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C 2003) American Journal of Community Psychology, Vol. 31, Nos. 3/4, June 2003 (°
Coming Out in Community Psychology: Personal Narrative and Disciplinary Change Anthony R. D’Augelli1
Community psychology as a discipline has not focused its attention on the lives of lesbians, gay men, and bisexual (LGB) people, despite the field’s potential to collaborate with this population in dealing with the many psychosocial challenges they face. Professional and personal barriers that community psychologists must confront conducting research and developing interventions with the LGB community are described. Community psychology work with LGB communities is often a “coming out” experience for LGB community psychologists, and a questioning of sexual orientation fot heterosexual community psychologists. Conceptual analyses and empirical reports are presented that exemplify how community psychologist can contribute to decreasing the pervasive stigma LGB people face. The use of an ecological model, a focus on the development and evaluation of preventive interventions, and a recognition of the diversity within the LGB population are core perspectives that can direct future work by community psychologists. Issues ranging from testing ways to empower young LGB people to analyses of the impact of the sociopolitical climate on LGB lives demonstrate the rich range of contributions community psychologists can make. KEY WORDS: sexual orientation; homosexuality; homophobia; heterosexism.
GAY COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY: OUT AND INVISIBLE
people and developing a feeling of community with people who are often complete strangers. It is an odd process at best, one with few counterparts in human development. It is nearly always a difficult process, as it violates others’ assumptions about their friends, families, coworkers, and neighbors. For this reason, it nearly always involves some shame, which is exacerbated by the public stigmatization of samesex emotional and sexual expression. The comingout narrative involves moving from guilt/shame to positive self-esteem. This narrative, then, is central to understanding the lives of LGB people. Ironically, until recently, narrative has had no place in psychological inquiry (Rappaport, 1995). With the elevation of personal narratives to an acceptable methodology within community psychology (which runs contrary to the logical positivistic predilections of many in the field), I will comment on the papers in this special issue with some personal history. I do this because the years separating my own emergence as a gay man who happened to be a
The telling of personal narratives has always been central to the lives of lesbians, gay men, and bisexual (LGB) people. Dropping their heterosexual covers, LGB people “come out,” and then proceed to tell their coming-out stories for many years, both as a prompt for personal consolidation and as a bridge to others who have undergone similar transformations. Because everyone is presumed to be heterosexual, the stories are told to many different people, in many different versions throughout the life span. Some time ago, I wrote of this “exiting from heterosexuality” (D’Augelli, 1994), the first part of a social process that hinges upon finding other LGB 1 To
whom correspondence should be addressed at Department of Human Development and Family Studies, Pennsylvania State University, 105Q White Building, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802; e-mail:
[email protected].
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C 2003 Plenum Publishing Corporation 0091-0562/03/0600-0343/0 °
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344 community psychologist and the appearance of these papers were vibrant and difficult years for LGB people, myself included. This special issue is strong evidence that LGB people, whether as research participants or as researchers, have a home in community psychology. This was not always the case, and the importance of this special issue can only be appreciated within an historical context. I first told someone else that I was gay in 1981. Twenty years later, I am out to everyone I know. Thanks to my having been the only open gay faculty member at my university for many years and one of the few people to raise LGB issues in my local community, my colleagues and many local residents know I’m gay. I would have wanted to come out years earlier. Homosexuality was not removed from the psychiatric nomenclature in DSM until 1973, a year after I completed my doctoral training. During my clinical training, I wanted to discuss my feelings with someone, but the idea was terrifying; and, I did not seek professional help because of fear that I would be removed from my program. (After all, who trains someone with a mental disorder to be a clinical psychologist?) In addition, despite my sexual orientation, which was fairly clear to me at that point, I could not even bring myself to share this information even with the Army physicians during my physical examination after being drafted for service during the Vietnam era. This simple truth would have removed me from induction, but I could not say the words. That would take another decade. Much of my early work as a community psychologist had involved the development of informal helping resources for communities, especially rural communities like the ones that surround my university in central Pennsylvania. I knew the importance of social support, of the connections to others, and how support networks play a powerful preventive mental health function. I knew, too, how difficult it was to “create” social support networks, especially when there are systemic factors that make social connections unstable. As with most of us in community psychology, I was driven by a strong social ethic of “doing good,” but with an equally strong concern for the unanticipated consequences of such a stance; I experienced the paradox of how to empower others without inserting a layer of professional “expertise” into their lives. By the time I had come out, I had worked for several years trying to encourage social networks in rural areas, working with community people to become “helpers” without their becoming crypto-professionals, and, hopefully, providing a model for such community
