The introduction outlines the personal, political, and scholarly foundation of the book’s focus on lesbian visibility in LGBTQ+ social spaces. It begins with the author’s coming out narrative, establishing how lived experience informs the book’s lesbian standpoint and its critical engagement with visibility politics. The chapter then presents key conceptual frameworks of the book: visibility, space, belonging, and power, highlighting that these are understood as individual but relational notions. It addresses the absence of research that focuses on lesbian experiences within social sciences and how this has consequences for the understanding of lesbians as an invisible and homogenous group in the United Kingdom. While the dominant representation of LGBTQ+ spaces is predominantly gay male-centric, this chapter starts to challenge the notion that lesbians are uninterested in such spaces and highlights the inclusion and exclusion practices within LGBTQ+ venues often centred around intersections of (dis)ability, race, age, gender, and sexuality. The localised governing practices and norms that regulate LGBTQ+ identities in these spaces are not always accounted for in empirical research. However, this book’s insights from Manchester’s Gay Village reveal the complexities and diversity of lesbian identities and experiences of LGBTQ+ spaces. This leads to the main argument of this book: that conceptualising power relations from a lesbian standpoint can contribute new insights into what it means to be (in)visible and to (not) belong in LGBTQ+ social spaces. Arguing that centring lesbian standpoints in research can shift dominant ways of thinking about lesbians, and more broadly, mainstream LGBTQ+ culture and spaces. The chapter concludes by outlining the feminist standpoint methodology underpinning the study and provides a roadmap for the chapters to follow.