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.