Chapter One: The Invisible People: A Lifetime of Leaving Footprints in the Sand

This chapter considers the concept of the invisibility of LGBTQ+ populations in societal environments from the years immediately following the World War Two. The findings of the study on which this book is based are used as a starting point to illustrate how marginalisation and discrimination on a structural level impacted the formative years of populations now from their forties to seventies and eighties, and how these beginnings have shaped their health outcomes and engagement with healthy ageing practices in the present day.

Essentially, the first two chapters of this book argue that the agents of invisibility adapt their modus operandi over time, but the outcomes of marginalisation remain the same, rendering entire generations of ageing LGBTQ+ populations invisible for all or part of their lives as they pass through multiple states of erasure, and on into the mists of history. As such, public health and occupational therapy models are employed in conjunction with extensions of Queer Phenomenology (Ahmed, 2006) to fully explore these concepts.