Chana -“I am okay with living alone.”

“”I am 73 years old, born in Tel Aviv. At a young age, already at 11, I felt that I was not like everyone else. I realized that I was falling in love with women around the age of 14-15. I understood that I was different; I didn’t even know what it was called, I didn’t know the word. I felt like a stranger in my society, in my place, in my family, in my city. A kind of exile, I would even say. That I was not at home. I really searched for women like me, but my problem was that I didn’t know any lesbians in Israel. Over the years, I became very active, both in the feminist movement in Israel and in the association. I came to the association at the age of 24. We started from nothing, and we didn’t have an older generation we could learn from.”

“I have criticism of the world, that they say it belongs to the young, and maybe that’s true, but when you reach a certain age, there are difficulties. I say: wait, the world belongs to everyone; it should belong to everyone equally, and maybe we need to consider each other…”

“I am glad that I was in feminist organizations, that I grew up in feminist organizations. I gained knowledge in how to change the world. But I still have not gained knowledge in the life of aging. I think it is appropriate and necessary to have a retirement home for people from the LGBTQ community.”

“Most of my life has been very intense, only in recent years have I become more reclusive, especially since COVID-19. But I am okay with living alone, without a partner. However, from the aging side, I also struggle a bit. For example, I do as little physical shopping as possible and make orders online, and sometimes I have trouble with the computer or mobile phone, which leads to great frustration and anger…”