Understanding Community Resilience Resources and Experiences of Inequity within the LGBTQ+ Community: Implications for Identity and Mental Health Disparities

Being a part of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer plus (LGBTQ+) community has been linked with positive well-being. Research has established that the LGBTQ+ community has community-level resources (e.g., connection, belonging, shared hardships) that sexual and gender diverse people can utilize to cope in the face of discrimination (i.e., community resilience). However, due to various forms of discrimination and oppression, those with marginalized identities within the LGBTQ+ community (i.e., LGBTQ+ people of color, plurisexual, gender diverse) may not have equal access to LGBTQ+ community resilience resources. This dissertation is composed of three separate studies aimed at understanding sexual and gender diverse people’s experiences with community resilience resources and inequity within the LGBTQ+ community. The first of three studies recruited 14 LGBTQ+ people of color to explore their experiences within the LGBTQ+ community. Participants from the first study shared positive experiences within the broader LGBTQ+ community, such as shared narratives and hardships, engagement in social justice, and making space within the LGBTQ+ community for the intersections of their LGBTQ+ and ethnoracial identities. However, LGBTQ+ people of color also shared experiences of inequity and discrimination that occurred within the broader LGBTQ+ community, which limited access to LGBTQ+ community resilience resources and silenced people of color within the LGBTQ+ community. The second and third study were conducted using survey data from a larger study of 527 sexual and gender diverse people. A measure was developed and validated for the second study to assess an individuals’ experiences with community resilience resources and inequity within the LGBTQ+ community. The new measure is appropriate for researchers, mental health providers, and LGBTQ+ community organizations to use to examine experiences within the LGBTQ+ community. The third study used the newly validated measure from study two to examine patterns of advantage and disadvantage within the LGBTQ+ community. Results yielded four profiles of experiences (i.e., marginalized, neutral, disengaged, and embedded) among LGBTQ+ participants and that profiles predicted mental health outcomes. It is our hope that findings from the dissertation study will be used for advocacy and decreasing inequity within the LGBTQ+ community.