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D’Augelli building (D’Augelli, Vallance, Danish, Young, & Gerdes, 1981). Coming out as a gay man in 1981 in rural central Pennsylvania was to experience what it was like to have no social network and no social support. There were at that time no known open gay or lesbian faculty or staff on campus to whom to turn. The “gay community” in the local town consisted of a single “gay/bisexual support group” containing, at its better attended meetings, three members. (I later learned that there was a secretive lesbian social network, but I was obviously ineligible to participate.) The gay and lesbian student organization, once a highly visible and politically active collective, had dwindled down to fewer than 10 members, many of whom were not even students. There was no gay bar, historically the prime institution that provides cultural socialization into gay social life. The lack of a social network seemed like a challenge that my training as a community psychologist could address. To do so, however, meant another transition for me—from “gay professional” to “professional gay.” To work to develop a helping community in the area, if only for my own selfish purposes, meant being “out” in a public way, and it led to a shift in my work to a focus on the development of my own local gay community. A tenured faculty member, I was also in a privileged position—I could be open about being gay and probably not be fired. (As of the end of 2002, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania still does not have a statewide law protecting citizens from discrimination based on their sexual orientation, as 14 states currently do.) Some of the details about efforts to develop a “helping community” in the area, both in the town and at the university, are presented elsewhere (D’Augelli, 1989c). Thus, my background as a community psychologist gave me conceptual and practical tools, my personal needs gave me motivation required to overcome the fears of the consequences of becoming an open “queer” in town and on campus, and my position as a senior faculty member added moral obligation and some protection. I appeared to be in the ideal position to “do good.” My first opportunity to come out in the field of community psychology was offered to me by the late Steve Heyman, a Community Psychologist at the University of Wyoming, who had somehow learned that I was gay. Meeting with me at our annual convention, Heyman asked if I would be open to writing the “gay piece” for a special issue on rural communities he was editing for this journal. Whatever hesitancies I might have had about being involved locally (which were considerable)
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Coming Out in Community Psychology: Personal Narrative and Disciplinary Change were greatly magnified when I knew that agreeing to write such a paper meant that I would be, in essence, telling my friends and colleagues in community psychology that I was gay. Nonetheless, I agreed, and the resulting paper (D’Augelli, & Hart, 1987) was my professional “coming-out,” and it reflects much of my own experience as a gay man living in a rural area. I was later to find out that Heyman, at the time we talked a sports psychologist for several of his university’s teams and not out locally, became the victim of a deadly hate crime, thrown to his death from a car after an evening at a gay bar in Denver. (It was Heyman that I immediately thought of when the vicious murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard occurred in 1998.) Steve Heyman was the only gay community psychologist I knew, and the first community psychologist who approached me acknowledging that I was gay. My experiences as a gay community psychologist in the first decade of my being out were not good. Most people simply ignored the fact that I was gay. No gay or lesbian community psychologist (there had to be some) made an effort to contact me, leading me to feel as if I were the only one, a common symptom of institutional heterosexism that most LGB people feel. The systematic exclusion of LGB issues from all the discussions of how community psychology was not adequately addressing the needs of “minority” communities was striking, given the historic disenfranchisement of LGB people and the everincreasing number of gay and bisexual men who were casualties of HIV/AIDS in many of the urban communities where community psychologists worked. Of all of the colleagues I knew, less than a handful ever asked about my experiences coming-out; few were at all interested in the kind of professional work I was then doing. Years later, when community psychology colleagues came to my university to give colloquia, they did not ask about my research, no less about any personal struggles. One notable, and much appreciated, exception was my invitation to present a paper (D’Augelli, 1994) at a 1988 conference on diversity organized by Ed Trickett. I was clearly invisible to others as far as my sexual orientation was concerned, and my contributions as a community psychologist who focused on LGB communities were probably seen as marginal if noticed at all. It is also possible that stigma-by-association, or what Goffman (1963) called courtesy stigma, was operating. The fear that others might question one’s sexuality if you spend too much time with an out gay person is a well-known phenomenon. I experi-
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enced this on campus, when colleagues showed little or no interest in my research, and when I would be shunned at university-wide gatherings, even by people I knew. As for community psychologists, however, a disinterest in the broader set of concerns faced by LGB communities, clearly relevant to the field, was clear. This occurred because most community psychologists were heterosexual, most were men (men are considerably more threatened by same-sex erotic expression than women), and most did not see LGB communities as “minority” communities—hence, neglecting these communities was possible. An important additional issue was that surely other LGB community psychologists could not feel welcome by the field. At a time when being closeted was more important than being open, and when being open had severe professional consequences, few psychologists were willing to be out. (A case in point is the late Roger Brown, the renowned social psychologist at Harvard, who waited until 1996 to publicly acknowledge his homosexuality, after his retirement, Brown, 1996). Thus, little work was done by community psychologists on LGB issues until the very late 1990s. For example, with the exception of my four pages (D’Augelli, 2000) and a five-page discussion of AIDS prevention in gay communities (Revenson & Schiaffino, 2000), almost no mention is made of LGB issues in almost 1000 pages of the Handbook of Community Psychology (Rappaport & Seidman, 2000), a comprehensive review of the field. In the Handbook’s coverage of the first 25 years of community psychology’s treatment of women’s empowerment (Swift, Bond, & Serrano-Garcia, 2000), the section on lesbians (p. 862) identified four papers on the topic (which I had written). Thus, the field’s historical indifference to LGB issues is clearly documented by their absence in the Handbook . Over a decade ago, I wrote: Both the ideology of community psychology and its many intervention models provide powerful tools for collaborating with lesbians and gay men in developing their helping communities. Community Psychologists have an ethical responsibility to make these tools accessible to lesbians, gay man, and their significant others. Although community psychology has “given away” its resources to help many groups, widespread sharing of community psychology with lesbians and gay men remains an unfulfilled promise. (D’Augelli, 1989c, p. 28)
The papers in this issue begin to make good on this promise, and it has been a long time coming.
