4   Being Queer in the Small City

Wendy Hulko

Administrator: How was your trip to Puerto Vallarta?

Me: Great—it was all gay, all the time. I’m experiencing culture shock being back in Kamloops.

Administrator [tone of surprise]: Are you gay?

Me [tone of incredulity]: Yeah!

Administrator: I didn’t know. Well, why would I know though? It shouldn’t matter in this day and age. Does it matter anymore?

Me: Yes, it does. That’s why I took a break from teaching sexual diversity last fall—I’m identified more as a queer faculty member than as a gerontologist and health researcher. I’m surprised you didn’t know, as I’m one of the only queers on campus.

Administrator: But what about [faculty member X] and [faculty member Y]?

Me: They left, and so did [faculty member Z].1

In Canada, as elsewhere, research on sexual orientation and gender identity/expression has generally focused on large urban centres, where the proportion of LGBTQ people is estimated to be higher than it is for the population as a whole (Fredriksen-Goldsen and Muraco 2010; MetLife MMI 2010).2 This concentration no doubt reflects what Mary Gray (2009, 3) calls “narratives of escape to urban oases,” which encourage LGBTQ youth to migrate to cities that already have sizable queer communities, where resources and opportunities for support and acceptance are more available than in a rural setting (Poon and Saewyc 2009, 121). There is, however, a growing literature related to queer people who live in rural areas, including a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies titled “Rural Lesbian Life: Narratives of Community, Commitment, and Coping” (see Cohn and Hastings 2011). While many of these studies centre on gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth (see, for example, Gray 2009; Palmer, Kosciw, and Bartkiewicz 2012; Poon and Saewyc 2009; Saewyc et al. 2007, 42), attention has also been focused on older lesbian women and gay men (see, for example, Comerford et al. 2004; Fenge, Jones, and Read 2010; McCarthy 2000). Despite this, a twenty-five-year review of the literature on aging and sexual orientation found that, out of a total fifty-eight studies published from 1984 to 2008, only three (5%) focused exclusively on older gays and lesbians living in rural areas (Fredriksen-Golden and Muraco 2010, 396).

In general, small cities have not been the site of much research to date, and, in the research that does exist, they are often lumped together with rural and remote communities under the umbrella of nonurban settings. Yet geographic location clearly plays a role in identity formation and community building—as Gray (2009, 5) puts it, “without question, rural youth negotiate queer desires and embodiments under different logistical realities”—and small cities are distinct not only from large urban centres but also from rural towns. While larger sociocultural transformations with respect to LGBTQ rights, such as the removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1973 and the legalization of same-sex marriage, undoubtedly have an impact on small cities, the speed and manner by which prescriptive or legislated change plays out may differ, and innovations that occur in small cities may not migrate to the same extent as those that originate in large urban centres.

In this chapter, I discuss identifying as queer and finding community from the perspectives of lesbian and bisexual women and transgender persons living in small cities and rural towns in the interior of British Columbia. I use the word queer to refer to people who identify outside the rigid sex/gender system (Butler 1990) that presumes heterosexuality and prescribes gender conformity and to indicate that I view sex and gender, along with other identity categories, as socially constructed. I agree with Nagoshi and Brzuzy (2010, 434): “‘Queer’ is an identity, a theory about nonheteronormative sexuality, and a theoretical orientation for how identity is to be understood.”3 At the same time, I acknowledge that not all LGBTQ people are comfortable being identified as queer, particularly older ones who remember this word being used to harm and have no desire to reclaim it, and that the word queer may hold different meanings for those who identify as such (see Peters 2005).

