, told ABCNews.com last year that she had listened to the kind of she calls the “Sapphic siren call,” or as character Elaine would assume, “joining the other team.” “If I don’t sleep with a woman in a short time, I think I’ll kill myself,” Leifer, a comedian, wrote in her volume, “When You Lie About Your Age, the Terrorists Win.”

Leifer, the afflatus for the Elaine Benes character from TV’s “Seinfeld,” was conjugal and dated only men the first 39 years of her life — single in kind of them was Jerry Seinfeld himself. But at 40, she had a overthrow with a woman and fell in love.

“Life threw me a surprise alliance,” she told said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I was looking in favor of something fun and chic. I didn’t think it would redefine me since a person.

“My feelings for men were very real and valid, but I fell in love with my partner,” she said. “It’s been the most expedient. see the various meanings of good relationship of my life.”

Women who love other women have come to be more commercially visible in recent years, in television shows like Showtime’s “The L-Word” and in songs like Katy Parry’s “I Kissed a Girl.”

And experts argue many women who may have felt stymied by homophobia in previous generations are finding permission for the first time to explore a modern sexual identity — later in life.

“I feel people are under the double-faced impression: ‘There are no men left, I’ll go to women now,’” said Leifer. “After 40, I felt emboldened to have an brush with a woman — 40 sort of gave me permission to produce that.”

“I adopted a son at 50,” she said. “Life gets besides interesting as you get older.”

‘Permission’ to Love a Woman

The slow-in-life lesbian phenomenon is the theme of a documentary, “Out Late,” created ~ the agency of filmmakers Beatrice Alda (daughter of actor Alan Alda) and her participator, Jennifer Brooke.

The idea for the documentary, which explores the lives of five women who base new sexual identities after 50, came from a friend of the marry’s named Jason.

“Jason’s mother was in her 80s, afflictive and divorced 40 years ago,” said Alda. “He said, ‘I meditate she may be a lesbian and doesn’t know it.’ It’s not while uncommon as you think.”

One of the film’s subjects, Elaine, came with~ at 79 after a 50-year marriage.

“It was something she felt she had to be enough,” Brooke told ABCNews.com. “She bumped into two strangers at a place of traffic and said, basically, ‘Are you two partners? I need to talk to you,’ and she used them in the most positive habit as an avenue to free herself. And she never turned back.”

Many women who came of maturity in the 1940s and 1950s — like Elaine — felt a “duty” to wed and have children.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, women illustrious “romantic friendships,” according to Leila Rupp, professor of feminist studies at University of California at Santa Barbara and maker of “Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women.” One of the chiefly famous was that of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who had each “intense, passionate” relationship with journalist Lorena Hickok in the 1930s.

But it was the emergence of the feminist movement of the 1970s, when women pushed ~ the sake of reproductive freedom, that gave women more control of their bodies, Rupp uttered.

“Now there are more options for women, and it’s other thing socially acceptable,” said Rupp. “But it’s not just about biology.”