Youth of color in the LGBTQ community

As this first issue of volume 21 of JGLMH is in preparation, the United States is bidding a fond farewell to its first African American president. Back in 2008, when Barack Obama was first elected, there was much hope that the symbolism of a Black president would mark an historic shift for the country in moving beyond its history of slavery and racial discrimination. Yet the shootings by police officers of unarmed Black men that dominated headlines in 2016 have shown us that symbols are just that, and that lasting change takes real work.

Many of us in the LGBTQ community are justifiably proud of the hard work that went into improving relations with police since the time of Stonewall, when raids of bars and bathhouses were commonplace. And yet, a protest last summer by the organization Black Lives Matter that temporarily halted one of the largest pride parades in North America, in Toronto (Battersby, 2016), forced us to consider whether LGBTQ people outside the White middle class were all benefitting from these advances. In fact, scholarly review of the history of interaction between the LGBTQ community and police shows that a narrative of linear progression is not an accurate depiction (Dwyer, 2014).

This issue of JGLMH begins with a thorough review article by Russell B. Toomey, Virginia W. Huynh, Samantha K. Jones, Sophia Lee, and Michelle Revels-Macalinao that analyzes the current state of the literature on LGBTQ youth of color. What they find is that a disappointingly small proportion of these studies specifically examine the intersection of racial and sexual orientation identities and oppressions for this population, and that, overall, there is a need to move away from a model focused only on deficits to one that includes cultural strengths and normative adolescent development.

Also in this issue, we bring you a number of original research articles looking at depression in the LGBTQ community: Lauri M. Lindquist, Nicholas A. Livingston, Nicholas C. Heck, and Greg R. Machek present a fascinating article looking at whether attributional style—that is, how one attributes the cause of trauma and victimization—affects depression symptoms in college-age LGBTQ people. Jessica Marsack and Rob Stephenson continue the Journal’s contributions to understanding the needs of rural LGBTQ people by presenting their study of the association of sexuality-based stigma with depression symptoms in this population, including clinically significant depression. An article by Ashli A. Owens-Smith and colleagues demonstrates that perception of community tolerance is highly associated with depression symptoms in transgender and gender nonconforming people.

Finally, Kieron Beard, Catrin Eames, and Paul Withers report, in their study, the role of self-compassion in the wellbeing of a sample of gay men.

A new year brings change in many ways. For 2017, we say goodbye to two longtime editorial board members who are retiring, Ralph Roughton and Ann D'Ercole, and we welcome new editorial board members Lourdes Follins, Carey Roth Bayer, Timothy McCajor Hall, Richard Montoro, and Martin Plöderl. Joining our editors’ team as an Associate Editor is child and adolescent psychiatrist Lorraine Lothwell. Welcome to all!