Sexual-orientation Self-disclosure.

Previous research has not addressed the disclosure of sexual orientation using methods derived from general self-disclosure research. This exploratory study addresses the intersection of these two research areas. Subjects were 56 female and 167 male subscribers to the Newsletter of the Association of Lesbian and Gay Psychologists. They responded to a mailed questionnaire containing: demographic questions; Target Importance (TI) Inventory, rating the importance of coming out of 14 family, friend, and business targets; Coming Out (CO) Inventory, ranking targets in the order in which subjects came out to them; 38-item Self-Disclosure (SD) Inventory, yielding target scores (SD-T; extent of information disclosed to targets) and item scores (SD-I; extent to which gay-related topics were disclosed); and Snyder's Self-Monitoring (SM) scale, indexing subjects' inclination to match self-presentation to social-situational cues. Results for targets indicated that people chosen for intimate relaionships in adult life rated highest in target importance, were come out to earliest, and received disclosures about the largest number of topics. Next on all three measures was the nuclear family; finally business relationships and other relatives. Two exceptions were that Mother rated in the top group in target importance; and Colleague rated in the top group for amount of information disclosed. Overall, subjects came out sooner and disclosed most to friends of their own sex and sexual orientation. All four scales had unitary factor structures with the best predictors for the TI, COI, and SD-T factors being targets from the nuclear family. On SD-I, social and political content was disclosed to more targets than were explicitly sexual items, but the latter had the highest factor loadings and were disclosed more often by males than by females. The surprising finding was that in the multiple regression analysis by far the most frequent predictor for all SD-T and SD-I scores was Employer TI, followed by Father TI and Brother TI. SM was unrelated to other measures. The findings were interpreted as an indication that the cutting edge of sexual-orientation self-disclosure is the willingness to break a social taboo: the revealing of sexual content to the principal representatives of social norms.Ph.D.Clinical psychologyPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/127668/2/8422247.pd