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346 TOWARD AN AFFIRMING FUTURE FOR LESBIAN, GAY, AND BISEXUAL ISSUES IN COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY This special issue comes at an opportune time as community psychology is taking stock of its history. Indeed, this was the challenge faced by a team of editors drawing on papers from the first 25 years of this journal. One volume provides statements of conceptual issues at the core of the field and illustrative empirical reports (Revenson et al., 2002a), and the other highlights methodological contributions of particular usefulness to community psychology (Revenson et al., 2002b). Finding a place for LGB concerns in the future of community psychology involves a synopsis of past coverage of these topics, as Harper and Schneider (2003) provide in their introductory commentary to this special issue, as well as conceptual and methodological examples that provide direction for the future, which the papers in this special issue represent. In organizing their reviews, the team of editors of the two edited volumes extracted core themes at the heart of community psychology. Conceptual themes concerned the use of an ecological model for the understanding of human behavior, a focus on the development and evaluation of preventionoriented models for intervention, and the necessity of considering various forms of diversity in understanding communities and collaborating with such communities for social action and change. The methodological consequences of these core concepts are the need for ecological assessment and the importance of research methods that are “culturally anchored,”— that is, methods that take into account cultural and other individual differences and integrate these differences into their methodologies (Hughes, Seidman, & Williams, 1993). We see these same themes illustrated by the papers in this special issue.
IMMERSION IN LGB COMMUNITY LIFE: TRAINING IN THE CREATION OF SETTINGS FOR PERSONAL CHANGE Stanley’s paper (Stanley, 2003) details how community psychology training can be used to assist LGB communities in the development of helping resources. Much attention has been given in the last decade to issues confronted by LGB youth essentially because more adolescents are coming out at earlier ages, while still at home and still in school. The clash between their drive to self-affirmation and stigma and victim-
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D’Augelli ization creates stress and, for some, mental health problems (current reviews of this literature can be found in D’Augelli & Patterson, 2001). In the practicum course that Stanley describes, students were asked to become collaborators with LGB youth in developing a safe setting in which to meet. This is an excellent example of a core skill community psychologists have—collaborating with communities in the “creation of settings” that enhance development and community resources. Students learned the difficulty of creating settings, confronting the paradox of how community psychologists can “empower” others (Gruber & Trickett, 1987). Importantly, most of the students were self-identified heterosexuals, privileged by this status in society at large, but they were minoritized within the LGB group they were “empowering.” The requirement here that students learn about a community to which they did not belong prevented the kind of professional arrogance, however subtle, that might have occurred had the “target” population been heterosexual. These students’ heterosexual personal power was thus destabilized, and their understanding of this provided an experiential learning of the meaning of collaboration with communities. Students experienced crucial professional change as community psychologists by confronting their own heterosexism and by their exposure to the diversity of sexual identities displayed among the youth. At the same time, the youth gained in the process—a safe space was created. This project demonstrates the obvious—that heterosexual community psychologists can and should work with LGB communities. But, it also suggests why this has not happened—the threat to socially constructed heterosexual identities that this process might produce. At the core of heterosexism and homophobia is the legitimate fear that one’s own sexuality can be questioned, partially by others through a guilt-by-association process, but also by oneself, as the lines between presumed sexual categories are found to be permeable.
