There’s no point in doing research if no one wants to listen’: identifying LGBT needs and effecting ‘positive social change’ for LGBT People in Brighton & Hove

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) individuals and communities have long been regarded as ‘sexual and/or gender dissidents’, resulting in their marginalisation and exclusion. While legislative changes during the New Labour era in the UK, to a degree, benefitted some LGBT people, LGBT people continue to face marginalization, considerations which are more than scholarly but also have implications for policy and planning. Using an LGBT community-led research project, Count Me In Too, this chapter outlines how partnership working that is instigated right from the design of the research can empower marginalised LGBT people, and yet still contribute to the agendas of those ‘in power’. However, even this impact is not uniform across different sectors. Using data on housing and suicide, we show that sexual and gender difference matters in different ways to different people, and that the organizational context in which partnership working takes place is crucial in making research ‘do something’. We argue that participatory action research, and partnership working, more broadly, can affect social change, but this is not uniform because of the broader contexts into which the research data comes and is used or not. We conclude by contending that work across community-university-public sector divides has the potential to be productive.