Critical perspectives on sexualities and health: Closing the gap between LGBTQ health research and the LGBTQ community

Critical perspectives on sexualities and health: Closing the gap between LGBTQ health research and the LGBTQ community Adam Jowett W ELCOME to the second of two Special Issues on Sexualities and Health: Critical perspectives. As with the previous issue, we have an internationally diverse range of articles and commentaries which critically examine lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) health. In particular, one theme that runs through most of the articles in this issue is a concern with ‘giving voice’ to the LGBTQ community and closing the gap between LGBTQ health research and LGBTQ communities. It would be fair to say that LGBTQ people have historically had an uneasy relationship with the health professions. However, just as feminist health psychology has been inluenced by the women’s health movement (Wilkinson, 2004), afirmative LGBTQ health research has also had a symbiotic relationship with LGBT health activism. Indeed, the removal of homosexuality from the DSM, often cited as a major historical landmark in the LGBTQ health movement (Mail & Lear, 2006), was brought about both by political campaigning and evidence from gay afirmative research (Harris, 2009; Kitzinger, 1997). As Harris (2009) notes, the case of homosexuality’s removal from the DSM illustrates both the importance of social movements in creating an atmosphere in which institutional prejudice can be challenged and the important role scientists can play in marshalling evidence to create social change. Health professionals and researchers at times also play a leading role in political organising. For example, in the late 1970s and 1980s health professionals who were often lesbian or gay themselves pioneered health clinics speciically for lesbians or gay men to attend without fear of discrimination (Fish, 2009; Mail & Lear, 2006). Similarly, gay health professionals and academics played their part in developing the infrastructure around gay men’s (sexual) health which developed as a response to the HIV crisis. In the absence of an evidence base, academics have long engaged in LGBTQ health research alongside their local LGBTQ community organisations in the form of community health surveys (Fish, 2009; Meads et al., 2007), often conducted on shoestring budgets and in academics’ free time. Two shining examples of LGBTQ health academic-activists were Eric Rofes (1998) in the US and Tamsin Wilton in the UK (1997, 2000). In addition to their academic work on AIDS, both played a key role in promoting a vision of a broader LGBTQ health movement. In 2002, Rofes, together with other activists in the US organised a LGBTI Health Summit following earlier gay men’s health summits, while in the UK Wilton was instrumental in developing a National LGBT Health Summit, the irst of which took place in 2006. Just as the British Psychological Society established a Lesbian and Gay Psychology (now the Psychology of Sexualities) Section, LGBTQ people in many other health professions have similarly mobilised within or outside of th