DIVA’s founding editor FRANCES WILLIAMS reflects on age, invisibility, and how to find the light in dark times

DR FRANCES WILLIAMS is a researcher, writer and activist and the founding editor of DIVA magazine.

“You are starting to become invisible now,” an older friend comments. I had recounted an incident when an annoying man stomped over my toes as I queued in the supermarket. Despite being in plain sight, he just didn’t see me. “Any woman over 50 slides into the twilight zone,” she informs from the ripe old age of 65. “It’s not just that you are no longer economically productive, but you’re not hormonally viable either!”

I pondered these words as a 52-yearold perimenopausal woman, wondering what I could write for DIVA about the specific nature of lesbian invisibility. I have not written for the magazine since I founded it as a young woman in the early 1990s. Hormones had indeed rocketpropelled me at this time to abandon the small Welsh town of my birth in exchange for the big city, in search of love and adventure. Now I find myself living back in Wales, been there and done that, thinking about age and invisibility as much as I am about sexuality.

In my activist days, I championed and celebrated lesbian visibility very loudly indeed. I not only made myself look as ridiculously lesbian as I could – short hair, checked shirt, big boots. But with other like-minded guerrilla girls, I made something of a public nuisance of myself. I was part of an international direct action group, for example. The Lesbian Avengers. Originating in New York, their mission was to focus “on issues vital to lesbian survival and visibility”. They designed it as a movement to explode across the globe, spawning multiple local “chapters”. Googling their activities now, I laugh at how impossible it would be to adopt the logo of a black bomb today, complete with fizzing fuse! Although intended as ironic, I imagine the humour just wouldn’t translate… But re-reading the “handbook for homemade revolution”, I am further struck by a couple of lines which advise on how to best manifest and exert lesbian power: “Because lesbians have been so excluded from power, many of us have developed a negative stance where the only influence we have is to say ‘no’.”