TAKING THE ECOLOGICAL METAPHOR SERIOUSLY: ANALYSIS OF SETTINGS FOR CHANGE One of the fundamental tenets of community psychology is the importance of the ecological context for both description and intervention, although the operationalization of this view is challenging in practical terms. For instance, at its most superficial
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Coming Out in Community Psychology: Personal Narrative and Disciplinary Change level, the ecological view simply requires that the “environment” be taken into account. We must understand that people are in context, but constructs that capture the dimensions of “context” are difficult to articulate. In this regard, Chesir-Teran’s work (ChesirTeran, 2003) provides an important contrast to the work done by the students in Stanley’s class by examining the social context in which youth spend most of their time—school. The history of community psychology is rich with examples of interventions conducted in schools, most prominently, the classic Primary Mental Health Project created by Cowen and his colleagues (Cowen et al., 1996) and, more recently, the social-cognitive problem-solving programs that have become standard preventive interventions for adolescents (Weissberg, Barton, & Shriver, 1997). Just as The Cafe´ provided a safe setting for youth, these school-based programs provide specific services—a supportive helper in the first case, training in a set of general interpersonal conflict skills in the second. These interventions, however, do not operate at a systems level to promote change. Chesir-Teran argues for the necessity of systemslevel change to enhance the development of LGB youth in schools. Individual-level change efforts, however useful on their own terms, do not empower LGB youth in that they leave the power structure of heterosexual privilege intact. Innovations such as Project 10 (Uribe & Harbeck, 1991), which provided social support and counseling to youths within high schools, do not change school policy, nor need they influence teacher and staff training. Indeed, they unintentionally “blame the victim” by creating an individual recipient of services who needs professional attention, even if they are primary preventive in nature. Nor do they challenge the nature of the formal curriculum or the informal curriculum of schools. LGB people are missing from nearly all class discussion (except in the context of HIV prevention, which serves to link LGB issues with AIDS issues). Moreover, the social climate of schools that allows victimization of LGB youth is not changed. The need for change in schools as contexts for LGB youths is critical, given the results of both convenience samples (e.g., D’Augelli, Pilkington, & Hershberger, 2002) and population-based studies (e.g., Bontempo & D’Augelli, 2002). Taking a lead from Moos’ work on social environments, ChesirTeran notes that aspects of the school environment ranging from policy statements prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation to the display of LGB-affirming images need attention. Indeed, he
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recommends systems-induced change in that bastion of male heterosexist socialization, the locker room. It is worth noting in this regard how little attention school sports have been given as promoting institutionalized heterosexism; many LGB youth are systematically excluded from such activities as a result of the homophobic atmosphere allowed, if not encouraged, by staff (see Grossman, 1998, for a discussion of the importance of leisure contexts for LGB youth). Physical-architectural features, program-policy features, structural characteristics, and social behavior patterns must all be addressed for intervention to succeed. Otherwise, efforts will exemplify the problem of first-order change (in this case, changing individuals) removing pressure from those responsible to produce second-order change (“real change,” i.e., systems-level change; Watzlawick, Weakland, & Fisch, 1974). Chesir-Teran not only suggests targets for social action consistent with basic community psychology principles, but also recommends assessment strategies consistent with a systems-level approach. Multiple sources of data are required, ranging from studies of the attitudes of students, teachers, and other personnel about LGB issues to policy reviews in which a formal analysis of particular elements of a school system are scrutinized and evaluated. In my own work at Penn State, for instance, it required surveys of freshmen’s homophobic attitudes (D’Augelli & Rose, 1990), surveys of resident assistants’ attitudes (D’Augelli, 1989a), and documentation of the victimization experiences of open LGB students (D’Augelli, 1992) to provide convincing evidence that a climate of discrimination existed and that victimization actually occurred on campus. These data, used by activist faculty, staff, and students, led to the addition of sexual orientation to the University’s nondiscrimination clause (this contentious history is described in D’Augelli, 1991). Not only had the nondiscrimination clause been changed, but the University’s “diversity” requirement could be filled by taking a course on sexual orientation, and a commission devoted to LGB policy issues was formed. Thus, not only were climate and safety addressed, but curricular changes were made. Changes at the high school (or elementary or junior high school) level are, of course, much harder to accomplish than on a college campus, but community (and school) psychologists can encourage the development of Gay–Straight Alliances (collectives of students supportive of LGB students), work to educate and train staff in issues related to sexual
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348 orientation, and, if need be, assist local community groups to gain access to legal and other resources available to encourage school change. We now have evidence demonstrating the positive impact of supportive school contexts on LGB youth (Blake et al., 2001). The enormity of the oppression LGB youth face during their schooling requires immediate attention, and change in the ecologies of schools is crucial.