LGBTQ Research to Date: Age, Geography, and Intersectionality

Studies related to rurality and sexual and/or gender identity have addressed the implications for service providers of having nonheterosexual clients (Oswald and Culton 2003) and the ways in which community influences sexual identity development and expression, depending on several factors: an individual’s location, whether urban or rural (Comerford et al. 2004; Poon and Saewyc 2009; Oswald and Culton 2003); access to gay spaces such as clubs, coffee shops, and areas of town (Pritchard, Morgan, and Sedgley 2002; Valentine and Skelton 2003); and the ability to access queer-oriented formal (such as health care) and informal (friendship-based) networks and communities (Comerford et al. 2004; Heaphy 2007; Heaphy, Yip, and Thompson 2004; McCarthy 2000; Oswald and Culton 2003). The availability of “gay space” has been found to positively influence the expression of sexual identity in both rural and urban settings (Comerford et al. 2004; Valentine and Skelton 2003), and the absence of gay space to have a direct negative effect (Oswald and Culton 2003). For example, in their exploratory, naturalistic study of the experiences of fifteen self-defined lesbians in rural Vermont, Comerford and colleagues (2004, 428) found that in rural environments, where few, if any, public, gay-positive physical spaces exist, their participants “felt a great deal of comfort” in the existence of a lesbian community. Likewise, on the basis of their observational study of the Manchester gay village (a large urban centre), Pritchard and colleagues (2002, 118) note that “gay and lesbian spaces have emotional and psychological importance as empowering places in a ‘straight’ world.” In their analysis of rural and urban differences related to sexual orientation in the 2003 BC Adolescent Health Survey, Poon and Saewyc (2009) argue that “lesbian, gay, and bisexual adolescents in rural communities may need additional support and services as they navigate adolescence” (118) and recommend “informal help networks, which could link LGB adolescents with peers and LGB adults” (122), as well as interventions focused specifically on mental health, substance abuse, and sexual education.

Although LGBTQ people in small cities and rural towns have not been well researched, the general concept of “community” figures strongly in research on the identity development and/or maintenance of LGBTQ people. A frequent theme in this research is the impact of formal and informal social networks on the lives of LGBTQ people, including the roles that family and friends play in supporting the health and well-being of the LGBTQ person. For example, in a qualitative study of older LGBTQ people in Britain, Brian Heaphy (2007) found that both sexuality and (normative) gender expression have an impact on experiences and interactions within the nonheterosexual community, as well as outside of it.4 In a study using grounded theory, Tracey Rickards and Judith Wuest (2006) discovered that women who come out at mid-life lost credibility within their social and health care networks; they argue that the health care system must re-evaluate taken-for-granted assumptions about patients.5 Susan Comerford and colleagues (2004) identified social isolation and community building as major themes in their qualitative study of the lives of older lesbians in rural Vermont. The aforementioned research indicates that older LGBTQ people rely more on personal support networks based on family (including chosen family) and friends, while younger ones rely more for personal support on public networks such as gay-straight alliances (GSAs) and clubs (Taylor and Peter 2011). These public networks are not always available in small cities and rural towns, where virtual communities may be one of the only source of peer support and information about identity development and services (Gray 2009; Hulko 2015).

Significant gaps exist in the research about the life course of LGBTQ people (Fredriksen-Goldsen et al. 2017) and comparisons between older and younger generations in terms of how these groups relate to one another socially and experientially.6 Furthermore, there is a conspicuous lack of research on LGBTQ communities in Canada, especially in small cities and rural and remote areas of the country. The research reported below attempted to address these gaps and limitations through interviews and focus groups with two separate demographic groups (described as younger and older), both being made up of women who identified as sexual and/or gender minorities. The research team explored their perspectives on identity and community through an intersectional lens. Intersectionality refers to ways in which identity categories such as race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and age are inextricably linked and interact with one another to shape an individual’s relationship to oppression and privilege (Hulko 2009). Researchers and theorists using an intersectional lens do not attempt to isolate a particular aspect of a person’s identity nor to prioritize one form of oppression over another; rather, they consider various facets of a person’s social location and treat oppressions as interactive and mutually reinforcing. Most intersectionality scholars who address geographic location do so in a dichotomous way: a researcher, for example, might explore urban and rural locations, with rural women being the focus of inquiry.7

