Forming queer community: Lessons from a Retreat for Black Lesbians

Forming queer community is often spoken about as the cure for loneliness for LGBTQ+ people. But how do you go about building it? This article explores different strategies for how we can connect with our queer family. Let’s take a close look at research published in the Journal of Lesbian Studies that explores the strategies one group of Black lesbians use for constructing LGBTQ+ community. 

This particular study, titled “Triple jeopardy and beyond: Multiple Minority Stress and Resilience Among Black Lesbians,” was conducted at the University of Rhode Island. Researchers interviewed 19 women at a retreat for Black lesbians in Southern California. They examined how this particular group of people, who are facing marginalization across multiple fronts, come to rely on each other and provide support. The word the authors use for this practice of enduring and thriving is “resilience.” It’s a common term in the therapy community that comes up in discussions of trauma. “Resilience” in a therapy setting refers to the idea that successful adaptation is possible despite threatening circumstances or challenges we have faced. Some of the stressors that come up in this study are what you would expect: racism, sexism, and homophobia, bigotry from families and neighbors, bosses acting unfairly and illegally. What might be unexpected is how the authors centered the resilience of the women themselves, rather than the many varied forms of prejudice and bigotry that they face. The authors of the study did excellent work acknowledging the reality of those threats, without using them for clickbait or sensationalizing them. Throughout the article, the voices of the women themselves were the primary focus, not the voices of their many detractors.

You can read the study here: “Triple jeopardy and beyond: Multiple Minority Stress and Resilience Among Black Lesbians” by Lisa Bowleg, Jennifer Huang, Kelly Brooks, Amy Black, and Gary Burkholder. Or keep scrolling for my summary of some of the key takeaways. 

So who are the women that get quoted in this study? Let’s dig in a little bit into just who was included. Lisa Bowleg and her team worked to interview 19 adult cis women. Participants were chosen from a group attending a retreat for Black lesbians. That identity label of “lesbian” only gives us a surface level understanding of their many more complex and nuanced sexual identities. The majority of participants did identify with the label “lesbian.” Around 16% self-identified as “gay,” one woman identified as “queer,” and around 11% identified as “other.” One criticism of this article would be to point out that some rich data got lost here in the oversimplification of these labels. What does “other” even mean? I would love to read more about what labels specifically those participants used- and which participants may have rejected all labels in the first place!

When it comes to the different kinds of prejudice these black, queer women face, how do the authors explore those overlapping harms? Again, the authors turned to the actual words of the participants themselves. For 79% of participants, racism was identified as providing more stress than sexism alone or homophobia alone. Compared to their experiences of the stress of racism, sexism to the interviewees felt more like a minor annoyance. The women’s responses to the interviews suggested that “because the workplace may provide more challenges for Black lesbians as Black professionals than it does for them as women, they may attend more to racism than sexism.”

The participants did not hold back in detailing how exactly they had faced homophobia and heterosexism in their lives. Examples included “being disowned by family members, being fired because of their sexual orientation, and being ostracized by a religious community.” More subtle stressors, like self-silencing about their sexuality and the fear that they would be outed at work, also played a role. It’s not like any of these forms of prejudice are happening in a vacuum either. One respondent put it pretty bluntly when they said “and being gay is like an affront to your blackness.” Exploring how these different forms of prejudice intersect is complicated work. 

Building Blocks

Let’s acknowledge the high degree of stress any one of these forms of prejudice brings. Let’s call out how much more deeply that pain is felt when you exist at the intersection of so many targeted communities. What a source of wisdom, the women who gave their time to this study are! Let’s dive into what they had to say on the subject of building community!

Here are some of the ways the participants of this study built and fostered community with each other:

• Balancing the demands of their different groups

They described how difficult it was to be a member of their families and their Black communities and their queer communities all at once. One of the major takeaways when you read this article is, and I quote, “how important it is for Black LGBQ people to maintain ties with the Black community because those communities served as a buffer for racism.” 

