Why Older Queer Voices Is Heading Backto ELLA

When Nicola and I returned from Mallorca last year, it was not only the programme, the conversations or the events that stayed with us. It was the people we met, the friendships we made and the feeling of being part of an international community of queer women and non- binary people coming together from different countries, cultures, generations and life

experiences.

There was something special about ELLA. Conversations started during sessions and carried on over meals, by the pool and late into the evening.We met people we would probably never have crossed paths with in London, and some of those connections have stayed with us. We laughed a lot, we learnt a lot, and we came home knowing we wanted to return.

So this August, Older Queer Voices is heading back to Mallorca.

A lot has happened in the year since we were last at ELLA. Older Queer Voices has grown considerably and so has our ambition for what it can become. We have been creating spaces for older LGBTQ+ people to be seen and heard, recording stories, bringing generations together, holding roundtables, creating events and asking questions about ageing that deserve a much bigger place within LGBTQ+ life.

Through all of this, one belief has become even stronger for Nicola and me: different generations need to spend more time together. Not simply talking about each other but actually getting to know each other.

ELLA creates opportunities for that to happen naturally. You can find yourself in conversation with someone twenty or thirty years younger or older and discover within minutes how much you have in common. You exchange stories, compare lives, challenge each other, laugh and sometimes leave with a new friend. That kind of intergenerational connection sits right at the heart of what we are trying to build through Older Queer Voices.

This year we are particularly excited to be in conversation on the beach, hosted by Lady Phyll. There is something rather wonderful about the thought of important conversations happening not in a formal conference room, but on a beach in Mallorca. We are also looking forward to seeing friends travelling from London, including friends from UK Black Pride and

DIVA magazine, reconnecting with people we met last year and meeting many more from the wider ELLA community.

I will also be speaking at ELLA Talks on 2 September with a talk called Ageing Disgracefully: Nobody Told Me.

Ageing has become central to so much of our work, partly because Nicola and I are living it ourselves. We are fascinated by what happens when we stop treating ageing as a conversation only about what we lose and start making room for everything we continue to become.

At 56, my own life seems to be expanding rather than contracting. I have published my first book and am writing two more. I am developing a short film. Nicola and I are building Older Queer Voices, developing new ideas, meeting extraordinary people and imagining work that

did not exist in our lives even a few years ago.

There is something wonderfully liberating about growing older and realising that time matters far too much to spend it living according to somebody else's expectations.

That is why representation across generations matters. Younger queer people deserve to see that there is not one version of a queer future waiting for them. There are thousands. Older queer people deserve to walk into LGBTQ+ spaces knowing that we are not there merely to represent history, but to participate fully in what our communities are becoming.

We are still creating, changing, falling in love, making friends, starting things, taking risks, getting things wrong and discovering parts of ourselves we did not know existed. And we are still learning from each other.

That is what Nicola and I are looking forward to finding again at ELLA: familiar faces and complete strangers, conversations we have planned and the ones we could never plan, different generations sharing the same spaces, and the possibility that we might return home knowing someone, or knowing something, that we did not know when we arrived.

Sometimes that is how community grows. One conversation at a time.