Equitable Death Care for Sexual and Gender Minorities: The Role for Social Workers.

Abstract

Early in my career as a suicidologist, I was ignorant about the world of death care, outside of personal experiences attending funerals, celebrations of life, and other forms of memorial and disposition. At the American Association of Suicidology Conference in 2018, I overheard some colleagues discussing the lack of death education in schools. Soon after the conference, I received a phone call from a local pastor asking me to help him properly memorialize the life of a young person who’d died by suicide. Not long after that, I was contacted by a funeral provider, asking me a similar question. It occurred to me that death care providers didn’t know much about suicide, and I didn’t know enough about death care. My journey in studying death care in the United States was born from these conversations. Stigmatized forms of death were difficult for the providers to “get right”. I then wonderedis there anything else the U.S. death care industry needs more help to understand? I began reading the research on all things death and dying, starting with Jessica Mitford’s 1960s scathing expose of the funeral industry, The American Way of Death, then on to nearly every book and research study written since that time. What was largely missing from all these publications was the death care needs of sexual and gender minorities. Topics of culture, tradition, religion, economics, marketing, and policy were all addressed, but nothing was written about the experience of LGBTQIAþ people in the U.S. death care system. I’m not one to shy away from such a glaring omission in one of the largest industries in the United States. Funeral care is a 20-billion-dollar business, however, generally still privatized. Ninety percent of the 18,000 funeral homes in the U.S. are family-owned and operated, with the rest being corporately owned by companies like Service Corporation International (SCI). This is a source of pride for the industry and funeral homes market themselves as communityand family-oriented businesses. What they do not market themselves as is safe spaces for