Queer Elders are the living record of our community.
This is not a project about age. Elder is not a number on a birth certificate. It is about what someone has carried, what they have survived, and what they know because of it. A person who came out during Section 28, who nursed friends through the AIDS crisis, who fought for rights that others now take for granted, is a Queer Elder regardless of how old they are today.
Many grew up when being queer was illegal, hidden, or treated as illness. They built lives, relationships and support networks without protection or public recognition. Their stories sit beneath the freedoms many now take for granted.
This project will create a series of formal, considered portraits of older LGBTQIA+ people. The work will be slow and collaborative. Each sitter will be given time, space and agency over how they are seen. The portraits will avoid nostalgia and sentiment. They will focus on presence, dignity and lived reality.
Alongside the images, short first-person testimonies will be recorded where participants wish to share them. These texts will anchor the portraits in lived experience. They will speak about survival, loss, love, work, care and memory. What was gained. What was lost. What remains unfinished.
Recording these lives is urgent. Much queer history was never archived. It existed in bodies, relationships and spaces that were erased or denied. As Elders are lost, so is first-hand knowledge of how communities protected themselves, cared for each other, and resisted erasure. This project acts as witness. It preserves voices that rarely make it into official records.
Every new generation believes it is starting from zero. That the fights are new, the risks unique, the language original. Queer Elders remind us that none of this begins with us. They have lived through backlash, moral panic, policing of bodies and love, and cycles of progress followed by retreat. By listening to them, we learn how communities survive pressure, how care is built when systems fail, and how visibility can both protect and endanger. Their experience does not offer answers to copy, but patterns to recognise. What you face now has been faced before. What will you do differently because you listened?
The work is intended for exhibition, publication and community display. I aim to take the project beyond gallery walls and into spaces where LGBTQIA+ people already gather. Community venues, care settings and public sites will be part of its life. The project invites intergenerational exchange, not passive viewing.
This is not a look back. It is a holding of ground.
The project asks you to look closely.
To recognise whose shoulders you stand on.
And to consider what kind of record you are leaving behind.
Get in touch if you are interested in participating.
