From fear of care homes to a lack of visibility, these are the issues facing older LGBTQIA+ people in 2026
BY RAGA D’SILVA
On 5 May, Older Queer Voices hosted a roundtable in the House of Commons, chaired by Joseph Galliano-Doig MBE, bringing together older LGBTQIA+ people, activists, carers, health professionals, housing voices, and those working across systems that shape how we age, and how safely we are allowed to do so.
This work sits within Older Queer Voices, a platform founded by Nicola Fenton and me, to centre the lived experience of older LGBTQIA+ people. It exists to make space for stories that are too often missing from policy, culture, and even our own communities. It began as a podcast built on one commitment: to listen properly. Not to interpret, soften, or translate queer ageing, but to hear it directly from those living it. What has grown from the podcast is a wider body of work that moves between testimony and action, bringing lived experience into rooms where decisions are made.
What the roundtable made impossible to ignore is this. We are not dealing with nostalgia. We are dealing with survival.
Care homes came up repeatedly, not as theory, but as fear. A fear that sits very close to daily reality for many older LGBTQIA+ people.
Fear of entering a system and having to explain, again, who you are in order to be treated with dignity. Fear of partners being dismissed or erased. Fear of chosen family being pushed aside or not recognised. Fear of trans identity being questioned, diluted, or ignored at the point of care. Fear of silence being the condition for safety.
One person said they would rather die than enter a care home. That sentence should not exist in 2026. Yet it does.
It was not said for impact. It was said from exhaustion. From experience. From a lifetime of navigating institutions that have not always known how to hold them.
What sits beneath it is structural. Housing systems that still struggle to recognise chosen family. Health and social care often lack a consistent LGBTQIA+ understanding. Mental health services that do not always hold the weight of lifelong grief, stigma, and survival. Trans people continue to assess risk before disclosure in moments of vulnerability.
And yet this is the generation that built so much of what we now stand within.
People who lived through criminalisation. People who buried partners through the AIDS crisis. People who created care networks when institutions refused to. People who built community from urgency, necessity, and love.
They did not wait for permission. Now, as they age, they are too often being asked to become smaller again.
What also emerged clearly is that this is not only about care homes. It is about visibility across everyday life. Older LGBTQIA+ people described feeling increasingly invisible in spaces that once felt like home. Across generations, there is also disconnection, with few shared spaces where understanding can move in both directions without judgment or distance.
That gap is not abstract. It shapes trust. It shapes safety. It shapes whether people feel they can remain connected to community as they age, or whether they slowly withdraw from it.
And still, what filled that room was not resignation. It was leadership.
Older queer people are not waiting to be spoken for. They are naming what is broken with clarity. They are bringing lived experience directly into policy conversations that have too often excluded them. They are still building, still organising, still insisting on dignity where it is not guaranteed.
Older Queer Voices exists to hold and amplify that leadership. To make sure it is not contained, softened, or ignored. To connect testimony to action. And to ensure that ageing queer lives are not treated as an afterthought in policy or culture, but as central to how we design what comes next.
This is not about one organisation or one voice. It is about what we choose to build together.
We fought to be seen once. We are not doing it again in silence.
Come and celebrate with us on 3 June at the Older Queer Voices Festival, Welwyn Garden City: outsavvy.com/event/34926/older-queer-voices-festival
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