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The world is ageing. The government estimates that by 2020 there will be 12% (or 1.1 million) more over-65s and 18% (300,000) more over-85s in the UK. Yet despite this increase, there remains a cultural aversion to seeing older people as sexual and the older people get, the less sexually visible they are, particularly women. Stonewall estimates that around 5-7% of the British population identifies as gay, lesbian or bisexual, although the true figure is difficult to determine. The one thing we know for sure is that we are all getting older and how we think about and experience sex changes over our lifespan.
According to a survey in the US magazine Allure, LGBT people are more likely to have relationships with a big age gap. Ellen DeGeneres, 57, and Portia de Rossi, 42, are an obvious age-gap couple but there are many more, such as the model Jenny Shimizu, 48, and fashion icon, Michelle Harper, 37, and author Jeanette Winterson, 56, and psychoanalyst and author Susie Orbach, 68.