Abstract
The demographics of Tuolumne County are similar to those of other rural areas, however, little is known about the LGBT community. The purpose of this research project is to acknowledge and document the challenges of living in a conservative rural area for LGBT persons in Tuolumne County. The project aims to document the coping strategies and resources used by LGBT community members in facing those challenges. The population for this study includes LGBT residents of Tuolumne County, a rural community set in California’s Sierra Nevada foothills. The study specifically examines the LGBT community as the target population within the community at large. The number of subjects was based on availability and time. This sampling is nonrandom, as the researcher used personal connections to obtain 20 participants with the specific criteria of being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (criterion sampling), and using snowball sampling to find the remainder of needed participants. The study included seven lesbians, four gay men, nine bisexuals, and three transgender individuals. With respect to gender, there were seven males and 13 females, four of whom were male to female transgender. Different participants found varying levels of satisfaction and/or fear living within this social environment. Some found the atmosphere intolerable and unsustainable such that they had to leave the area. Others found that if they kept their private lives private, they managed to live peacefully, for the most part in this rural area. The problem remains as how we are to address these concerns. Traditional approaches involve the interconnection of LGBT people and the organizing of these people into a community. This approach requires individuals to be visible enough to be found by others. Furthermore, it requires the group of LGBT community members to be visible as well in order to collaborate with and educate the community as a whole. Unfortunately, in rural areas visibility can mean exclusion, ridicule, and possible loss of personal safety and livelihood (Drumheller & McQuay, 2010). Because safe means of connecting with each other was by far cited as the number one desire of the participants in this study, there needs to be a means of finding and carrying out a way to for LGBT members to find and support one another.