The book
The first ever guide to wellness and wholeness in queer midlife
A radical, joyful and unapologetic invitation to move from midlife crisis towards queer midlife confidence and wholeness.
Still Here! Still Queer! Now What? is a groundbreaking practical toolkit written for LGBTQ+ people in their forties, fifties and beyond. It explores what it means to grow older after coming of age through stigma, invisibility, the AIDS crisis and Section 28 and how to meet the next chapter with renewed joy, courage and self-determination.
Weaving together lived experience, new coaching frameworks and conversations with more than 100 LGBTQ+ people, the book examines authenticity, mortality, resilience, shame, pleasure, belonging and transformation. It offers original tools including the Queer Wheel of Mid-Life, the Queer Wholeness Method and the Queer Mid-Life Manifesto.
Why it matters now:
- A generation is reaching midlife without the maps, mentors or cultural stories routinely available to heterosexual peers.
- Hard-won LGBTQ+ rights coexist with renewed hostility, uncertainty and the lasting bodily effects of stigma and silence.
- Most queer wellbeing resources focus on coming out or youth; this book centres the rich, complicated decades that follow.
- The book reframes midlife as a period of possibility: a chance to reclaim pleasure, purpose, community and queer power.
The author
Dr Paul Taylor-Pitt
Photograph: Steve Grolfe
Dr Paul Taylor-Pitt is an Organisation Development consultant, coach, facilitator, activist, podcaster and author who has spent more than three decades helping people, communities and organisations navigate change. His client list includes The Royal Albert Hall, The Old Vic, The British Film Institute, McCain, Airbus, Shelter, The Barbican, British Red Cross, Universal Music and The Somatic School.
His work brings together psychology, systems thinking, emotional intelligence, reflective practice and
creativity. He is particularly interested in the places where professional and human life meet: identity, uncertainty, belonging, power and the stories people tell themselves about who they are allowed to become.
Paul holds a doctorate in Organisation Development Professional Practice and is a Fellow of the RSA. His work has won awards from the Healthcare People Management Association, ODN Europe and the OD Network. He has been featured in HR Magazine’s Most Influential Thinkers and Most Influential Practitioners lists. He lives in London with his husband.
The endorsements
A beautiful combination of stories and social history, noticing and naming what is, Paul invites us all to consider the possibility of what might be.
Claire Pedrick, author of Simplifying Coaching
Taylor-Pitt turns midlife into an invitation, not a crisis. Through interviews with queer people and his own unfiltered story he shows that wholeness was never broken, only waiting to be reclaimed. Funny, rigorous, and exactly the elder wisdom our community needs.
Marc Svensson, founder of You Are Loved CIC
Paul gives us permission in his book. Permission to live by our own rules, that we can get it wrong and try again, to reconnect with joy, to love ourselves unconditionally. We have survived dark times and good ones. We absolutely are still here, still queer, and ready to live with purpose, unapologetically.
Saba Ali FRSA, equalities advocate and critical friend
I came to this book expecting a glimpse of the road ahead; instead, I found a mirror. Warm, funny and fiercely life-affirming, Still Here! Still Queer! Now What? honours the histories that made us while offering compassionate, practical ways to become more wholly ourselves. Paul Taylor-Pitt makes ageing feel not like a narrowing of possibility, but an invitation to live more vividly, more deliberately and more queerly. I finished it feeling connected to the generations ahead of me - and excited to join them.
Seth Insua, author of Human, Animal and Man and Wife