Transcription:
101 on LGBTQ+

Scott Webb: Welcome to Stoughton Health Talk. I'm Scott Webb, and I invite you to listen as we discuss issues facing the local LGBTQ+ community and the work that the organization, Building a Safer Evansville, and Stoughton Health are doing to address these issues. And joining me today is Mark Mellecker. He's the project coordinator for building a safer Evansville. And Mark, thanks so much for your time today. Before we get rolling, please tell listeners a little bit about yourself.

Mark Mellecker: My name is Mark Mellecker. I am the project coordinator for Building A Safer Evansville in Evansville, Wisconsin. BASE is a community health coalition that focuses on substance use and mental health in Evansville and surrounding communities. I've been working with Stoughton Health over the last couple of months to bring LGBTQ+ health equity as a forefront of what they're going to be doing in the hospital system as well as substance use, alcohol use, mental health in the general Evansville area over the last about year.

Scott Webb: That's great. And we're going to get to BASE especially. I want to have you just kind of paint a picture for listeners or explain to listeners what does LGBTQ+ stand for?

Mark Mellecker: So LGBTQ+ is an initialism. It stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, Q is for queer, and then the plus covers kind of everything else. I guess I can go letter by letter. Lesbian is a woman who is emotionally, romantically or sexually attracted to other women. Gay describes a man who is emotionally, romantically or sexually attracted to men.

Bisexual is somebody who is emotionally, romantically or sexually attracted to both or multiple or all genders, though it's not necessarily simultaneously. A bisexual person is sometimes used interchangeably with pansexual as somebody who loves everybody, because we kind of know that gender is a spectrum. And so bisexual kind of exists in this weird state of flux as we begin to understand what gender and sexuality looks like.

Transgender is a term that covers a large experience of people who have different gender or sexual identity expressions. Transgender is specifically focused on somebody who has a different identity than what they might've been born with or is not gender conforming. So somebody might've been born a man, but knows who they are at a later stage in life and are a woman. Or they don't identify with men or women or just, you know, they have gender-neutral or gender nonconforming standards of how they present themselves.

Trans doesn't necessarily impact sexual orientation, because somebody who's born a man and then transitions to female may have the same sexual identity that they had prior to transition. So it's a very interesting upcoming thing that we're starting to see more of with only 2% of the United States identifying as trans. We're starting to understand more of how it fits into our culture.

And then queer is the Q on LGBTQ+, and it's kind of an umbrella term that covers everything. I know that's really hard to see it in the initialism and then say that it covers everything else in the initialism. But it's been used to avoid specific classification. Some people don't feel that they fit in the LGBT or the plus. It used to be a slur, but it's something that has been reclaimed by many members in the community. If you don't like using queer, and feel more comfortable with questioning, they kind of cover about the same. People who identify as queer should be allowed to use it. But those on the outside who don't know shouldn't just say somebody is queer because it is seen as offensive in that way.

And then the plus on LGBTQ+ covers pretty much everything else. There's a lot of different terminology that can be used for it. If we were to spell out every letter in LGBTQ plus, it would be like LGBTQIA+ and that covers things such as pansexual, intersex, asexual, which if there's more interest in those, we have some really great resources on the BASE website that kind of go through all that stuff. But just for sake of time today, LGBTQ+ is what we generally use when referring to the community.

Scott Webb: Yeah, there a lot to unpack there. And as you and I were discussing before we got started here, really this is just about sort of educating people. And I think that's a great start, a great foundation for this. And so next I want to ask you, do members of these communities suffer from health disparities? And if so, maybe you can take us through them.

Mark Mellecker: There are a lot of reasons surrounding health disparities. The CDC has a really great website page about health disparities amongst the LGBTQ+ communities, as well as LGBTQ+ youth. And that usually focuses on the fact that like there's over 2.6 million sexual minority students in the United States. BASE focuses a lot on youth behavior, youth disparities, the impact on youth. And we see that over the United States, there's over 2.6 million students that fall in that category.