THE CHALLENGES OF TAKING DIVERSITY SERIOUSLY A field that considers communities to be its objects of study and its focus for intervention cannot underestimate the diversities of people in communities. This has become such a cliche´ that it bears little repeating, but the consequences of taking this perspective seriously are substantial. How, for example, is it possible to discuss the “Latino community” as if it were a monolithic entity, rather than a complex system of interwoven, yet distinct social connections and cultural lineages? Consider too, how sexual orientation makes this even more complex when its place in different cultural groups is considered. The differences between people’s privately experienced sexual arousal patterns, their sexual activities, their self-labeled sexual orientation, and their publicly presented sexual orientation render the matrix of personal “sociodemographics” extraordinarily complex. If one is discussing HIV prevention among adults who are at elevated risk as a result of their sexual activity, there is a pressing need to understand the cultural and other individual and group differences that account for variability in risk. For instance, several colleagues and I have recently written of the unique characteristics of rural environments that need consideration in developing HIV prevention approaches for men who have sex with other men (Preston, D’Augelli, Cain, & Schulze, 2002). Many aspects of rural life, ranging from geography to the extremely closeted nature of same-sex sexual activities in small towns would make an intervention such as the one Miller and her colleagues (Miller, Klotz, & Eckholdt, 1998) developed for male hustler bars in New York City impossible to implement. In this regard, Zea, Reisen, and Diaz (2003) provide a strong argument for the need for a cultural analysis to be at the heart of understanding the sexual behavior of Latino men who have sex with men, some of whom self-identify as gay or bisexual, and many of whom do not. Such an analysis has multi-
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D’Augelli ple levels that deal with sexual behavior as, simultaneously, a reflection of an individual’s place in time and space; an individual’s history of transactions with others for the purpose of sexual expression, and an individual’s position in a shared sociocultural context is required. A broad psychological theory must somehow integrate these different levels of meaning, and Diaz, in this paper and elsewhere (Diaz, 1998), has proposed a “psychocultural” model to accomplish this. Such a model entails understanding the cultural messages that are internalized during socialization as far as same-sex sexual expression and gender are concerned. In their analysis of sexual scripts, Simon and Gagnon (1986) distinguish between cultural scenarios (collective meanings held by people in a particular culture), interpersonal scripts (the application of scenarios to interpersonal exchanges), and intrapsychic scripts (internalized personal meanings). Aspects of different cultural communities that are distinctive (for example, the strong collectivism and familialism in Latino communities, which occurs in the cultural context of Catholicism) must be extracted from the everyday lives of people who may be at risk. Developing a culturally sensitive methodology is no easy task, but several important suggestions are available (Hughes et al., 1993). As is common among analysts arguing for a strong cultural analysis, Zea et al. stress the importance of qualitative methodologies to map the nature of relevant cultural meanings. These methodologies must be complemented by quantitative methods so that ideographic and nomothetic perspectives can be integrated. The challenge is one faced by any cultural analyst: the systematic deconstruction of embedded meanings must be followed by a reconstruction of some kind. There are, unfortunately, no scripts for the reconstruction process except for the requirement of the use of multiple sources of data gathered in diverse ways as well as methods to determine the correspondence of interpreted meanings by different observers.
LIFE SPAN CONSIDERASTIONS IN COMMUNITY INTERVENTIONS FOR LGB PEOPLE Just as it has always been true that the concept of a “community” as a homogeneous unit that needed no further explanation was mythical, so it is that while the “LGB community” serves as a useful metaphor, it is one with certain dangers (D’Augelli & Garnets, 1995).
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Coming Out in Community Psychology: Personal Narrative and Disciplinary Change Perhaps no subset of the LGB community has been so consistently ignored as older LGB adults. Old LGB people are invisible in two worlds—the heterosexist world that assumes that all older adults are heterosexual, and the “gay community,” especially the gay male community, which prizes youth. And traditional gerontological theory and research are heterosexist in their analyses of aging (Grossman, D’Augelli, & Hershberger, 2000). Older lesbians and bisexual women are even more invisible than older men. Considerable evidence exists that shows the importance of social support to successful aging. Encouraging social support networks among older lesbians faces serious obstacles, as Nystrom and Jones (2003) shows. Older lesbians do not get involved in the many activities that are often part of urban LGB community centers, and workers in such centers are often at a loss to know what kinds of programs would be useful. There are no models for “outreach” to this group in the literature, and Nystrom and Jones’ paper represents, to my knowledge, the only example of a community intervention designed for older lesbians. There are social and recreational groups for older LGB adults in many metropolitan areas, of course, and now even internet-based social activism groups (most prominent is OLOC, or Older Lesbians Organized for Change [www.oloc.org], but a case study such as Nystrom and Jones’ provides an invaluable example of the difficulties faced in efforts to create a psychological sense of community among these often hidden older women. The power of such a sense of connection with other women is strong. For instance, the informal (and secretive) network of lesbians that exists in my community, though not limited to older women, has lasted for nearly 20 years, and remains the primary linkage among local women (D’Augelli, 1989b; D’Augelli, Hart, & Collins, 1987). The model the organizers of the Elder Initiative used is, in essence, a community psychology model that echoes the work of Berkowitz (1982) and Wolff (2001), among others. But, the leaders of the Initiative appreciated the limitations of the model they used when applied to the distinct population they were hoping to organize. One could not assume that all community agencies and businesses would be publicly supportive of a group for older lesbians (as they might be concerned with such a topic as, for example, preventing child sexual abuse). Not all of the resources required might be available or accessible to older lesbians. For example in work focused on developing helping networks in a rural community
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(D’Augelli, 1989c), we quickly found that few professionals were “out” in our community, fearing that their work would be jeopardized. Efforts to obtain tax-exempt status for a community LGB telephone helpline were accomplished by members of the organizing group who had no legal training. The group had no funds to hire an attorney, and no local attorney was known to be LGB. Even the simplest aspects of community-building, such as placing an ad in a local newspaper about a group meeting had an obstacle unique to LGB people: no one was willing to place the ad, which involved giving a name and mailing address for billing. In our small town, this was simply too public, and this reluctance to let people know of our organizing efforts created months of delay. It is a testament to the carefulness of their organizing process that the Elder Initiative drew 550 women into its network over a 3-year period. The few formal social service agencies that currently exist for older LGB adults seldom have so many women involved in their programs. It is surely the fact that this is a “bottom-up” approach that explains this success. Interpersonal trust, safety, and, for many, privacy are crucial issues for older lesbians. As a group, older lesbians and gay men have lived through a history of institutionalized discrimination, including decades of pathologizing by the mental health profession. The power of connecting to other women can help overcome feelings of isolation, and provide a crucial feeling of communal empowerment.
