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The Health of Sexual Minorities pp 149–168Cite as

Targeting the State: Risks, Benefits, and Strategic Dilemmas of Recent LGBT Health Advocacy

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Abstract

During the 1990s in the United States, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) health advocates undertook a significant strategic experiment that was fraught with some peril: They turned to the state in an attempt to institutionalize a broad-based health agenda. What I call here “state-centered” LGBT health politics involves concerted efforts by activists and researchers to make demands on the state for inclusion and incorporation—demands to institutionalize LGBT (or, more often, just lesbian and gay) health as a formal concern of public health and health research bureaucracies. At the crux of state-centered advocacy is the claim that lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered persons have distinctive health concerns and would benefit from research that finds them, counts them, studies them, and compares them with others. Thus the state-centered approach takes fixed categories of sexual identity as the foundation of a health promotion and biomedical research strategy. Although state-centered politics has been conducted in relation to the federal, state, and local government levels in the United States, I emphasize what I take to be the most significant recent target: the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and its key, health-related component agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of California-San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA

    Steven Epstein

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  1. Steven Epstein
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, NY, 10032, USA

    Ilan H. Meyer PhD  & Mary E. Northridge PhD, MPH  & 

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Epstein, S. (2007). Targeting the State: Risks, Benefits, and Strategic Dilemmas of Recent LGBT Health Advocacy. In: Meyer, I.H., Northridge, M.E. (eds) The Health of Sexual Minorities. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-31334-4_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-31334-4_7

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