• Diversifying their resources

Casting a wide net to lessen their feelings of isolation meant, for several participants: finding books, finding magazines, using the internet to connect with geographically separate individuals, traveling however far was necessary to attend Black lesbian events, and planning ahead to balance the financial hit of those travels. Black lesbian community did not exist close by for all of these women. They put in considerable effort to cobble it together, to carve it out, to find small pieces of it or to invent it for themselves. 

As an aside: I love that participants of this study spoke to more than one geographic area. This is not research about queer people living in Chelsea in New York City or Boys’ Town in Chicago. This is research about people who do not come from those neighborhoods, and do not have the advantage of a huge queer community right outside of their door. 

• Drawing from individual strengths to connect with others

We don’t have a lot of control over what makes up our personality. This is not about attempting to mold or change your personality features. It’s more about identifying what already exists in your personal makeup, and then playing into those qualities that serve you best. The full list the authors identified:

1. Spiritual characteristics

2. Feelings of uniqueness

3. Self-esteem

4. Behavioral and social competencies

5. Happiness about “freedom from restrictive gender role norms,” optimism, and humor.

A note about this last point: I hesitate to use the exact word from the study, “happiness,” because I hate it when I get the advice to “just be happy.” As if the very real problems of racism or sexism or heterosexism just go away on their own and I can easily slide into a blissful state. Rather than repeating that same tired line, let’s hear it right from the participants. One of them was a 47-year-old cab driver. She described how after years of depressive symptoms, once she admitted openly that she was a lesbian, the happiness she felt at coming out overtook her. “It was like a whole new world opened up… And you know, I have my ups and downs, but I feel like it can be a good life for me, and it is a good life for me. And I proactively do things that will make it good for me.” 

That last line, about proactively making it a good life for yourself: that is what DBT is all about for me. Dialectical behavior therapy asks “How can you structure your life the way you want it, so that you have your best chance of long-term satisfaction or fulfillment?” This is so different from that old cliche “be happy.” This is an active choice that you can make, or realistically a whole bunch of choices you can make, with the aim of what will best serve you in the future. There are particular skills for this in DBT. Some examples: choosing what goal is closest to your values, defending that choice when other parts of your life make it difficult to stick to, checking the facts to see if you are getting closer to that life.

• Using their own agency

Participants described how critical it was to connect with their own sources of power, when faced with larger systems designed to deny their humanity. So much of the challenges they are up against are not problems that any one person can solve, and over time we know how that wears down your sense of capability. The participants of this study advocated for using strategies like: 

1. Actively confronting oppression where possible and when it is safe

2. Staying aware of their power to change things

3. Not taking responsibility for other people’s beliefs and actions. I love the language one participant used when she said “Choosing not to bear the burden of other people’s bigotry.”

• Nurturing social support

According to multiple participants, supportive relationships “sustain them, especially during times of stress.” It all comes back to relying on each other for many of the Black lesbians in this study. This can look like friends, intimate partners, affirming religious communities, the list goes on. Holding tight to whoever made up their network was a major factor in their being able to withstand and bounce back from the stressors in their lives, time and time again. Family support looks a little more complicated. 74% of the participants reported that they felt supported by at least one family member. At the same time, all except for one participant said that support from their families did not always encompass all the parts of themselves as Black lesbians. 

I’ll end this summary with the words of one participant, talking about the last element from the list above. She captures the feeling of being held up by a group you can trust. She says “I’ve been blessed by having some really incredible friends… And I’ve been blessed with a partner who accepts me absolutely and supports me, in all of my realities. I don’t have a lot of support [from my family or in this community], but I have some real solid pieces and it makes a difference when things are incredibly hard or you’re met with silence or just simple challenges of dealing as a lesbian, a Black lesbian woman in this world.”

Curious about more options for how to build queer community? This article goes into more detail about forming LGBTQ+ community in the pansexual community.

 “Triple jeopardy and beyond: Multiple Minority Stress and Resilience Among Black Lesbians.” Bowleg, Lisa et al. Journal of Lesbian Studies (Harrington Park Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press Inc.) Vol. 7, No. 4, 2003, pp.87-108.