Intersecting Identities: Recognising the Heterogeneity of LGBT Communities

Abstract

One of the most pervasive stereotypes about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people is that they are white, ablebodied and have large disposable incomes. In LGBT communities, to a much greater degree than any comparable movement, the ‘institutions of culture-building have been market-mediated: bars, clubs, newspapers and magazines, phone-lines, resort and urban commercial districts’ (Warner, 1993: xvii). Traditional forms of association such as local communities, the workplace, churches and kinship networks, schools and colleges have been less available for LGBT people. Much of the early research conducted by LGB researchers was constrained by these realities and inevitably reinforced these assumptions; studies typically recruited LGB who were the most visible and accessible within communities (see Chapter 4) and failed to include transgender people. Yet despite a small but growing field of study among LGB communities, virtually nothing is known about the diversity of the LGBT population. In many studies, groups do not form large enough sub-samples on which to conduct separate analyses and researchers appear to presume that all participants have the same needs (Greene, 2003). Such work is urgently needed because a persistent assumption among policymakers and practitioners is that due to its relative economic advantage, the LGBT population can afford to buy its way out of structural disadvantage by paying for private health and social care.