This essay examines the collections of five rural midwestern public libraries to assess the presence of books with gay and lesbian content in the pre-Stonewall era. It considers how reviewers writing for standard library review sources (A.L.A. Catalog, Booklist, and H. W. Wilson’s Fiction Catalog) described these works. Throughout the first six decades of the twentieth century, most gay and les...

Based on analytic techniques that collapse data into a single average value, it has been reported that women lack category specificity and show genital sexual arousal to a large range of sexual stimuli including those that both match and do not match their self-reported sexual interests. These findings may be a methodological artifact of the way in which data are analyzed. This study examined w...

OBJECTIVE To compare the quality of life (QoL), a measure of psychological well-being, of adolescents reared in lesbian-mother families with that of a matched comparison group of adolescents with heterosexual parents. The adolescents in the comparison group were derived from a representative sample of adolescents in Washington state. The second aim of the study was to assess among teens with le...

PURPOSE To evaluate whether anti-bullying policies that are inclusive of sexual orientation are associated with a reduced prevalence of suicide attempts among lesbian, gay, and bisexual youths. METHODS A total of 31,852 11th-grade public school students (1,413 lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals; 4.4%) in Oregon completed the Oregon Healthy Teens survey in 2006-2008. The independent variab...

Despite increasing evidence of enhanced HIV risk among sexual minority populations, and sex workers (SWs) in particular, there remains a paucity of epidemiological data on the risk environments of SWs who identify as lesbian or bisexual. Therefore, this short report describes a study that examined the individual, interpersonal and structural associations with lesbian or bisexual identity among ...

Does the prevalence and degree of body dissatisfaction differ among heterosexual and homosexual men and women? Some theorists have suggested that, compared to their heterosexual peers, gay men are at greater risk for body dissatisfaction and lesbians at lower risk. Past studies examining this issue have generally relied on small samples recruited from gay or lesbian groups. Further, these studi...

Despite growing visibility of lesbian- and gay-parent adoption, only one qualitative study has examined birth family contact among adoptive families with lesbian and gay parents (Goldberg, Kinkler, Richardson, & Downing, 2011). We studied adoptive parents' (34 lesbian, 32 gay, and 37 heterosexual; N = 103 families) perspectives of birth family contact across the first year post-placement. Using...

One hundred planned lesbian-parent families (i.e., two-mother families in which the child was born to the lesbian relationship) were compared with 100 heterosexual-parent families on child adjustment, parental characteristics, and child rearing. Questionnaires, observations, and a diary of activities were used to collect the data. The results show that especially lesbian social mothers (i.e., n...

In the political arena, lesbian and gay issues have typically been contested on grounds of human rights, but with variable success. Using a moral developmental framework, the purpose of this study was to explore preferences for different types of moral arguments when thinking about moral dilemmas around lesbian and gay issues. The analysis presented here comprised data collected from 545 studen...

Selected nursing theories about the childbearing experience are examined as they apply to the assessment of the pregnant lesbian couple. A review of the women's health literature suggests that the lesbian pregnancy experience is characterized by the use of donor insemination, social discrimination and a dependence on peer rather than family networks for social support. Based on these sociocultu...