Pride, belonging and community: What does this mean if you are Aboriginal and LGBT+ and living in Western Australia?

Abstract

The lived experience of being LGBT+ and an Aboriginal person was a major focus of the mixed methods Breaking the Silence research project led by Aboriginal LGBT+ researchers. Aboriginal LGBT+ participants were invited to respond to a survey that canvassed how they were included and accepted within their own families, on social media, dating apps and the wider community. The analysis and discussion of the findings from the survey examine the issues of discrimination, racism, homophobia and what belonging to a community means for intersectional identities. The findings show that while participants do experience microaggressions and queer-phobia, they also describe agency and positive experiences. The question is how these instances of resistance and disruption can be enabled to proliferate and (if appropriate) be supported collectively, to enable Aboriginal LGBT+ individuals to experience a sense of pride and belonging to communities at times and in spaces of their own choosing.

Conceptualising Wellbeing for Australian Aboriginal LGBTQA+ Young People

“…Visibility is, however, a common theme in other literature concerning Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander LGBTQA+ peoples. For example, the importance of visibility to young people's identity echoes work by Hill et al [19], O'Sullivan [24] and Farrell [25] that discusses how young people's ability to see and express multi-faceted Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander LGBTQA+ identities in online spaces supports their wellbeing by offering a sense of belonging and a site for resistance. Our findings also highlight the added dimension of visibility within young people's offline communities, courtesy of other Aboriginal LGBTQA+ community members that are personally known to them.…”

“…By approaching this topic through an intersectional lens, we can see how the 'mainstream' (non-Indigenous) perspective most often employed in LGBTQA+ research misses important parts of the lived realities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community members and imposes a colonial view of what might be considered 'health'. On the other hand, 'Aboriginal' models of wellbeing without explicit consultation with LGBTQA+ people (e.g., Gee et al [18]) similarly omit the experiences of Aboriginal LGBTQA+ people, who are rendered invisible in deference to the interests of 'typical blakfellas' (i.e., cisgender and heterosexual; [19]) ('Blak' and 'blakfella' are self-descriptors commonly used by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community). Additionally, in both communities, there is a tendency to preference the voices of older people, and youth perspectives are often seen as less legitimate or not representative of the rest of the community.…”

“…While prior research has not explicitly set out to understand what constitutes wellbeing from an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander LGBTQA+ youth perspective, research in adults points to some topics of importance and charts the matrix of systems of oppression, sources of strength and strategies of resistance that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander LGBTQA+ adults enact. Research in this area confirms that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander LGBTQA+ people experience high levels of discrimination [19,20], including homophobia and transphobia that is distinctly gendered and racialized [21]. We might contextualise this discrimination by understanding it as the enforcement of the colonial project of gender, in which supposedly 'natural' concepts of gender, sexuality and family are revealed to be colonial categorisations that continually reinforce the inferiority of Indigenous peoples [22,23].…”

Indigenous LGBTIQSB + People’s Experiences of Family Violence in Australia

“…In a recent systematic review of the evidence, for example, Carlson et al (2021) did not find any publicly available evidence on the rates of family violence for Indigenous LGBTIQSB + people in Australia. No studies to date have taken a family violence perspective to the lived experiences and aspirations of Indigenous LGB-TIQ + people in Australia and even though there is some tangential evidence about family violence in the literature or even topics such as intimate partner violence for Indigenous LGBTIQ + people despite their ostensible importance (see Briskman et al, 2022;Dudgeon et al, 2015;Hill et al, 2022aHill et al, , 2022bKerry, 2014Kerry, , 2018Liddelow-Hunt et al, 2021, 2023Riggs & Toone, 2017;Soldatic et al, 2021aSoldatic et al, , 2021b for example).…”

Accelerating gender and sexuality inclusion in organisations: Introduction to the special issue and academic agenda

“…The continuing gender gap in economic participation and opportunity might take up to 132 years to close based on current trends, which represents a step backward compared to the pre-COVID-19 trend when the gender gap was expected to close within 100 years (World Economic Forum, 2022). The continued exclusion of gender identity, sexual characteristics and sexual orientation minorities from public life (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2019, 2021; McGee, 2020; Stephenson and Hayes, 2021) and work life (Hill et al, 2021; Jones, 2023), particularly for individuals who belong to multiple marginalised groups, indicates that progress towards inclusion is complex, non-linear and can be supressed by passive and active resistance.…”