This LVW, we’ve partnered with LGBT Foundation to find out more about your rainbow families
WORDS BY MINDY
Happy Lesbian Visibility Week 2025. This year our theme is all about family. We’ve partnered up with LGBT Foundation, a UK-based national charity that focuses on LGBTQIA health and well-being, to hear what family means to you.
This is what family looks like to Mindy.
What does family mean to you?
For me, family is chosen as well as a couple of the people I have a genetic connection to. My primary family priority is my wife (we’ve been together for 34 years now) and our cats.
Tell us about a typical day in your family life.
We get up together, then we meditate before breakfast (that makes us sound a lot more worthy than we are). After breakfast we get on with our day, which includes cat care and the various volunteering things we are involved in. If it’s a Tuesday we go to a singing for wellbeing group, other days Linda plays her guitar and I dance. Sometimes we meet up with close friends for a meal or I go out dancing with other friends.
How have things changed for LGBTQIA+ families over your lifetime?
Big changes! In the 80s I knew I couldn’t adopt or foster so we have no children. The children of friends just take us as we are – all totally ordinary as we’ve known them since they were babies. We are both out to everyone in our lives and it wasn’t like that when I came out in the early 80s or when Linda left Northern Ireland in the late 70s.
What are your hopes for the future for LGBTQIA+ families?
My hope is that we keep on becoming more and more unremarkable so we are completely embedded in our communities and localities. Here in Manchester it feels like we are totally ordinary but that may just be because we’ve lived in the same house for 30 years and as older women we are largely invisible.
All of this is why I am part of the Centre For Ageing Better’s Age Without Limits campaign and part of their stock image library as well as a volunteer at the LGBT Foundation here in Manchester.
You can find out more about LGBT Foundation here: https://lgbt.foundation/
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