EMPOWERING YOUNG GAY AND BISEXUAL MEN As I mentioned earlier in these comments, efforts by community psychologists to empower other people have a built-in contradiction. What exactly is the expertise of community psychologists above and beyond that which a group of informed local citizens would develop if faced with a pressing problem in their communities? The HIV epidemic offered the most horrifying challenge ever faced by the LGB community, and I had urged the involvement of community psychology in this social issue some time ago (D’Augelli, 1990). On the one hand, little collaboration had occurred between community psychologists and LGB communities at that point. On the other hand, there was no reason to believe that community psychology had anything particular to offer, with the possible exception of being able to conduct evaluations,
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350 which were often seen as luxuries by hard-pressed community-based organizations and struggling informal support networks. Gay men in urban areas most affected by the epidemic had a prior history of strong community organizing and political activism (Duberman, 1993). Thus it was no surprise that the changes in risky sexual activity among urban gay and bisexual men (Martin, Dean, Garcia, & Hall, 1989), which were among the most dramatic behavioral changes ever chartered by behavioral science research, were accomplished by informal community groups. There already existed networks of men who were at the core of the first wave of efforts to thwart more infections, even before it was known that a sexually transmitted virus was involved. Such groups as the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACTUP responded to the changing contours of the epidemic by tapping their own resources and developing their own array of interventions, including direct action and political protest (which substantially reduced the cost of AZT to people with HIV). Therefore, it was with some dismay that in the early 1990s, I reviewed a paper submitted to this journal that credited community psychologists with a central role in the organizing resources to start HIV prevention activities early in the epidemic. An effort to appropriate and be credited for the hard-earned accomplishments of local gay communities within the rubric of community psychology on a post hoc basis was ethically troublesome at best, especially since community psychologists provided so little help in the early years. In this set of papers, however, Hays, Rebchook, and Kegeles (2003) demonstrate exactly what community psychologists can offer LGB communities and HIV prevention, and in the process show how community psychologists can give away their skills in ways that leave groups empowered. In essence, the Mpowerment Project is a process of community building. Its salient goal is social—to provide recreational and social opportunities for young gay men that are distinct from the sexually charged atmosphere of the many other settings available for them. In most areas, even in major metropolitan areas, the socialization of young gay and bisexual males is “sexualized,” an emphasis placed on the sexual aspects of their identities. This is appropriate to a degree, of course, and it would be a mistake to consider social settings that encourage the expression of gay men’s sexuality to be inherently problematic. An affirmation of male homoeroticism is a necessary response to the years of silence and stigmatization young gay men live
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D’Augelli through, and the agonies of the HIV epidemic. Thus, the Mpowerment Project is not an “alternative” to the other sociosexual sites young gay men can frequent, but is complementary. It is neither a moral response to public sex expression (i.e., in bathhouses and public venues), nor is it an antiseptic, desexualized socialization venue for conventionalizing gay men’s lives. It is, in contrast, a product of the men themselves, with professionals providing a structure that encourages ownership and continuity of operation. The components of the project—not its “content” or “message”—embody principles of community psychology. Ownership of the program by the “target” groups is accomplished in simple, symbolic ways with the men designing the logos for the project in their own areas and in their developing outreach events. But the real structural power encouraging ownership is in the administrative skeleton of the Project, which includes outreach groups of men who go to settings where young gay men are present, and the M-groups, which are small group discussions that help men talk about issues related to safe sex. Importantly, these are not “safe sex workshops,” a type of intervention that would be resisted by a new generation of young men who have grown into young adulthood surrounded by safe sex messages and by few sex-positive messages. The Mpowerment Project is based on approaches that have been used by community psychologists prior to the HIV epidemic. For example, in the early 1980s, several of us worked to develop “helping resources” in underpopulated rural areas of central Pennsylvania that had little professional mental health services. We wanted to provide “mental health prevention,” but presented the program as one that taught people how to be better listeners for their neighbors, and how to respond when others had common emotional problems (D’Augelli et al., 1981). We worked with community leaders to identify possible program participants, none of whom had formal mental health training. We had to gain the trust of the community, and play on their terms—setting up groups in places where they would be comfortable, following their leads and warnings, and steering clear of long-standing interpersonal tensions within the communities. We provided the structure, based on a “training the trainers” model, in which our first set of helpers trained others. In many ways, the Community Helpers Project was a conceptual predecessor of the Mpowerment Project. Our project slowly declined as we withdrew from the areas and our funding ended (hardly a unique sequence of events), and we did not succeed in institutionalizing
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Coming Out in Community Psychology: Personal Narrative and Disciplinary Change its operation due to the exceedingly limited resources of the local mental health systems, which would have had to had taken administrative control. Thus, too, one expects that the Mpowerment Projects will vary in effectiveness by context and community. And, just as our project faltered in the long term because of difficulties related to program maintenance over time, so might Mpowerment Projects have short life spans if the people involved do not consider how to maintain them. Yet, institutionalizing an intervention such as the Mpowerment Program may be, in principle, undesirable. LGB communities are in continuous flux, as new generations of young women and men enter them. In young LGB communities, novelty and change are valued, while “more of the same” is not. The “half life” of a program such as the Mpowerment Project remains unknown since change is always required to maintain community interest.
