Lesbians and Gay Men in Social Work

Abstract

We can safely assume that there have always been lesbians and gay men involved in social work, both as service providers and as service users. One of the problems of quantifying the numbers involved, even if it were relevant or useful, would be that the majority of people would have remained in the closet whether they were clients/service users or providers. Social work has had tremendous difficulties in accepting homosexuality as a valid sexual choice equal to heterosexuality (Hart and Richardson, 1981; Kus, 1990a; Brown, 1992a). Traditionally, social work has either ignored the issue or over-focused on it. Writing specifically about lesbians, Brown says:

in practice, social work agencies tend to deal with lesbians in one of two ways. Either the woman’s specific needs as a lesbian remain unrecognised and ignored, or her lesbianism becomes the central preoccupation, the prism through which her every word and action is interpreted. (Brown, 1992a: 201)