Abstract

Background and Objectives: Gay and lesbian older persons face a host of health inequalities related to their identity as they age. Challenges to health access and appropriate social support may be even more exacerbated for those living in rural environments; this may be due to the lack of supportive and affirming social connections. This project aimed to explore and describe the social networks and the relationship of these social networks to identity, health, and quality of life of gay and lesbian individuals in rural communities.

Research Design and Methods: Social network data on network type, size, and social capital were collected and supplemented by quantitative questionnaires relating to health, quality of life, marginalization, and identity.

Results: Participants (N = 25) were recruited from three states. Thirteen participants self-identified as gay and 12 as lesbian. All but one identified as non-Hispanic White. The average age of all participants was 60.32 years. Findings indicate that rural gay and lesbian individuals develop networks with little consideration for network members’ acceptance of their identity. Participants reported an average network size of 9.32 individuals. Gay men reported higher perceptual affinity (.69) than lesbian participants (.62). Lesbian networks showed significantly (p = .0262) greater demographic similarity (.58) than aging gay men’s networks (.55). Aging gay men (.89) reported statistically stronger (p = .0078) network ties than aging lesbian females (.78). Among participants in this study, network size is not correlated with the health and quality of life of rural aging lesbian and gay individuals. Still, personal identity congruence does appear to relate to health and quality of life.

Discussion and Implications: The findings highlight the collective need to continue research into sexual minority aging and rural sexual minority aging, particularly employing novel methods.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-2023

Notes/Citation Information

© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igad082

Funding Information

This project was supported by funding from JustFundKY, the University of Kentucky Donovan Scholarship in Gerontology, the University of Kentucky James S. Brown Award, and the University of Kentucky Office of LGBTQ* Resources. The project described was also supported by the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences through grant numbers UL1TR000117 and UL1TR001998. The content is solely the responsibility of the author and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.

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