CONFRONTING THE SOCIOPOLITICAL CLIMATE I know of no other research, except Russell and Richard’s (2003), that has focused on the impact of political processes on LGB people’s mental health. In contrast, political scientists and economists have paid considerable attention recently to public policy issues and their impact (Badgett, 2001; Riggle & Tadlock, 1999). Therefore, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that policies and laws relating to sexual orientation will influence LGB lives. Evidence exists, for example, showing that discrimination against gay men can be linked to later mental health problems (Meyer, 1995), and victimization of LGB youths in schools is associated with mental health distress (D’Augelli et al., 2002). The campaign preceding the vote on Amendment 2 in Colorado was marked by the usual antigay rhetoric, the contemptuous attacks on the gay “lifestyle,” and its corruptive influence on “the family.” Most LGB people have been exposed to this cultural form of verbal abuse for most of their lives in one form or another, yet considerable tension and fear occur if such discourse is routine in one’s local newspapers and other local media. Most LGB people live their lives in relative anonymity, but such public venom increases hyperconsciousness and interpersonal tensions. I know from my experiences the tension I would feel after sending a response to our local paper following the homophobic letters
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predictably appearing after any discussion of local or university efforts to increase rights for LGB people. For example, after reading that the University was providing funds for a film series on gay and lesbian issues, an irate citizen wrote that public funds should not be used to promote “disgusting man-on-man sex.” Perhaps the most painful part of local efforts in my community to amend a local housing ordinance to include protection from discrimination based on sexual orientation was observing the responses of LGB people to the often vicious and often ad hominem comments made in public hearings. Allusions to child molestation and perdition were common, expressed with frightening intemperance. This served to scare many LGB people from being willing to participate in public discussion, as did the lack of protection from being fired from jobs simply because of their sexual orientation. Russell and Richards’ paper is a bold, original contribution to our understanding of the impact of antigay political events on the lives of LGB people. Using attendees at public events for LGB people, they endeavored to identify stressors and resilience factors related to Amendment 2. They studied the period between the amendment’s passage through the 1996 U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning the amendment. I have personally observed all of the stressors they identified: encounters with homophobia, divisions within the local LGB community, trying to understand the dangers involved, the indifference of others from whom support would have been expected (“failed witnessing”), and feelings of internalized homophobia, a nearly automatic self-questioning based on absorbing years of antigay cultural messages. Resilience factors were also discovered. One such factor is a general personal ability to understand the political implications of antigay community actions. This involves both sensitivity to other groups’ civil rights struggles and an understanding of how the LGB community is linked to other marginalized groups. Other resilience factors were self-reflection on internalized homophobia and its impact, the expression of affect as a mobilizing factor, “successful witnessing” both by others’ supportive actions and by affirmative political and judicial decisions, and a renewed appreciation of the importance of the LGB community as a source of personal strength. These resilience factors form the core of an empowerment perspective for LGB communities, and make an important contribution by the deconstruction of the broad concept of “community” (D’Augelli & Garnets, 1995). For instance, a review of the impact of the HIV epidemic since its onset (Paul,
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352 Hays, & Coates, 1995) reveals a rich history, with many overlapping social networks and social agencies having to contend with unprecedented problems, yet emerging with renewed strength and resourcefulness. The many items that resulted from Russell and Richards’ research process not only form the basis for further (and much needed) community research linking sociopolitical contexts and events with LGB lives; but could also serve as a self-study framework for LGB advocacy and activist groups. Their paper is a rare example of community psychology researching political process, with both the research itself and its results serving to address institutionalized hatred.
