[Excerpt of news article by Natasha Sokoloff, July 27, 2024]
HARTFORD — Despite Connecticut's relatively strong protections of its LGBTQ+ community, a new report on the greater Hartford community says that it still faces striking disparities in areas of health, well-being, and quality of life.
At a time when other states seem to be increasingly hostile to LGBTQ+ lives through discriminatory policies and lack of protections, there is a common conception of Connecticut being a "safe haven" for LGBTQ+ people, according to a report released on July 22 by DataHaven. However, both qualitative data from Hartford-area residents and federal and statewide surveys indicate that Connecticut's LGBTQ+ community still has unique barriers to housing, financial security, health care, and employment.
The report, which was done in partnership with the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, aims to illuminate the current state of the LGBTQ+ community in the Hartford area and ultimately help better direct resources to meet the needs of this community.
"There is a very vibrant and interconnected queer community in the Hartford area," said Shannon Carter, the lead researcher on the report. "But there's still these sort of, like, other upstream factors that disproportionately affect queer people that aren't necessarily directly queer issues."
According to the report, LGBTQ+ adults in Connecticut disproportionately report more difficulty affording basic needs, having lower household incomes, more likely to face housing insecurity, and overall face higher economic precarity than the cisgender heterosexual population.
"There's definitely things that make life a little bit more difficult for folks with those identities," said Kate Szczerbacki, director of Learning and Evaluation and Capacity Building at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving. "And you see the evidence of that show up as disparities in the data."
But as queer people themselves, both Carter and Szczerbacki said none of that was necessarily surprising.
"I think being able to look at the data, you really understand that there is sometimes greater need and greater challenge for folks with LGBTQIA identities," Szczerbacki said. "This is just another point of verification of that reality."
The report shows that LGBTQ+ adults in Connecticut were at least two times more likely to not get medical care when needed despite experiencing a higher burden of need, as members of this community face barriers to health care access due to lower financial means and discrimination from providers while also having higher rates of chronic and mental illness and disability.
"These things are all interrelated, and I think we understand that they're related, but really seeing how that shows up in people's lives and making it really tangible — we can see that in quantitative data, we can see that in data sets," Szczerbacki said.
Carter said what was most surprising to them in the report's findings wasn't the clear challenges the LGBTQ+ population was faced with, but some of the stark disparities within the community itself. Transgender people were far more likely to experience housing insecurity and to have missed needed medical care than other LGBTQ+ adults, according to the report. And people of color within the LGBTQ+ community also experienced higher disparities in other quality of life issues.
So despite relatively strong protections on paper, LGBTQ+ people, and in particular transgender people, experienced discrimination in many dimensions of public life in Connecticut, with reports of discrimination based on gender identity spiking in recent years, according to the report.
"I think what's really important is to really understand some of the dynamics that are happening, you know, out in the real world, and what sort of structures, systems, experiences that might be driving the trends and disparities that we see in the quantitative data," Szczerbacki said.
But the lack of quantitative data available was an example of another disparity in itself, Carter said. Sexual orientation and gender identity is rarely collected at the state and federal level, according to the report, which is why the report also relies on DataHaven's statewide survey responses over recent years and also collected qualitative data in greater Hartford specifically.
The report was commissioned by the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving to guide decision making for the foundation's Equality Fund, which is focused on the health and well-being of LGBTQ+ residents in greater Hartford, Szczerbacki said.
"There is a really a lack of data about this population," Szczerbacki said. And because the foundation was seeking to understand how to best support the community, it seemed like an opportune moment to partner with DataHaven to leverage both the quantitative and qualitative data that is out there to drive grant making and strategy to address those inequities that exist in the community, she said.
That's why, in addition to data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, DataHaven’s Community well-being Survey, and the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities’ yearly discrimination data, the report also draws upon the input and experiences of greater Hartford LGBTQ+ organizations and community members.
The report referenced responses from people in qualitative interviews over a couple of months and in a discussion in April, who were able to share how these inequities show up in their lives.
"One thing that came up in the qualitative interviews a lot is just Connecticut as this state that is, like fairly affirming for queer people, and has been sort of ahead of the curve on a lot of these legal protections," Carter said.
Having legalized same-sex marriage seven years before federal legalization, a robust record of judicial wins regarding parental rights of same-sex couples, and recently passing the Parentage Act that further advanced these rights, Connecticut has created a strong foundation for its LGBTQ+ community, according to the report.
"And for a lot of folks, that was very comforting and kind of helped them feel safer here, or folks have come to Connecticut for specifically the queer protections," Carter said.
But not everyone they spoke to in the greater Hartford community felt that way.
"There was also folks that were like, 'Oh, I came to Connecticut for the safety and then when I got here, I didn't realize that there were all these other issues, like, things are really expensive here,'" Carter said. "If you're a person that's not making a lot of money, or you're on disability, it can be really difficult to carve out a living here."
"So lots of folks were like, yes, we really love these legal protections, but it doesn't always translate into equal treatment," they said.
Based on the report's findings, while Connecticut’s policies put the state near the top of the list for protections of the LGBTQ+ community, actual experiences, as seen in both the quantitative and qualitative responses, tell a more harrowing story about inherent challenges, structural stigma and interpersonal bias.
But in spite of the systemic barriers that exist, Carter said that if there's anything they learned from this study, it's that there is a lot of strength and resilience in Connecticut's, and greater Hartford within it, LGBTQ+ community.
And ongoing and improved data collection will allow for a better understanding of the needs of this community, so that organizations like the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving can target funding and resources to where it is needed most.
