OutsideIN: an intervention for GBT2Q who are less out
When we hear phrases like “be out and proud!” tossed around, it can be easy to think that coming out is a one-time event that every queer person must go through to have a healthy and fulfilling life. Even for those who consider ourselves out, it’s never a one time thing. We have to decide whether to come out with every new person we meet: co-worker, healthcare provider, or even the person we sit beside on a plane.
For many of us, outness is not so simple, and our complicated relationship to outness can create unique health needs that often go unaddressed.
OutsideIN is a multifaceted intervention for gay, bi, trans, and queer self-identified men, and Two-Spirit and non-binary people (GBT2Q) who are less out about their sexual and romantic lives, and for their service providers.
Through OutsideIN, HIM is looking to address the health inequities for GBT2Q who are less out. We aim to unpack outness and encourage GBT2Q of levels of outness to access resources and services that support sexual, mental, and social wellbeing.
WHY THIS POPULATION?
Through literature review and community consultations, we learned that less out GBT2Q experience a number of health inequities and unique needs compared to their more out counterparts. These include lower rates of accessing HIV/STBBI combination prevention tools, lower health literacy, and specific iterations of stress and social isolation that are detrimental to overall health.
WHAT IS OutsideIN?
OutsideIN is made up of three main components:
1. Resources aimed at supporting healthcare providers in adapting their practices to be more responsive to the needs of less out GBT2Q and other less out men who have sex with men. These include:
Best Practices documents which were developed based on multi-level consultation with GBT2Q and healthcare providers, and have information on specific health inequities experienced by less-out GBT2Q and concrete steps healthcare providers can take to address those inequities.
You can see both Best Practices documents here: mental healthcare providers and general healthcare providers.
We are also offering discussion-based workshops to help healthcare providers identify assumptions we may have about GBT2Q clients and outness, and ways providers can adapt their practices to better address the needs of these clients.
Interested in hearing more about the workshop, or interested in delivering it in your own communities outside of BC? Email us at outness@checkhimout.ca.
2. A social marketing campaign and accompanying website resource (outness.ca) that
encourage GBT2Q who are less out to access health and community services, and also promote the message that being out and outness are complicated ideas that can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
3. Let’s Talk it Out community workshops aimed at GBT2Q community members with the goal of encouraging participants to rethink their assumptions about being out and outness, address the stigma that less out GBT2Q often experience from their more out peers, and to increase compassion toward community members who have complicated and at times difficult relationships with outeness, including toward themselves.
Visit our website and find out more!
Let's start a conversation and create change so we can all participate in community and take care of our health, no matter how out we are.