Compared to their peers, their heterosexual peers, they are more likely to be bullied at school, have seriously considered suicide, attempted suicide, using illicit drugs or alcohol, misused prescription opioids. The behaviors that they exhibit are as a result sometimes of harassment, discrimination, just not feeling like they fit in a community, not having those protective factors.

And there's a lot of work that's still being done. The big thing that we have a problem with for LGBTQ+ populations is that there's just not a lot of data. And there's not a lot of data in rural communities as well. You might see more data available for a place like Madison or for Janesville or Milwaukee. But sometimes the outer-lying communities in Wisconsin kind of get forgotten about. There's not a whole lot of data in Stoughton, or there's not a lot of data here in Evansville or in Orfordville or any of the smaller communities that surround these big cities because the research isn't there, the desire isn't there to find out that information.

And sometimes the questions just aren't asked. They're not available on surveys. They're not part of the census data. They're not, you know, available or something that the doctors know to ask. A lot of the health disparities come from the fact that nobody's focusing on these things because they don't know they exist.

Scott Webb: Yeah. It's really interesting. And you're probably so right that in the larger cities, the larger communities, folks think to ask those questions and there is research, there is data available. But in the smaller communities like we're talking about here in Stoughton, Evansville, and so on, not so much, right?

Mark Mellecker: Yeah. And the problem is not that Madison's just better than Evansville or Stoughton. It's that there are organizations and people in those areas who are so dedicated to making sure those questions get asked. And that's what BASE is hoping to do over the next couple of years with the remainder of our funding is to get people to start asking those questions, to get that stuff included in school surveys and asked at the doctor's office. So that way we can keep up with these bigger cities and fix a lot of the problems that have been kind of left untouched so far.

Scott Webb: Yeah. And let's talk about BASE, you know, Building A Safer Evansville. So tell listeners about BASE, give them an overview of the work that you guys do, the grant that you got and just in general, what your mission is.

Mark Mellecker: Yeah. So Building A Safer Evansville is a community health coalition that's based in Evansville, Wisconsin. We focus on LGBTQ+, substance use, mental health. In our general DFC grant, which is drug-free communities grant, we focus on all kinds of substance abuse that happen here in Evansville, alcohol, vaping, opioid addictions.

We work with our community partners. We have a lot of really strong community connections that help us get change happening here. Education of families, individuals, youth. Providing resources for businesses and for parents and for students and teachers. We kind of have our fingers in every pie in the area with the focus on reducing the impact that substances and alcohol and vaping and stuff like that have on our community.

We have a huge connection with our police department, with our schools, with the businesses here in Evansville. And so whenever something is happening, like say there's a festival going on or we are responding to a crisis that had happened here in town, such as like a suicide or an opioid overdose, we're there every step of the way, trying to figure out how best we can provide support and resources for the community.

A lot of our stuff focuses on raising protective factors, so providing parents and teachers with the education to be able to respond to alcohol use with youth or to provide resources such as medication lockboxes or disposal sites for opioids and other prescription medication.

A lot of it is prevention. It's very focused on how can we make sure that we're building a healthy and safe community for all. And it's been interesting. I've only been part of BASE for a little over a year now, but BASE has been around since about 2009 and got official federal funding in 2011. It's been very interesting seeing it grow and be able to be as important in the community as it has.

Scott Webb: Yeah, I'm sure. And you guys are doing such great work and such necessary work. And as you and I were discussing, you know, education is really the key to everything. You have to educate people before you can really explain to them the needs, the urgency, and then ultimately, what can be done to help the various populations and help the communities in general. I guess I'm wondering, do you have any specific programs or services that you're particularly proud of that you want folks to know about?

Mark Mellecker: We've shifted almost all of our efforts to virtual over the last year, and engaging with people in that way has been really great. We're still providing a lot of our same essential services, such as our lockbox initiative, our medication takebacks. We're trying to find ways to archive a lot of the stuff that we've been doing that's engaged parents in person and provided them with training and education so that way it's available permanently online. So shifting a lot of what we've been doing to a virtual format has been a very big challenge as I'm sure everyone who has been working over the last year has been able to see.