Exploring Queer Women’s Identity in Interior British Columbia

This chapter arose out of a research project that I conducted in 2008–9 in collaboration with Natalie Clark, one of my colleagues at Thompson Rivers University. Drawing on insights from critical, feminist, anti-oppressive research (see Brown and Strega 2005; DeVault 1999; Kirby, Greaves, and Reid 2006; Reid, Brief, and LeDrew 2009), we set out to explore the impact of age on the experience of identifying as a sexual and/or gender minority in a small city or rural town. Focus groups and individual interviews (in person and by email) were conducted with fourteen female and seven transgender persons. The twenty-one participants represented two demographic groups, younger (n = 14) and older (n = 7), with those in the former group ranging in age from 15 to 30 years (average 20.5 years) and those in the latter from 52 to 61 years (average 56 years).8 Sixteen of the participants were living in small cities, while the other five were from rural towns; three were Indigenous, and the remainder were white, one of whom was an ethnic minority. With regard to sexual orientation, thirteen identified as lesbian, five as bisexual or pansexual, and three as straight.9

Five themes were identified through the thematic and comparative data analysis process—identity, intersectionality, aging, geography, and community. This chapter focuses on the latter two in relation to being queer in the small city, starting with geography or the extent to which size matters.

Size Matters: Population Size and Queer Community

Most of the older research participants and several of the younger ones had lived in cities and towns of varying sizes over the course of their lives. These participants spoke at length about the influence of specific places on their identity development and their connection to community, mainly in relation to the small BC city where they were now living. For example, one of the older lesbian participants—who, like many women of her generation, had given into the pressure to marry—had come out after her husband announced that “I’m not really going to be able to satisfy you, and I think we should break up, get a divorce.” Having found no “gay scene at all” in the small BC city where she had been living, she had decided to move back to Winnipeg, figuring that “Winnipeg’s gotta be a good place to come out.” The impact of population size was also highlighted by a younger lesbian woman from a rural town who, on more than one occasion, had hitchhiked to the closest small city in order to participate in a support group for queer youth:

For me, living in a small town where everyone knows everybody, it’s like, “hey you’re [name], you’re the lesbian.” . . . I live in a population of about forty. Everybody knows everybody . . . obviously I have some other issues going on at the moment, though—like, I know I am a lesbian, but not a lot of people know that I think I might be transgendered.

A young lesbian couple spoke of their experiences in two small cities in BC as related not only to population size but also to the degree of religiosity and the strength of faith communities. The small city where they both grew up is located in what is known as the “bible belt” and one of them explained that, “it was definitely worse there, by far. . . . We didn’t know anyone else who was gay at all growing up. Well, I had one gay friend, but that was it.” Still, the small city where they now resided was, one of them said, “hard in different ways, I think, than where we grew up. . . . It takes a while to realize where to go [and] where not to go.”

One younger transgender individual (who formerly identified as a lesbian) went to high school in two places—first in a small rural town in Alberta and then in Edmonton. In contrasting these experiences, he identified population size as the significant factor. He described having had “a huge problem coming out” in the high school in the rural town, the only choice of school in what he called “a small hick town.” In the Edmonton high school, however, “I could fully be a lesbian and they were fine. But, see, Edmonton is bigger.” Another younger transgender participant moved from a small city in Alberta to a much smaller city in British Columbia and felt that the former was more supportive of her gender fluidity. This acceptance was linked to the existence of a pride group on campus, which “helped make me connect the dots a little bit,” and to her involvement in social work, as well as to the difference in population size. Describing the small BC city in which she was now living, she said, “It’s very redneck: people screaming at you, swearing, cussing, giving me the finger—that’s normal.” She went on to describe the small Alberta city from which she had moved as “a lot more accepting,” attributing this greater flexibility largely to the “greater population” while noting there still was “definitely a segment of red neck.” Similarly, an older lesbian woman identified the presence or absence of like-minded people as related to the size of a city. Prior to settling in a small city in British Columbia, she had lived in Vancouver, Montréal, and Los Angeles, where she was active in the women’s movement. Living in a small city had, she said, “narrowed my opportunities.” She paused and then added, “It has made me socialize with people that I really wouldn’t be caught dead with, but there they are, and there I am, and from their perspective, I probably look just as much [like them] they wouldn’t be caught dead with me either.”

