Setting the Tone? Rethinking the Scope of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender-Specific (Social Work) Scholarship.

Research Methods with Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Populations. Edited by William Meezan and James I. Martin. New York: Harrington Park Press, 2003, 212 pages. Cloth, $24.95; hardcover, $39.95.

Reviewed by Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, Ph.D. Candidate, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, Department of Sociology, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016; e-mail: [e-mail].

Dissertating students like myself often look for various ways of strengthening their research and analytical skills. There are many anxiety-provoking moments in the dissertation process: from the idea of entering the field and thinking about the subjectivity of the researcher, insider and outsider status, and complexities of the methodological plan to the relationships one creates with the people in the field one is investigating. I welcomed the opportunity to review this book. As an experienced ethnographer and interviewer very interested in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) specific research, I was looking for some new ideas to incorporate into my own dissertation.

The book's title, while suggesting a general framework, focuses specifically on social work, addressing service provision, policy making, and research methods simultaneously. One would think that research methods are research methods, and their applicability is evenly spread throughout the social sciences. If this is the case, it is difficult to justify framing a methods book exclusively from a social work perspective. It is true that many social science disciplines have invested in the claim of methodological rigor within their fields. But if such a claim is made, something has to be offered in exchange. The editors of this book see social work research as the only kind of research that offers results to those it serves. However, this stance gives social work unnecessary authority, and it denies that the purpose of all social sciences does not need to simply be the gathering of data "for knowledge sake." Unfortunately, it is evident that nothing innovative is offered in exchange for such a grandiose claim.

A book on LGBT methods published in 2003 should offer something beyond what is offered by a basic textbook on research methods. A book on LGBT methods sounds like a political project, because it is charged with the responsibility to both cover basic methodological assumptions and argue for a specific LGBT framework--one that adds to our general knowledge of methodological practice. And a social work book on LGBT research methods sounds too specific and too narrow to actually be of use to a larger market.

Politics are at the heart of this book. For instance, if you are interested in a politics of representation in which the eventual purpose is to shatter stereotypes, or in advocating for statistics in which sexual orientation is part of the data collected, this book is for you. But if you are a social scientist invested in the development (and not simply the application) of research methods, other books will do. If you think not enough theoretical discussion as to what exactly constitutes a "LGBT" identity and social mobilization has taken place, or if you seek to problematize basic assumptions about an otherwise disparate collection of identities, you need not read this volume. Don't get me wrong: Social scientists have focused on actionresearch as well (Brown, 2003). That is not the problem. But the specificity of this text will not be helpful if you are looking to question some of the assumptions you have been resisting in research methods to date. Perhaps, if you are a social work student, teacher, or practitioner, this book will be provocative to you. I suspect, however, that even some of the social workers who have had the kinds of conversations offered in this collection will still crave more analysis.

Here lies the political project of suggesting LGBT methods that are incomplete at best, and that are framed within a social work perspective but attempt to reach to all social sciences. The methods are incomplete (most obviously) because they do not address all segments of their labels (the missing research about bisexual and transgender populations, acknowledged from the get-go, sets the tone; see p. 13). Similarly, sampling almost invariably involved White participants. The overused disclosure "we really, really tried to get people of color" needs to be supplanted by publications on the reasons why recruitment of ethnic minorities is so difficult (this is certainly addressed in Wheeler's chapter). While some of these are faults of a larger identity politics project, where the priority is the formulation of "healthy" and politically active constituents that claim an identity and pressure institutions for fair representation, the volume nevertheless offers both provocative ideas and old methodological discussions.

The refreshing aspects of the volume include an article by Sullivan and Losberg about sampling in a gay and lesbian journal. They point out the need to "conceptually define the populations" at hand, and assert that at times, acknowledging gender, sexual behavior, sexual identity, and social organization may actually "defeat the [research] enterprise entirely" (p. 159). However daunting a task, this is necessary in any research project, and many projects do not make these definitions operational, thus confounding groups. A particularly problematic slippage is the interchangeable use of gay, bisexual, and men who have sex with men (MSM) as labels to refer to the same group of people, as shown next.

A trend in the last decade has been the study of dual or multiple HIV risk factors: namely, drug use and same-sex behavior have been capitalized on by many medical anthropologists, public health officials, and psychologists. Gorman's article in this volume offers up-to-date discussion of issues about ethnographic work with these populations. Some of the issues Gorman raises are participant recruitment, the use of grounded theory, the use of multiple methods in an ethnographic context, the ethnographer as an added element in the informal street economy of sexuality and drugs (especially when providing financial incentives), and the range of experiences within an already complex group. However, this is one of the entries in which sexual identity and behavior are collapsed under a political category--gay--without recognizing that a consequence of doing this is the demonizing of all that does not adhere to its definition.

Such is the case of the concept of MSM. While the term has been widely used in the last two decades, its origin is attributed to the U.S. government during the advancement of AIDS as a pandemic to collapse gay and bisexual men into a behavioral, non-identity, epidemiological category (Rodriguez Rust, 2000). Notably, this term is also critiqued as a psychological, psychiatric, and social work discourse that imposes homophobia to any location outside of gay identification (Guzman, 1997). Thus, the category MSM does not, in fact, address the self-identification of the men to whom it refers; however, in this book, men who have sex with men and gay-identified men are collapsed. Similarly, seldom can one find a bisexual person whose identity is not shaped by gay identities, especially in research that focuses on gay-specific venues (Rodriguez Rust, 2000). This is due to the political practices of the confession as the ultimate healing practice for sexual "deviants"--to adhere to a gay-identified nomenclature is to be "true" and "honest" to oneself and others.

