About LGBTSr

Sometime in my 52nd year (I’m 60 as of this writing), the idea for a website serving the over-50 LGBTQ audience began to buzz around in my mind. The tendency of our culture, both the broader culture and the LGBTQ culture, to turn away from age and the aging was something I’d been aware of for many years. Back when I began my professional writing career for a Los Angeles gay paper in the mid-1980s I asked the editor why there was never a picture of anyone over 25 on the cover. It was a rhetorical question: aging faces and bodies don’t move copies of a newspaper found outside gay restaurants, bars and bathhouses. It was a realization that never left me, and as I found myself becoming one of the aged I decided to do something about that invisibility.

LGBTSr was conceived as an online space for those of us who don’t often see our lives reflected in the images around us. That’s changing somewhat as advertisers catch on to the graying of the American population. They have things to sell older people, and some of us have the money to buy them. But the most common refrain I’ve heard from my peers is that they feel invisible, displaced and disappeared in a culture and society that considers us anything but the next new thing.

I also wanted a site that was not resource-focused. There are quite a few of those, and very good ones. SAGE, LGBT Elder Initiative, even an LGBT page at AARP. I wanted instead to have columns, interviews, featured books, and other items of interest. All serving to highlight our lives as going concerns. We’re bus drivers, authors, cashiers, clerks, and retirees. We are everywhere, to use an old phrase about gay people, and we are not going away.

I hope you find some things of interest to you here. I look forward to the site aging with me, and to keeping it going as long as there are things to share and readers with whom to share them.

– Mark McNease/Editor

Mark McNease is the Editor of LGBTSr, a website “where age is embraced and life is celebrated.” He has had six plays produced, with the last, Till Morning Comes, premiered at New Jersey Repertory Co. He’s the author of the Kyle Callahan Mysteries, co-editor and publisher of the anthology Outer Voices Inner Lives (Lambda Literary Award finalist), and the co-creator of the Emmy and Telly winning children’s program Into the Outdoors.