A preliminary model of health regarding sexual and ethnic minority older adults

Abstract

Older individuals with sexual/gender minority and minority racial/ethnic identities typically face unique challenges, along with opportunities to overcome these obstacles. Published studies on the difficulties faced by sexual and gender minorities are available; however, research on older adults with both racial/ethnic minority and sexual and gender minority identities is rarer. These individuals must confront various forms of discrimination related to ageism, homophobia and racism. Resilience likely plays a role in the ability to manage and survive multiple challenges and discriminatory experiences, yet targeted research on these populations is lacking. This paper offers a preliminary model that incorporates prevalent threats to these populations’ well-being and their deleterious psychosocial correlates, especially, whenever available, the unique challenges that older individuals must face when age, sexual orientation and race/ethnicity intersect. Recommendations are made to optimise the expansion and empirical testing of this preliminary model.

Keywords:

• Older adults
• sexual minority
• gender minority
• race
• ethnicity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Throughout this paper, we use disparate acronyms such as LGBTQ, LGBT or LGB in order to preserve the use of these terms by the original authors. For similar reasons, although the term ‘homonegativity’ has started to gain popularity in research (for example, in the 2017 model of LGB minority stress by Conlin, Douglass and Ouch, 2019), we have used the term ‘homophobia’ instead, to match the terminology most often used in the published literature. We also use the term ‘sexual and gender minority’, as this more inclusive term is starting to replace LGBTQ by medical research agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (Light and Obedin-Maliver 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) grant 1 SC3 GM 094075-01, Luciana Laganá, Principal Investigator. Additional support for the project was provided by the NIGMS grant GM063787 (Minority Biomedical Research Support Program - Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement) and by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Building Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) grant 5TL4GM118977. The content of this article does not necessarily represent the official views of NIH or of NIGMS and is solely the responsibility of the authors.