By now, it is clear that the categories gay, bisexual, and men who have sex with men hold different meanings. But somehow, a racial-sexual collapsing takes place in the framing of this book, where a non-self-identified label often appears in relationship to people of color (pp. 8, 13). Such problematic merges maintain a culture of "coming out" and reproduce the very same pathologizing that the editors of this book seem to eliminate through their own research on LGBT populations. The only article specifically addressing African American LGBT populations counters the idea that communities of color are more homophobic (p. 66), but this seems to go unnoticed by the editors.

A significant breakthrough in this volume is the discussion of insider versus outsider status offered by LaSala and McClennen (identified as a heterosexual woman), which helps both insiders and outsiders to a group consider the pros and cons of their similarities or differences from the group. Wheeler, in his chapter on African American LGBT communities, adds to this discussion by pointing out that power is intrinsic in the relationship of researchers to informants, and perceived insider status does not mean lack of some standards nor immediate access to this population.

Another unnoticed effect of this compilation of articles is the varied opinions about who is studied and the choice of specific groups within the LGBT umbrella. Two articles that focus on lesbian women stand out from the rest of the collection (those by Swindell and Pryce and Swann and Anastas). There is no apology in their choosing this group as a population. These authors focus on conceptual issues and quantitative research, respectively, and they offer some suggestions that move lesbian research away from the 1970s and 1980s paradigms. While some gendered assumptions are in place--for instance, Swindell and Price argue that lesbians' self-destructive behavior can include sexual promiscuity (p. 105), something early anthropological work has challenged (Rubin, 1993)--and the psychological and developmental emphasis is too antagonistic to the sexual behavior and risk factors for male-centered research, these authors move outside the fallacy of studying LGBT and not successfully being "inclusive." Sometimes "less" is really more, and they prove it.

One of the main holdbacks of the volume is its uncritical assumption of "subjects' protection," intrinsically a service-provision framework that taints any substantive innovation to research methods. For instance, the editors' constant criticism of ethically dubious studies such as Laud Humphreys' Tearoom Trade (1970) is used as a justification for a subject-centered approach. I am certainly not denying that, in research, subjects' positioning is often one of vulnerability, and that as social scientists, we must guarantee that there is no harm conducted while researching. Yet erasing the obvious in research like Humphreys'--the fact that his method allowed for findings that could not have been gathered in any other way--sounds like a excuse not to think about the best possible methods to answer a question about human organization and behavior.

There are also misleading statements that attempt to compare racial and ethnic minorities to gays. Take, for instance, LaSala's point that "White, Anglo, heterosexual sociologists in the U.S. studied 'deviance' among African Americans, Latinos, and gay men" (p. 17). This statement is problematic in that it equates sexual and racial minorities--a political project that continues to be unsuccessful (Berub6, 2001). It mentions Humphreys' research in order to assume MSM's in his study as gay, which is misleading because Humphreys' research showed that many if not most such men were not gay-identified to begin with. (For a recent dissertation focusing on public sex use by selfidentified gay and bisexual men, and one that also challenges Humphreys' focus on public sex sites as impersonal, see Brown, 2003).

One of the most ahistorical comments occurs when the editors locate Hoover's 1957 study on mental health and men who have sex with men and call such men gay. This is incorrect because "gayness" as an identity began taking place in the late 1960s and solidified in the 1970s. Going back into history and claiming that "gays" have always been there only erases the complexity of sexual identity and sexual behavior, and in this sense, the book does not move toward critical notions of identity.

However, there are a few practical benefits to the book for students and researchers alike. For instance, if you are interested in reading about the minute details of qualitative interviewing, the article by Hash and Cramer will be refreshing and will help keep you organized. And if ethics and program evaluation are aspects of concern to you, the last chapters outline some basic discussions that will be of help in preparing for your own project.

Overall, this is a basic text of use to researchers who may need to realize their own heteronormative assumptions. It is also a product that will offer social work scholars and practitioners a baseline from which to develop further work. While limited in its scope, the text's language is accessible and the varied methodologies are complementary. This text may be of use in senior undergraduate classrooms as one of several resources for the study of research on sexually "marginal" groups.

REFERENCES

Berube, A. (2001). How gay stays white and what kind of white it stays. In B.B. Rasmussen, E. Klinenberg, I. J. Nexica, & M. Wray (Eds.), The making and unmaking of whiteness (pp. 234-265). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Brown, M. (2003). "Thanks, buddy": Gay and bisexual men's personal experiences of public sex sites. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Colorado-Boulder.

Guzman, M. (1997). 'Pa' la escuelita con mucho cuida'o y por la orillita': A journey through the contested terrains of the nation and sexual orientation. In R. Grosfonquel & F. Negron-Muntaner (Eds.), Puerto Rican jam (pp. 209-228). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Humphreys, L. (1970). Tearoom trade: Impersonal sex in public places. Chicago: Aldine Publishing.

Rodriguez Rust, P. (2000). Bisexuality in the United States: A social science reader. New York: Columbia University Press.

Rubin, G. S. (1993). Thinking sex: Notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. In H. Abelove, M. A. Barale, & D. M. Halperin (Eds.), The gay and lesbian studies reader (pp. 3-44). New York: Routledge.