Health information for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual communities.
A Growing, Community-Informed LGBTQIA+ Health Resource
Hello and welcome to the LGBTQIA+ Health Information Network! This website explains and documents the building of a community-informed resource for LGBTQIA+ health information, addressing the urgent need for accessible, affirming, and quality health information for LGBTQIA+ communities across the United States.
What Is This Project All About?
By partnering with LGBTQIA+ communities, librarians, and community health workers, we aim to connect the LGBTQIA+ community with vital, available healthcare resources.
LGBTQIA+ people experience various health disparities due to social stressors like stigma and discrimination. One critical factor contributing to these disparities is the lack of accurate health and healthcare information.
Issues like discrimination in healthcare settings, lack of LGBTQIA+-specific content in medical training, and geographic or economic constraints mean that LGBTQIA+ people are more likely to encounter health misinformation and irrelevant resources that do not reflect their unique needs. LGBTQIA+ communities combat these barriers by creating their own resources, such as lists of affirming providers or collaborative documents about top surgery aftercare. However, not all LGBTQIA+ people know about the existence of these community-based resources.
This project addresses these barriers by providing accessible, affirming, and quality health information to LGBTQIA+ individuals through a digital consumer health resource created and curated by LGBTQIA+ communities, librarians, and community health workers. The resource will provide a centralized platform where users can navigate consumer health information at the national and local levels.
How Will We Accomplish Our Goal?
We are creating a national resource to improve access to trustworthy health information for LGBTQIA+ communities.
In prior work, our team mapped the national, digital health information landscape, reviewing hundreds of existing LGBTQIA+ health resources across 200 existing sites to understand what’s covered and where gaps remain. From there, we partnered with librarians and community health workers across the U.S. to find and assess new resources that fill those gaps.
Now we’re working on a local level to host community forums in public libraries to hear directly from members of the LGBTQIA+ community about the information they use and need. Together, we are building a digital platform shaped by collaboration between libraries and the communities they serve, ensuring the result is both relevant and impactful.
Who Is Leading This Project?
The project is led by Vanessa Kitzie, Ph. D., a faculty member at the University of South Carolina (USC) School of Information Science. It’s a continuation of her work focused on understanding how LGBTQIA+ people create, seek, use, and share health and healthcare information.
Over the next two years, Kitzie and her team will collaborate with LGBTQIA+ communities, LGBTQIA+ community health workers, public libraries, and health sciences libraries to identify available health resources, then assess and curate them. They anticipate concluding the project at the end of 2028.
Kitzie’s work is externally funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The funding was rescinded by the current administration for eight months due to its not aligning with governmental priorities. In a way, this is a testament to how critical the topic is and how often official expert research meant to support LGBTQIA+ health outcomes is challenged. Fortunately, the American Library Association and its partners, through ongoing lawsuits, secured the restoration of all Institute of Museum and Library Services grants, including Kitzie’s, as of December 3, 2025 [If you’d like to read the project narrative originally submitted to IMLS, you can do so here.]
If you have any questions, please email LGBTQHealthGuide@sc.edu.
We want to host forums at public libraries across the US that bring together members of the LGBTQIA+ community with public library and healthcare workers to create a digital consumer health resource. If you are an LGBTQIA+ person, a public library worker, or a healthcare worker interested in participating in or hosting a forum, we want to collaborate with you!
Please see the video for more information and complete our interest form. We’ll be in touch soon!