Sexual Identity Disclosure and Alcohol Experiences Among LGBTQ+ Adolescents

Abstract

Sexual and gender minority youth (SGMY) report greater alcohol use in comparison to their heterosexual counterparts. Prior research has found that elevated alcohol use among SGMY can be explained by minority stress experiences. Sexual identity outness may be another factor that drives alcohol use among SGMY, given that outness is associated with alcohol use among older sexual and gender minority samples. We examined how patterns of sexual identity outness were associated with lifetime alcohol use, past-30-day alcohol use, and past-30-day heavy episodic drinking. Data were drawn from the LGBTQ National Teen Survey (N = 8884). Participants were SGMY aged 13 to 17 (mean age = 15.59) years living in the US. Latent class analysis was used to identify sexual identity outness patterns. Multinomial regressions were used to examine the probability of class membership by alcohol use. Six outness classes were identified: out to all but teachers (n = 1033), out to siblings and peers (n = 1808), out to siblings and LGBTQ+ peers (n = 1707), out to LGBTQ+ peers (n = 1376), mostly not out (n = 1653), and very much not out (n = 1307). SGMY in classes characterized by greater outness to peers, friends, and family had greater odds of lifetime alcohol use compared with SGMY in classes characterized by lower outness. These findings suggest that SGMY with greater sexual identity outness may be a target for alcohol use prevention programming. Differences in sexual identity outness may be explained by minority stress factors.

Keywords:

• Alcohol use
• coming out
• LGBTQ
• outness
• youth

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health under grant numbers K01DA047918 and 1L60DA054640-01. Support for this project was also provided by the Ohio State University Institute for Population Research through a grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health (P2CHD058484). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.