Sexual Identity Disclosure among Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Individuals

Long Doan, Trenton D. Mize

Sociological Science October 19, 2020
10.15195/v7.a21


Most research on sexual prejudice explicitly or implicitly assumes that an individual’s sexual orientation identity is known to observers. However, there has been little large-scale survey evidence examining differential rates of disclosure among lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals, and there remains much to be studied as to why and when LGB individuals choose to disclose their sexual identity to others. Using data from a nationally representative sample of LGB Americans (N=1,085), we assess the contexts and conditions under which LGB individuals disclose their sexual identities. Results show that bisexual women and men are significantly less likely to disclose their sexual identity across several important social domains, such as family and the workplace. This disclosure gap is partially explained by measures of identity commitment but surprisingly not by measures of perceived social acceptance. We discuss implications of these findings for sexuality and identity research.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Long Doan: Department of Sociology, University of Maryland
E-mail: longdoan@umd.edu

Trenton D. Mize: Department of Sociology and Advanced Methodologies, Purdue University
E-mail: tmize@purdue.edu

Acknowledgments: We thank Brian Powell, Lisa R. Miller, and Brian T. Connor for excellent suggestions on various drafts of this paper. Parts of this paper were presented at the Indiana University Social Psychology, Health, and the Life Course seminar and the 2017 ASA Meetings. We thank audience members in both venues for their valuable comments. We are also grateful to the Pew Research Center for collecting the data used in our analyses. Partial funding for open access was provided by the UMD Libraries’ Open Access Publishing Fund. Opinions, findings, and ‘conclusions presented in this paper are ours and do not necessarily represent the views of any of the organizations or individuals above.

  • Citation: Doan, Long, and Trenton D. Mize. 2020. “Sexual Identity Disclosure among Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Individuals.” Sociological Science 7: 504-527.
  • Received: August 19, 2020
  • Accepted: September 19, 2020
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v7.a21


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