Health
Lesbian Health Matters! by Val Leoffler; Mary O’donnell; Kater Pollock; Ziesel Saunders
Created by memvers of the Women’s Health Collective who found nothing at the time specific to lesbian health. The aim was to provide something to help lesbians gain control of their own health care. Foundational.
Counseling Our Own by Charna Klein
This is the first and only book existing on the lesbian/gay counseling service, mental health movement in the United States. It covers how gay counseling services arose from the lesbian/gay subculture and gay movement, why they were needed, their history, organization, philosophy, staff, clients, and relationship with their lesbian/gay communities and the established mental health system. It provides recommendations and advocates measures the on-gay mental health professionals and agencies. It chronicles lesbian/gay history and the struggle for positive mental health services in a context of cultural homophobia and labeling gays as mentally ill.
Minority Stress And Lesbian Women by Virginia R. Brooks
**Part I: Redefining the Problem**
**Introduction**
– Overview
– Terms and Definitions
**The Etiological Question**
– The Biological Argument
– Methodological Considerations
– The Psychoanalytic Argument
– The Socialization Argument
– The Sociocultural Response
**Sex Roles, Androgyny, and Mental Health**
– Concepts and Linkages
– Sex-Role Conformity versus Nonconformity: Comparative Outcomes
– Androgyny and Lesbian Women
**Stratification and Exclusion**
– Minority Status of Women
– Rationale for Minority Exclusion
– Social and Economic Exclusion of Lesbian Women
**Part II: Minority Stress: Theoretical and Empirical Model**
**The Theory of Minority Stress**
– Overview of Stress Theory
– Minority Status as Stressor
– Minority Stress and Problems in Measurement
**Stress-Response Variables among Lesbian Women**
– Stress Indexes
– Hypotheses
– Factors Associated with Negative and Positive Outcomes
– Need for Further Research
**Coping Resources**
– Defining Coping
– Stress-Mediating Resources
– Individual Responses and Minority-Group Patterns
– Model for Analysis of Minority-Stress Variables
**Part III: Redefining Self, Group, and Social Context**
**Identity Conflicts, Cognitive Dissonance, and Resolution**
– Faulty Premises and Self-Concept
– ‘Personal’ Identity versus ‘Lesbian’ Identity
– Reassessing Social Reality
**Intragroup Differences**
– Group Identity and Class Differences
– Upward and Downward Mobility
– Collective Diversity
**Social Disclosure**
– Stress of Disclosure versus Nondisclosure
– Variables in Disclosure Decisions
– Disclosure: The Personal Becomes Political