One of the older lesbian women, who was originally from a country in northern Europe, had immigrated to Canada as an adult and had subsequently come out as a lesbian; in the country from which she had emigrated, she said, “it would be, ‘Shhhh!’ It would not be as easy to be a lesbian as in Canada.” She was one of three participants who referred to their experiences in countries outside North America. Another was a younger lesbian woman who said she had a “tendency to go to really Roman Catholic countries,” including a Latin American country, where she lived with Catholic families for a year, and Spain, where she spent some time in “a really queer-friendly city.” The third was a younger lesbian woman who had spent a few months living in a Spanish-speaking country. The size of the cities in which they resided was not highlighted by any of these participants; rather, it was the difference in the country that was the focus.

Another younger participant, who identified as transgender and had moved from a small town to the small BC city in which she now lived, noted the threat of violence from a family member in addition to the lack of acceptance within her community, both due to her gender expression. She described her home town as “really small—you could just walk around town in one hour.” In her home community, she said, “they don’t accept us at all. . . . My dad, every time he sees me, he wants to beat me up.” Although she did not speak of violence or abuse growing up in a small town, one of the older lesbian women described how she discovered the rules of who to love and who not to love after falling in love with another young woman (whom I will call Anne) in eastern Canada, where she lived:

I grew up in a very isolated area—very, very isolated . . . and I didn’t know ’til I was fourteen that there were rules about who you could love and couldn’t love. I didn’t even know, I couldn’t even have cared less, it didn’t register, that’s not how we lived at that time anyway. . . . When I was fourteen, I found out there were laws and rules that said I could not be in love with Anne, but the simple fact was that I was.

An older transgender and bisexual woman spoke of the challenges of living in a small city but said that this can become easier over time, depending on the fortitude of the individual:

I find that living in a smaller community, being transgendered, living as a female with a male ID and all that stuff, that has a harsh impact on somebody that’s different. . . . Wherever you go people judge you, people disrespect you, people harass you and call you derogatory names. But you know, if one has the courage and the strength to endure all that and to become fully committed to the community, that all changes over time, you know, it gets easier.

The reality of living in a small city, where there is not as much anonymity and, as two older participants described, “everybody knows everybody else’s business” and “you run into your doctor, your lawyer, your shoemaker . . . your hairdresser,” was mostly seen as a negative by the younger participants and as positive by the older ones. “If you’ve got an issue,” said one older lesbian woman, “you either have to learn to deal with it like a grown up, or you have to talk to your neighbour. You can’t sit back in a small town in the same way and go ‘Bloody fags!’ because in a small town [your neighbour] could very well be the one you’re talking about.”

All of the younger participants who had only lived in small cities or rural towns expressed a desire to move to a larger city like Vancouver—that is, to “escape to urban oases” (Gray 2009, 3). “I despise small towns,” a young participant wrote in her emailed response to the interview questions. “They’ve never been anything but a negative impact on my life and my identity, and as soon as I have the money, I am out of here.” A younger lesbian woman who grew up in a small city, moved to Vancouver after high school, and returned to her hometown for a few months each summer confirmed the suspicions of all the youth who wanted to move to the big city. “I have definitely, since I’ve moved to Vancouver, found more of an open and understanding community. So . . . that’s where you’re going to find it—in a larger centre.” Vancouver was identified by another young lesbian woman as the “most comfortable place I know” and the place where she found “role models.” She was clearly impacted by experiencing the Vancouver Pride parade in the company of her girlfriend:

The first time we went down there to the Pride parade was three years ago, and that was just so much fun, just seeing everyone on the streets, holding hands and clearly gay. . . . One day, I’d like to live there. It’s just too damn expensive, but I think that’s where [we] usually go, you know, to feel that sense of community.

These sentiments about an open and understanding community and identifiable role models being more common in a large city were echoed by another younger lesbian woman, who moved to Calgary after graduating from high school in a small city in northern BC. In Calgary, she said, she put “theory into practice” and “hung out with lesbians all the time.” This enchantment with the big city was absent among the older women, who instead focused on the positive aspects of the sense of community one finds in small cities or rural towns—the ties among neighbours or fellow citizens. Many of the older lesbian women spoke of community size as being more important for younger people than for those at their age in terms of accepting oneself and finding women with whom to form friendships and/or intimate relationships, although they surmised that their own experience may have been different had they been single. Thus, the responses of participants indicate that age and stage of life relates to the degree of comfort to be found in cities of different sizes when one is queer.

