‘Life Things’: How Mid-Older LGBT+ People Draw on Experiences of Place-Based Exclusion to Construct Wisdom and Imagine Intergenerational Exchange

Depending on which historical moments they have inhabited, LGBT+ people aged 40 + may have experienced a combination of criminalisation, pathologisation, discrimination from within both cis-heterosexual spaces and LGBT+ spaces, and ongoing threats to inclusion through anti-LGBT+ speech. This paper draws on 38 life-course interviews with LGBT+ people aged 40 + conducted as part of the IncludeAge project ​ (2022-27), which explores experiences of inclusion and exclusion in everyday places and online spaces. Our paper considers how LGBT+ people aged 40 + currently living in Britain construct forms of experiential wisdom by reflecting on lives shaped by exclusion and marginalisation. We argue that attention to these ‘life things’ offers a broader way of conceptualising what exchanges between LGBT+ people of different generational moments might look like, and how such exchanges might contribute to age-friendly places and spaces for LGBT+ people. Although our data cannot demonstrate bidirectional LGBT+ intergenerational exchange or its effects, it does suggest that ‘life things’ provide a useful way of conceptualising what might be exchanged: not simply historical knowledge from old to young, but experiential perspectives on the ordinary and difficult business of living.