The big things that BASE is super proud of though are our Evansville Night Out, which is a family-focused, substance-free engagement, like festival day. It happens every year. It's about two, three hours in Evansville from like 6:00 to 8:00 PM. BASE partners with the EMS, the Evansville Police Department, the Fire District, as well as community partners in the area, the Rock County Health Department. We have doctors, nurses there.

It's focused on creating a safe and healthy substance-free activity for families to participate in. So that way, people can come together and see that it's not just alcohol or drugs that really are the only thing that keeps all of us together. As well as providing education on what goes on. What do EMS do? What does the police do? What does the fire district do? How can we work with the doctors to make our lives healthier? That's something that we've been really proud of over the years, especially because we have so many community partners and businesses that end up doing fundraising or advertising for us.

And so it really isn't just one or two organizations doing this. It's something that the entire community comes together for, which, I mean, you can't be any happier about that. And that's one of the biggest things we do every year, that I know we're incredibly proud of.

And just a couple of the other ones, like our lockbox initiative, our alcohol-locking tops. We provide resources for families to remove unwanted, expired or unused medication, lock them up. Get rid of them, like having several different safe disposal ways to get rid of medication from the home to prevent opioid addictions.

It's providing resources, I think that we're also really proud of, because it's an effective and proven way that we use our funding to help our community safe. We've got a lot of medication lockboxes available, but we've also given away a lot of them over the years. So it's something that we're really proud of, making direct connections with families and impacting everybody in Evansville.

Scott Webb: Such great stuff, you know, and just kind of smiling on my end here, you know, working with families, doing things for families, getting that community buy-in all across the community. So cool. And I do hope that this is the first of many conversations that we have about this and we can take a deeper dive into some of these areas in the future. But Mark, as we wrap up today, anyway, anything else you want folks to know about you, the work that BASE is doing, anything else?

Mark Mellecker: I just kind of want to end it by talking about our LGBTQ+ community here in Evansville and the area. So I want to say thank you to Stoughton Health for putting this all together. The work that you are doing for LGBTQ+ communities in the area is very important. It's something that, in my conversations with community members who are LGBTQ+, they have shown nothing but gratitude for the fact that the health network that directly impacts them here in Evansville or up in Stoughton is making changes and is making a commitment to what is being done in the area.

A lot of them have felt that they've had to drive, you know, an hour or two to find reasonable healthcare, that you know, is in their network. And it is something that they feel safe going to a specific clinic. And if we can make those changes here at home, that makes it suddenly a 15-minute drive or a 20-minute drive. And being able to connect with your doctor on a level that, you know, is here in our community is huge.

And so thank you to Stoughton Health for making that commitment. I know it's not easy, especially now when you're dealing with vaccine rollout and we're still in a pandemic and everything else that's going on. But just, you know, know that it is making a change.

I'm really proud of the work that I do for our LGBTQ+ community because 25% of our youth here in Evansville identify as LGBTQ+ and that's big. When a quarter of the student population sits in that way, I can't help but feel responsible and make sure that I'm doing everything that I can to know that their voices are heard, that they have the community support that they need, that they have the school support that they need.

Again, thanks for giving me this platform and this opportunity to have that conversation and let people know that we're doing stuff. And community support has been really important so far and it's going to be important as we do more work in the future.

Scott Webb: Yeah, you are definitely doing stuff, Mark. You are so knowledgeable, so passionate, fantastic work. Thank you so much. And you stay well.

Mark Mellecker: Well, I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Scott Webb: And for more information, head to StoughtonHealth.com. And that concludes this episode of Stoughton Health Talk. Please remember to subscribe, rate and review this podcast and all the other Stoughton Hospital podcasts. I'm Scott Webb. Stay safe and be well.