Accessing Community: The Search for Safe Spaces

While the participants defined community in different ways, most referred to the presence or absence of an LGBTQ community in small cities and rural towns. “Community can mean so many things,” said one younger participant who lived in a small city. “It can mean your family, it can mean the LGBT community itself, it can be the physical area.” She added: “I think, for the most part, here, sense of [LGBTQ] community is, like, nada.”

Unsurprisingly, the LGBTQ community was seen to play an important role in normalizing and validating same-sex relationships through creating spaces where people can feel comfortable expressing their same-sex attraction—at dances put on by the local LGBTQ group, for example. An older participant described the importance to her of such spaces and the gay and lesbian community in the small BC city where she lived:

I can go there with my partner and can show my affection to her in public. I can hug her and I can kiss her, I can dance with her, which I can’t do in the street here. I could, but—I’d feel uncomfortable—don’t feel safe doing it. But in that community, I can do it, and that’s what was important to me about that community.

Another older lesbian woman had lived in a number of large North American cities when she was younger and credited these experiences with helping her to develop a positive self-identity as a lesbian feminist. “Community is very important for younger people, [for] knowing who they are, absolutely . . . I don’t think that will ever change,” she said. But she lamented, for younger women in particular, the lack of community in the small city where she was living now. “There aren’t enough women here. We used to have dances alone and dances with [the local LGBTQ group] and . . . it’s not enough really, it doesn’t make a community.” She described community as “people you feel comfortable with, that you share common values with, that you can be around casually, drop in easily,” but in her small city, she said, “it’s dying of thirst and starvation. . . . I don’t feel community here at all.” Despite that absence of community, however, attempts were being made to create it, to organize informal gatherings centred on games and conversation. “We want to be with people where it doesn’t have to be dancing and loud noise and drinking, or loud music and drinking,” she said. “We’ve got that going, we’ve started that, but it’s only about twelve people.”

Accessing “the community” was raised as an issue by younger participants, including a bisexual woman who told us in her emailed response, “I can’t really say that I have found a sense of community at this point, but I hope to in the future.” A younger lesbian woman who wasn’t sure of the meaning of community knew that she needed to find the access key if she wanted to connect with other lesbian and bisexual women in the small city where she was living: “It almost feels like you need some sort of special key to access this strange community.” This need for a “special key” was linked to the absence of a physical space for LGBTQ community members to gather, be it a café, bar, or community centre.10 As one younger lesbian woman said, “I think that community is dependent on space.” This was echoed by an older lesbian woman, who felt that until societal barriers to freedom of expression are removed, artificial meeting places are required: “If you cannot walk down the street holding hands, what that says to me is that there is still a barrier for people with a certain quality about them for meeting others, so you have to create, for lack of a better description, an artificial place, meeting place, which is a form of community.” That is, until heternormativity—the presumption and privileging of heterosexuality—is recognized and addressed, designated and identifiably gay space is needed; in this space, members of the queer community can gather and provide emotional support to one another.

The loss of the local women’s resource centre in one small city was keenly felt by the older lesbian women in that community, who spoke of this meeting place as one where they provided one another with emotional support and engaged in social activities that were not connected to music and alcohol. “We had a really good group going,” said one older participant. “We got it together, we did camping, we did picnics, we did this, that, and the other thing, and sat and had weekly good discussions. We helped people in their relationships; we let them, you know, spill their guts, whatever they needed to do.”

In addition to sharing their thoughts on the degree to which their current, former, and ideal places of residence (rural towns, small cities, large urban centres) could be considered safe for and accepting of queer people, the participants identified specific places that they choose to frequent and those that they try to avoid (see table 4.1). Generally, the unsafe spaces were public spaces and the safe ones were more private, and the younger participants identified more specific places than the older ones did. For example, while anyone can attend a LGBTQ dance, these events are put on for and by members of the queer community and attendees are unlikely to encounter LGBTQ-phobia.