EXPANDING THE UMBRELLA OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND ITS PREVENTION The theme of community research as empowerment is at the core of Ristock’s study (Ristock, 2003) of abuse within lesbian relationships. Working from a feminist perspective, Ristock challenges current views of relationship violence because such views are organized around gender-based power as the primary theoretical construct. At the same time, Ristock’s approach is postmodern and deconstructivist, focusing on power, cultural context, and social action, but it does not enshrine empowerment as the goal of community research and action. Indeed, such a “grand narrative,” as she states, creates pseudohomogeneity in others’ views of LGB people, and most likely marginalizes some while suggesting that others represent normative LGB lives worth emulating. Qualitative methodologies have unique strengths in such a critical analysis, allowing unexpected relationships to emerge. For instance, the importance of first lesbian relationships was underscored by many women, who reported that their first relationships were abusive, and were with older women. Many of the women reported intense need during the period of their lives in which these relationships occurred, with their desperation leading them to partnering with others who may not have been appropriate. The complexity of abuse within same-sex relationships was a core comment emerging from focus groups with service providers. Balancing the importance of discovering women’s stories on their own terms and developing service models based on these findings is a powerful way to challenge views that oversimplify
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D’Augelli lives and by doing so allow social power to remain unchallenged. COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY: OUT OF THE CLOSET AND INTO THE STREETS? Collectively, the papers in this special issue show that community psychology is emerging from its closet of heterosexist theory and practice. The timing is crucial as society becomes increasingly inclusive of open LGB people. As more research on sexual orientation across the lifespan has accumulated, increasing demands have been placed upon research findings to help chart rational approaches through the often volatile waters of societal discussions of homosexuality. The protection of women and men from discrimination and violence based on their sexual orientation, the determination of the age at which sexual behavior is legal, the inclusion of education about sexual orientation in schools, the nature of same-sex committed relationships and their social value, and the impact of growing up in families headed by lesbian or gay parents are among the issues that current research has influenced. Such research has served to prevent bias and bigotry from perpetuating unfair social practices, and has led the way to affirmative psychological approaches that emphasize the strengths of lesbians and gay men, of their significant others, and of their communities. Community research on LGB lives not only has an impact on particular social problems, but on community psychology itself. Psychology in general has been blind to variability in human sexual orientation. Understanding sexual orientation development has not to date been considered essential to psychological models of human development and behavior. Thus, much psychological knowledge can be challenged on heterosexist grounds. Just as queer theorists in the humanities since the early 1990s have challenged traditional analyses of texts for their motivated erasure of homoerotic desire, it is important for community psychologists to challenge the heterosexism of our own research and practice. Indeed, it is no longer possible to maintain heterosexual hegemony in community psychology; new generations of community psychologists will simply not tolerate it. Community psychology research has the potential to make an enormous contribution to the study of LGB lives in context. Community psychology, as represented by the papers in this issue, has come out of the closet and it now must continue the progression into the streets.
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Coming Out in Community Psychology: Personal Narrative and Disciplinary Change ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I express my appreciation to Steve Danish, Carole Danish, Ed Seidman, Graham Spanier, Sandra Spanier, Ed Trickett, and Tracey Revenson for their support and encouragement over the years described in these comments. Margaret S. Schneider and Gary W. Harper are thanked for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. REFERENCES Badgett, M. V. L. (2001). Money, myths, and change: The economic lives of lesbians and gay men. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Berkowitz, W. R. (1982). Community impact: Creating grassroots change in hard times. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman. Bontempo, D. E., & D’Augelli, A. R. (2002). Effects of at-school victimization and sexual orientation on lesbian, gay, or bisexual youths’ health risk behavior. Journal of Adolescent Health, 30, 364–374. Blake, S. M., Ledsky, T., Lehman, T., Goodenow, C., Sawyer, R., & Hack, T. (2001). Preventing sexual risk behaviors among gay, lesbian, and bisexual adolescents: The benefits of gay-sensitive HIV instruction in schools. American Journal of Public Health, 91, 940–946. Brown, R. (1996). Against my better judgment: The intimate memoir of an eminent gay psychologist. New York : Harrington Park Press. Chesir-Teran, D. (2003). Conceptualizing and assessing heterosexism in high schools: A setting-level approach. American Journal of Community Psychology, 31(3/4), 267–279. Cowen, E. L., Hightower, A. D., Pedro-Carroll, J. L., Work, W. C., Wyman, P. A., & Haffey, W. C. (1996). School based prevention for at-risk children: The Primary Mental Health Project. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. D’Augelli, A. R. (1989a). Homophobia in a university community: Views of prospective resident assistants. Journal of College Student Development, 30, 546–552. D’Augelli, A. R. (1989b). Lesbian women in a rural helping network: Exploring informal helping resources. Women and Therapy, 8, 119–130. D’Augelli, A. R. (1989c). The development of a helping community for lesbians and gay men: A case study in community psychology. Journal of Community Psychology, 17, 18– 29. D’Augelli, A. R. (1990). Community psychology and the HIV epidemic: The development of helping communities. Journal of Community Psychology, 18, 337–346. D’Augelli, A. R. (1991). Lesbians and gay men on campus: Visibility, empowerment, and educational leadership. Peabody Journal of Education, 66, 124–142. D’Augelli, A. R. (1992). Lesbian and gay male undergraduates’ experiences of harassment and fear on campus. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 7, 383–395. D’Augelli, A. R. (1994). Identity development and sexual orientation: Toward a model of lesbian, gay, and bisexual development. In E. J. Trickett, R. J. Watts, & D. Birman (Eds.), Human diversity: Perspectives on people in context (pp. 312–333). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. D’Augelli, A. R. (2000). Lesbian, gay, and bisexual issues. In J. Rappaport & E. Seidman (Eds.), Handbook of community psychology (pp. 944–947). New York: Kluwer Academic.
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