Identity Reports & One in Ten — now online!

Identity Reports (1989) and One in 10 (1986)

You’ve heard about them — or maybe you haven’t — but now you have. Anyway: now they’re online!

As I wrote in my June 2 letter to the Anchorage Assembly:

It’s been pointed out that the government maintains no statistics on sexual orientation discrimination because it’s currently not illegal to discriminate on that basis. But it’s not entirely correct that there are no statistics at all. I was part of two research efforts in the 1980s to document the sexual orientation bias in Alaska. I was principal writer for One in 10: A Profile of Alaska’s Lesbian & Gay Community (Anchorage, AK: Identity, 1986), which reported on the results of a survey of 734 lesbian, gay, and bisexual Alaskans on a survey of 100 questions on various aspects of our lives, including experience of discrimination, harassment, and violence. I was coauthor, with Jay Brause, of the second, Identity Reports: Sexual Orientation Bias in Alaska (Anchorage, AK: Identity, 1989), which comprised three papers: “Coming Out: Issues Surrounding Disclosure of Sexual Orientation” (Green), based primarily on data from One in 10; “Closed Doors: Sexual Orientation Bias in the Anchorage Housing and Employment Markets” (Brause), based on a randomly selected, anonymous survey of 191 employers and 178 landlords in Anchorage; and “Prima Facie: Documented Cases of Sexual Orientation Bias in Alaska” (Green), which presented 84 cases from interviews, newspaper accounts, court records, and other documents of violence, harassment, and discrimination in Alaska on the basis of actual or assumed sexual orientation from 1975 to 1987. Copies of both reports are available in area libraries, including the Loussac and the UAA/APU Consortium Library.

But now no need to trot down to the library: just click through this link: http://www.henkimaa.com/identity/. Tell all your friends!

The files are quite big, by the way: because the original wordprocessing files weren’t available, they all had to be scanned in as images, so each document is howsoever many pages of full page images. Always a problem. I’ve broken down Identity Reports into its constituent papers too, but even then — “Prima Facie” is a big document.  Give it a try, if many people have problems I’ll see what I can do.  If you have a problem downloading, post a comment on this post, or on my “Equality” page.

A big thank you to Identity, Inc., the original sponsor of the research.  Although I wrote a lot of this stuff, they held the copyright — but they want people to know about this work, which is so very relevant to our current efforts to finally achieve legal equality in Anchorage.  Hopefully they’ll have copies posted to their website soon too.