Table 4.1 Safe and unsafe spaces

It is surprising that the younger women and transgender persons did not identify schools as being unsafe spaces, while the older women did. The results of a recent Canadian survey of high school students indicate that homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia exist “in every class in every school” in this country, with 64 percent of LGBTQ students and 61 percent of students with LGBTQ parents reporting feeling unsafe at school (Taylor and Peter 2011, 8; see also Haskell and Burtch 2010). Further, it is well known that sexual minority youth are more likely to be suicidal than their heterosexual peers (Saewyc, Konishi, Chiaki, and Homma 2014, 90, 97, 100). It is also generally accepted that schools have a role to play in addressing this health disparity. In their analysis of data from the BC Adolescent Health Survey, Saewyc and colleagues (2014) found that school-based GSAs and anti-homophobic bullying policies can reduce LGB students’ odds of discrimination, suicidal thoughts, and suicide attempts (97–98) and stress the need for more research on the protective impact of peer groups and anti-bullying policies (101).

Conclusion: “The World Is Slowly Changing”

In spite of the considerable challenges associated with living in a small city or rural town where one is defined as deviant on the basis of one’s gender expression and/or sexual orientation, the older participants in this research expressed the view that life was better or easier for younger queer people than it had been for their generation. One older woman said, “There’s so much more tolerance now,” adding, “This generation’s society is a little more accepting now.” Another older participant emphasized the significance of those who came before, speaking of the pioneers who had paved the way, to some extent, for the youth of today. Her comments received a lot of support from the other focus group participants, all older lesbian women, who nodded and murmured in agreement as she spoke:

I even consider ourselves lucky at our age group, the ladies that went before us and the ground they broke. They were in a very intense time and living really on the edge—dangerous lives, really dangerous lives. The police really took a fancy to roughing up the women as well as the men. So . . . even though the kids today are even that much more lucky, I still count myself very fortunate that I didn’t come out until I was thirty.

This was not enough for the younger participants, though, who were craving celebration of their queerness and the myriad ways in which their sexual and gender identities affected their lives rather than acceptance of them as “absolutely normal and like everybody else.” They wanted easily identifiable role models and mentors, as well as the freedom to express themselves in all their queerness.

A clear continuum presented itself in this research, with rural towns identified as the least desirable and supportive and the least likely to have a sense of community and large urban centres as the most desirable and supportive and the most likely to fulfill “the dream.” Small cities, where most of the participants were living, were identified as a middle ground between these two extremes: they generally had an LGBTQ community, albeit very small and difficult to access, and were clearly more supportive than the rural towns in which many of the participants originated or grew up. Still, small cities fell short of the dream of the big city for many of the participants, particularly the youth.

In my opinion, though, the answer is not to encourage youth to move to larger centres. As Lesley Marple (2005, 74) argues in her reflection on queer-community organizing in Nova Scotia, “queer oppression is not unique within rural communities, and removal of queers from the rural sphere is not going to remedy this social flaw for either the queers or the community in question.” I argue that we should work to create more affirming communities within small cities and rural towns by building on the positive aspects of knowing your neighbours and running into your doctor, lawyer, or hairdresser at social events. At the same time, we should reject the ideal of community that Iris Young (1990, 227) describes, one that “expresses a desire for the fusion of subjects with one another which in practice operates to exclude those with whom the group does not identify” and that “denies and suppresses social difference”; rather, we need to promote an alternative “ideal of city life as a vision of social relations affirming group differences” and “as an openness to unassimilated otherness” (227). A city—small or large—that embraces diversity and demonstrates openness and tolerance of immigrants, LGBTQ people, and artists is a city that is destined to grow and be economically successful, as is shown in the research of Florida, Mellander, and Stolarick (2010). Through an analysis of forty-six census metropolitan areas and census agglomerations in Canada, they found a strong relationship between higher regional incomes and expressed openness and tolerance towards gay people, bohemians, immigrants, and visible minorities (310). Thus, making the small city more inclusive and affirmative of sexual and gender diversity (and discouraging LGBTQ people from moving to the big city) could have a positive impact on small cities both economically and socially.

