Welcome to the first issue of volume 18 of the Journal of LGBTQ Issues in Counseling! Our journal continues to feature innovative scholarship on LGBTQ + and allied communities. As the visibility of impact of the journal increases, we are receiving more scholarship from across the globe seeking to highlight the experiences of increasingly diverse and interconnected populations of LGBTQ + people. I want to thank all of our contributing scholars for their thoughtful and creative work. Keeping in mind that the journal has a special purpose to feature scholarship related to or applicable to the work of counselors, we strive to balance our focus with the hope to remain relevant to broader emerging voices and perspectives passionate about scholarship on LGBTQ + issues in counseling and human development.
For the current issue, we feature two research articles and two conceptual articles based on critical review of the literature. One conceptual piece is a systematic review of standards related to the use of Photovoice in counseling research and practice. The other conceptual piece seeks to advance theory on the topic of resilience as it manifests in LGBTQ + communities. We also are including an article describing instrument development for a new measure of self-acceptance in LGBTQ + people. Finally, the fourth article involves a qualitative exploration of the meaning of being a drag queen in a sample of Black participants. The diversity of focus and method appearing in this issue represents the type of breadth and depth of scholarly work with LGBTQ + issues that the journal was designed to feature.
The past 18 years of the journal’s existence has seen advances for LGBTQ + civil rights and social inclusion, as well as severe backlash to those gains. Within counseling and counselor education, practitioners and scholars who are passionate about LGBTQ + issues continue to face marginalization both subtle and overt. Scholarship on LGBTQ + issues is often held to a narrower standard than other type of scholarship, and rejected for being too niche, not generalizable, or not needed given the supposed gains in LGBTQ + inclusion from the past two decades. I challenge my colleagues in counseling to address these biases, and encourage any scholar whose work has been marginalized by other journals to consider the Journal of LGBTQ Issues in Counseling.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).