By Matt Simonette

Staff writer

Alcohol use is no more prominent among lesbians than it is among straight women, but lesbians seem to be at greater risk for developing problems with alcohol, according to one area researcher.

Dr. Tonda L. Hughes, professor of nursing at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Nursing, spoke on “Alcohol Use among Lesbians and Other Sexual Minority Women” at Howard Brown Health Center Sept. 7.

Hughes said that research on alcoholism in the lesbian community has been ongoing since the 1960s. One older study she pointed to suggested that one out of three lesbians had problematic alcohol usage. She said, however, that many of those earlier studies were skewed because the data had been collected mostly in lesbian bars.

Past studies, according to Hughes, were also limited because of unclear of sexual orientation definitions, homogenous samples, a lack of comparable heterosexual comparison groups and limited assessments of alcohol use.

Hughes said that studies undertaken in the early 2000s suggested, “Even when rates of heavy drinking among heterosexual and lesbian women are found to be reasonably comparable, lesbians still tend to report more alcohol-related problems.”

She has been working for the past several years on the Chicago Health and Life Experience for Women, a study profiling the health experiences of 447 Chicago women. Hughes said she set out to get as diverse a sample as possible in her study; the average age was 39-years-old and more than half of the women were of color.

Hughes combined date from the CHLEW study with other studies to get an idea of alcohol abuse among lesbians.

When Hughes looked at 12-month levels of alcohol use in the samples, she said, the majority of the lesbians were light drinkers, 17 percent abstained and 8 percent reported problem drinking, which Hughes defined as an average two or more drinks per day.

But when Hughes looked at whether respondents had ever worried about their alcohol use at some point, she said nearly 42 percent said they had become concerned about the extent of their drinking. She also noticed that many of the lesbians who were abstaining from alcohol were doing so in response to previous problems.

“It could be more of a willingness to acknowledge and more awareness in the community about drinking, but that’s a pretty substantial number,” Hughes said, adding that 18 percent in the sample had been in treatment and 8 percent were in recovery for alcohol-related issues.

Hughes said she tried not to skew the study towards women in treatment or recovery.

“We didn’t use anything about alcohol in our recruitment materials, and we didn’t go to any gay bars or health centers to recruit,” Hughes added.

She also mentioned that rates of alcohol use, which generally decline as women get older, decline to a lesser extent in the lesbian community. Among women who reported alcohol dependent symptoms, Hughes said, lesbians under the age of 50 are more likely to report problems than straight women.

She added that she was studying many factors that may put lesbians at higher risk for alcohol abuse, among them relationship stressors, depression and early-age drinking experiences, as well as self-perceived sexual abuse.

The latter reason is admittedly controversial. At a conference, when Hughes suggested a connection between alcoholism in lesbians and childhood sexual abuse, she said she was essentially told, “Burn the data.”

She also pointed out that a major difficulty in raising awareness of the issue is that many events in the lesbian community are supported by the beer and liquor industries.

“It’s really hard to try to figure out how to do moderate drinking kinds of messages in the context of supporting these companies that are supporting the community. But it’s definitely worth grappling with,” Hughes said.