A practical implication of the research reported in this chapter is the need to focus more attention on community building and to create opportunities for lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women (and other queer people) to connect with one another, and for LGBTQ youth to connect with older mentors (see Bohan, Russell, and Montgomery 2002), in the context of their small cities or rural towns. At the same time, formal support should be increased in small cities and rural towns through enhancement and/or creation of programs like Safe Spaces (see Hulko et al. 2010) and GSAs (see Saewyc et al. 2014; Taylor and Peter 2011). This would go a long way towards enticing LGBTQ people to live and remain in small cities and increasing the vibrancy of smaller communities for all of their inhabitants.

In terms of future research, it will be important to address the extent to which characteristics of individual cities or towns, other than their size, make a difference in the development of identity and formation of community for LGBTQ people. Another area of research that is lacking is the investigation of whether or how the experiences of gay and bisexual men in small cities and rural towns differ from those of lesbian and bisexual women and transgender persons in such places. Finally, evaluative research on the impact of formal support services such as safe spaces and/or informal support networks would assist in both building community and developing social services that are affirmative towards LGBTQ people.

Acknowledgements

The research on which this chapter is based was funded by two Aid to Small Universities grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and grants from two research networks funded by the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (Women’s Health Research Network and BC Rural and Remote Research Network). I would like to thank my research team, including co-investigator Natalie Clark, research assistants Jessica Hovanes, Erica Bouffioux, and Megan Stevenson, and community partners Kari Bepple and Dr. Maijo Heimo for their contributions; and all the lesbian, bisexual, and transgender participants for their willingness to share their views.

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1 This conversation took place in 2010. The campus climate has improved since then, owing in large part to a greater number of openly queer faculty members in the School of Social Work and Human Service and in other professional programs such as law. There has also been an increase in the administration’s recognition of the importance of celebrating various forms of diversity, demonstrated, for example, by its willingness to speak at the annual campus Pride Parade.

2 In this chapter, I use LGBTQ as an acronym inclusive of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, two-spirit, intersex, queer, and questioning individuals and communities.

3 For a primer on queer theory, see Wilchins (2004).

4 For early research on sexual orientation and the experience of aging, see also Gabbay and Wahler (2002); Heaphy, Yip, and Thompson (2004); and Shankle et al. (2003).

5 For more on women coming out as lesbian in mid-life, see Larson (2006). On sexual identity formation among youth, see Hollander (2000); Rosario et al. (2001); Saewyc (2011); and Swann and Spivey (2004).

6 For notable exceptions, see Floyd and Bakeman (2006) and Grov et al. (2006). For more on the historical and environmental contexts of older LGBTQ adults’ lives see the special issue of The Gerontologist reporting on Fredriksen-Goldsen and colleagues’ landmark study, Aging with Pride: National Health, Aging, and Sexuality/Gender Study, conducted in 2014 and involving 2,450 LGBTQ Americans aged 50 and older (Fredriksen-Goldsen and Kim 2017).

7 For more on intersectionality as it relates to research on women, see Hankivsky et al. (2010) and Simpson (2009).

8 Through purposive sampling (snowball and convenience), we initially aimed to recruit women under the age of 25 and over the age of 60. When we had difficulty locating women over the age of 60, and after several women in their fifties asked to participate, we dropped the age to 50 for the older group. Of the original fourteen participants who self-identified as younger, one disclosed her age to be 30 during data collection; we thus eliminated her from our analysis of the youth data (see Hulko 2015; Hulko and Hovanes 2018). I have included her in this chapter, however, as her age skewed the results only with respect to the original purpose of our study.

9 The three participants who identified as “straight” were transgender individuals, one of whom identified himself as formerly bisexual and lesbian. We included both male-to-female and female-to-male transgender persons because we did not wish to conflate either gender or sexual orientation with biological sex. Rather, we left it up to potential research participants to exclude or include themselves on the basis of their understanding of the purpose of the study.

10 For more on the importance of gay space, see Comerford et al. (2004) and Valentine and Skelton (2003).