Last Saturday I took our Equal Deathcare message to our local Pride festival. Our community is relatively small (a town of about 50k) and in the Midwest (hint, hint, Mike Pence was born here). The joy and celebration of being able to be true to ourselves and surrounded by love reverberated throughout the festival the entire day. I wish every day was Pride. And why not? That is a question I ask myself constantly. But, I digress.
The reasons why every day isn’t PRIDE influence our deathcare options and ability to access inclusive services. As we know, this isn’t just deathcare. We understand that disparities exist in healthcare and other services, too. We aren’t sure where to go or who we can talk to about our needs without fear of discrimination. Neither hospitals nor funeral providers (or other deathcare providers) explicitly market to the LGBTQIA+ community in most cases. Yet, the needs of single and coupled, polyamorous, queer, gay, trans, bisexual, asexual, intersex, and two-spirit folks are unique and require providers to make public statements about how they can best serve us.
Where many hospitals operate as public providers and are governed by healthcare laws, deathcare providers are mostly private and create their own rules. As I mentioned in my last post, funeral providers are mostly regulated in terms of cost transparency (to avoid fraud) by the FTC but are not beholden to other consumer protection policies such as anti-discrimination. Since death care and deathcare providers are often viewed (correctly or incorrectly) as religious or conservative, it becomes even more critical that they explicitly market to the LGBTQIA+ community if they want our business.
In an earlier post, I discussed some of the research I’ve done to investigate equity in death care. In the first study I conducted, I evaluated funeral home websites for any inclusive signaling. I looked for language, graphics, forms, and other markers to indicate that the provider openly served or was knowledgeable about serving sexual and gender minorities.
Spoiler alert: I found none. Zero. No funeral homes included in my study (approximately 100 randomly selected websites) signaled inclusivity of the LGBTQIA+ community.
So how do we go about finding an inclusive funeral provider?
Many of the people I spoke with throughout my years of research told me they often find inclusive providers via word of mouth. My question back was “But what about folks who live in rural areas?” or “What about someone who needs to find a death care provider quickly because their spouse/partner/loved one died suddenly?” They would shrug. Word of mouth doesn’t always work.
In June, I was asked to present to a group of funeral professionals about the work I do. I asked the question “Why don’t funeral homes market to the LGBTQIA+ community?” I also asked funeral providers and others in the death care industry this question while doing interviews for my research. The themes of the responses are what you might expect: community pushback, including the local religious community who often preside over funerals (pastors, priests, preachers), religious and/or conservative funeral home owners and funeral directors, and business competition/regional reputation.
There is some hope. Some providers I talked to said they’re starting to market at Pride festivals (I didn’t see any deathcare providers at my local festival this year, but I did last year), in LGBTQIA+ publications, and some funeral homes are members of the Pride Chamber of Commerce. Still, much of this puts the onus on the consumer to discover services via these methods instead of a simple web search, like we’ve grown accustomed to in these days of online shopping and price comparisons. We look for homes on Zillow and Redfin, cars on dealership websites, and we can compare rates for insurance- all online. Yet, with death care being such a huge expense, we often cannot find prices or inclusive signaling. It’s all behind the curtain.
Our goal at Equal Deathcare is to bring death care out of the shadows and into the light for our LGBTQIA+ citizens. Toward that end, our website is building a national repository of vetted providers in all areas of death care. Please be patient with us as this is a slow process in finding inclusive services state-by-state since many of them do not explicitly market to the LGBTQIA+ community on their websites. In the meantime, we have several national and some state resources already listed. Check out our site, and reach out to us with questions. We want to hear from you and help you in answering questions about death care for yourself, your loved ones, or someone you’re helping.
#deathcare #lgbtqia+ #funerals
