When was the last time your LGBTQ+ creative featured someone over 55? For most brands the honest answer is never — and a report published this week makes that a costly habit. The Centre for Ageing Better found the UK’s LGBTQ+ 50+ population grew 33% between 2019 and 2024, while the heterosexual 50+ population grew 4%. Eight times the growth rate, and almost no one is buying against it. Meanwhile Older Queer Voices — a first-year podcast founded by Raga D’Silva and Nicola Fenton — just ran an intergenerational festival backed by Tesco, Booker, Best Food Logistics and N2O, with Sue Sanders, Rosie Jones and Jason Patel on the panel. FMCG money, older LGBTQ+ audiences, zero competition. We break down why that’s a smarter buy than it looks.
Here’s a question I’d put to almost any brand doing LGBTQ+ marketing right now: when was the last time your creative featured someone over 55?
For most, the honest answer is never. Not out of hostility — out of habit. LGBTQ+ marketing calcified early around a young, urban, high-visibility image, and twenty-five years later most briefs still default to it without anyone deciding to.
Which is why a small UK media property is worth your attention this week.
What Older Queer Voices Is Doing
Older Queer Voices was founded in 2025 by Raga D’Silva and Nicola Fenton as a podcast centering the lived experience of older LGBTQIA+ people. In June it marked its first year with a free festival at the Tesco Heart Building in Welwyn Garden City — keynotes, panels, a live podcast recording, a musical performance, and more than 200 attendees across generations.
The live episode was called “Bridging Generations,” and the panel was built for exactly that: veteran activist and Attitude 101 honoree Sue Sanders, comedian Rosie Jones, actor Jason Patel, and Dan Porter, co-chair of Tesco’s own LGBTQ+ network. Lisa Power gave the keynote. Clare Summerskill performed.
Per DIVA’s coverage, Jones spoke about how her disability became the label that overshadowed every other part of her identity — her sexuality included. That’s a specific, uncomfortable, useful observation, and it’s the kind of thing that only surfaces when you build a room where it can be said.
D’Silva has been blunter in her own writing. In DIVA in May, on older LGBTQIA+ people facing care homes, housing and healthcare systems that don’t see them: “We fought to be seen once. We are not doing it again in silence.”
That line should be on a wall somewhere.
The Sponsor List Is the Story
Now look at who’s paying for it: Tesco, Booker, Best Food Logistics and N2O.
That is a grocery retailer, a wholesaler, a foodservice distributor and an experiential marketing agency — supporting an intergenerational LGBTQ+ media property. Alongside a long list of community partners including LGBT Great, LGBT Foundation, Stonewall, myGwork, Pride in London and Tonic Housing.
Why does that matter? Because FMCG and grocery are exactly the categories that have been most skittish since 2023, and here they are underwriting LGBTQ+ content that isn’t a June campaign and isn’t aimed at 24-year-olds. Tesco hosted it in its own building and put a network co-chair on the panel. That’s not a logo placement — that’s participation.
It’s also, quietly, a smart buy. Nobody is competing for this space.
The Numbers Nobody Is Looking At
This got considerably more interesting yesterday, because the Centre for Ageing Better published a spotlight report on ageing in LGBTQ+ communities on August 26. The headline finding is one every media planner should know:
The UK LGBTQ+ population aged 50+ grew 33% between 2019 and 2024 — from 343,000 to 457,000. Over the same period, the heterosexual 50+ population grew 4%.
Read that twice. A segment growing at eight times the rate of its general-market counterpart, and I cannot name a brand actively buying against it.
Some of that growth is demographic and some is people becoming comfortable answering the question honestly later in life — which is its own marketing insight, since it means this segment keeps recruiting from within the existing 50+ population.
The rest of the report describes circumstances brands should understand:
- More than half of gay and bisexual men aged 65+ live alone, against fewer than a quarter of heterosexual men.
- Gay men aged 50–64 are more than twice as likely to live alone as heterosexual peers; bisexual women in that band, twice as likely.
- Only 55% of gay and bisexual men aged 50+ say they have someone to rely on for help — against 69% of heterosexual men.
- Older LGBTQ+ people are almost twice as likely to be renting.
- Fewer than half of LGBTQ+ adults are on track to meet their retirement financial needs.
The U.S. picture rhymes. GLAAD projects roughly 7 million LGBTQ people aged 50+ by 2030, and long-standing MAP/SAGE research found older LGBTQ adults twice as likely to be single and living alone, and four times less likely to have children.
What That Means Commercially — Said Carefully
I want to handle this next part with some care, because there’s a lazy version of it that treats hardship as an opportunity, and that’s not what I’m arguing.
What the data actually describes is a large, growing group of people whose household structure doesn’t match the assumptions almost every consumer campaign is built on. Living alone means different basket sizes, different pack formats, different meal occasions — which is precisely why a grocer, a wholesaler and a foodservice distributor showing up here is more logical than it first appears. Fewer children means different financial planning and different discretionary patterns. Renting later in life means different home and financial services needs. Smaller support networks mean community, connection and trust matter more in a brand relationship, not less.
None of that is being spoken to. Search for LGBTQ+ creative featuring people in their sixties and you will find very little that isn’t a healthcare or end-of-life category. The community that built the visibility every brand now trades on is largely absent from the marketing that visibility made possible.
That’s the gap. It’s not a moral point, though it is also that. It’s an unbought audience with money, loyalty, and almost no competition for its attention.
Why the Intergenerational Format Works
One more thing worth naming, because I think the format matters as much as the audience.
“Bridging Generations” didn’t put four older people on a panel to talk about being older. It put Sue Sanders next to Jason Patel and Rosie Jones. That structure does something a single-cohort format can’t: it makes the content legible to younger audiences while still centering elders.
For a sponsor, that’s the whole ballgame. You’re not buying a narrow age segment — you’re buying a cross-generational audience with an angle nobody else has. And you’re associating with the part of this community’s story that carries the most weight: the people who were there.
It also travels. Intergenerational content performs unusually well in our network, because it gives people a reason to tag someone. A 26-year-old sends it to a mentor. A 62-year-old sends it to someone who’s just come out. That’s the sharing behavior every content strategy is chasing, and this format produces it structurally rather than by luck.
Where Pink Media Lands
Three takeaways going into the 2026 LGBTQ+ Marketplace Guide.
Older Queer Voices is a partnership target, not just a nice story. A first-year property with real FMCG backing, a defined editorial position and an audience nobody else is serving is exactly the kind of platform worth building a relationship with early.
The 50+ LGBTQ+ segment needs to be a line in briefs. Not a diversity checkbox — a named audience with its own creative and its own placements. If your LGBTQ+ campaign has no one over 55 in it, that was a decision, even if nobody made it out loud.
Sponsors like Tesco deserve to be pointed at. In a year when a lot of brands went quiet, some showed up for the least fashionable, least photographed corner of this community. That’s worth more than a Pride post, and it should be said out loud.
We did not fight for visibility just to age out of it. If you’re thinking about how to reach LGBTQ+ audiences beyond the demographic every brief defaults to, we’d welcome the conversation. You can reach us through PinkMedia.LGBT.
Authentic LGBTQ+ engagement, 24/7, 365 days a year, at every age — that’s what Pink Media is built for.
