Publications

Oral health is central to overall wellbeing, and two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (2SLGBTQ+) communities have reported poorer outcomes. This scoping review searched six databases worldwide for evidence on 2SLGBTQ+ oral health, unmet dental needs, service use, and the risk factors behind them. Only ten studies met the criteria, five from India, four from the United States, and one from Brazil. Two reported worse oral health among transgender than cisgender people, while two found similar rates of dental service use. Reported risks included affordability, income, discrimination, and misgendering in clinical settings. The authors stress that the literature remains strikingly sparse.

Peer researchers, hired for their lived experience, are increasingly common, but their own perspectives are seldom examined. This participatory qualitative project interviewed 34 people who had worked as peer researchers across four intersecting communities: mental health service users, consumers and survivors; people who use drugs; racialized people; and trans and non-binary people. Many described racism, transphobia, ableism, and classism from colleagues and institutions, alongside pressure to perform academic professionalism while representing communities their workplaces disparaged. Participants resisted in various ways, sometimes allowing themselves to be tokenized in hopes of community benefit, and were harmed again when those benefits never arrived.

Epidemics land unevenly, and COVID-19 was no exception. Engage-COVID-19, a mixed methods study in Vancouver, Toronto and Montréal, included two rounds of qualitative interviews between November 2020 and October 2021 with 93 gay, bisexual, queer and other men who have sex with men. Fifty-nine identified as Black, Indigenous or a Person of Colour, and they described repeated discrimination during the pandemic. Participants did not report discrimination tied to sexual identity, but racism shaped how they were treated within sexual networks. East Asian and Black participants most often reported verbal harassment in public and online, including for wearing masks.

Photovoice hands cameras to community members to surface strengths and inequities, and COVID-19 pushed the method online. Reflecting on a large study of 110 men's perspectives on equitable, sustainable intimate partner relationships, this article weighs the case for and against virtual photovoice across three themes. Online work widened recruitment and cut data collection costs, but introduced phishing risks and uneven internet literacy. Participation itself changed, with some sourcing third-party or archived images, choosing audio-only interviews, or restricting photo use. Large multi-site datasets raised fresh analysis questions. The authors expect a continuum of virtual, hybrid and in-person approaches.

Pandemic rules were not written with queer lives in mind, according to gay, bisexual, and queer men across Canada. Researchers conducted two rounds of semi-structured interviews with 93 men in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver between late 2020 and late 2021, analyzing them through cis-heteronormativity and intersectionality. Participants described stay-at-home orders and gathering limits as reinforcing heterosexual models of kinship, while restricted access to queer spaces damaged their sense of belonging and identity. Others noted the directives ignored homelessness and structural racism among queer people. The findings show how COVID-19 messaging overlooked chosen kinship, community organizations, and varied LGBTQ+ vulnerabilities.