One of our missions at Equal Deathcare is to provide you with safe spaces (funeral homes, crematories, cemeteries, death doulas, and other providers) to plan your deathcare. Also, we aim to be transparent in this process, so we’d like to share how we find and vet the businesses and providers we list on our “resources” page.
Before we get to that, let’s discuss some barriers to finding equitable death care.
A gay couple lives in a small, rural town without a word-of-mouth network. In this situation, finding a provider within a reasonable radius can be challenging. In 2017, a lawsuit was filed against a funeral home by a man whose husband had died at a rural Alabama care home. When the care home called the funeral director to pick up the body, they refused upon discovering the deceased was married to a man. The couple’s nephew had made the original arrangements and scrambled to help his uncle find a new funeral home to take his uncle’s husband. As it turned out, the only funeral home they could find was nearly 90 minutes away.
Conversely, a woman I interviewed years ago from a rural Indiana town shared with me how fortunate she felt that she and her wife had access to a funeral home owned by a local lesbian woman who’d inherited the business from her father. They were able to make the arrangements they wanted safely and were even able to secure local cemetery plots next to each other. When I asked them what they would have done if they lived in a big city, they both shrugged their shoulders. In the big city, there are so many options. “We’d have to ask around,” they said. They felt this would be overwhelming and it might cause them to delay making their arrangements.
LGBTQIA+ people shouldn’t have to disclose their sexuality or gender identity to get death care services. Walking into or calling a funeral home to request an LGBTQIA+-competent provider, therefore, seems like it would require just that. This is one of the barriers we seek to mitigate at Equal Deathcare. No one should have to cold-call a funeral home to vet them when seeking services that make us feel vulnerable, such as at the time of death (at-need) or even when pre-arranging (pre-need).
So, how do we vet our listed providers?
Because most providers’ websites do not explicitly market or signal to LGBTQIA+ people (I’ve conducted research on this), we are left with word-of-mouth or cold-calling. This is unacceptable. Whether you’re a member of an LGBTQIA+ community, or you’re the child of an aging or dying gay parent, or your sister is a trans woman, you may find yourself in the position of seeking pre-need or at-need death care services. Taking the time to ask around or do research can be exhausting and demoralizing.
We’ve made every attempt to do this research for you. Our team conducts deep-dive searches to find providers that: 1) explicitly market via their website, social media, or through local LGBTQIA+ publications, websites, or events, 2) are explicitly recommended via LGBTIQIA+/Pride groups, and 3) are part of our stakeholder network and are part of this mission.
Now, for the difficult part.
What about providers who might be competent, inclusive, and affirming, but don’t explicitly market? And why wouldn’t they explicitly market?
I’ll give you an example.
In June 2024, I was an invited speaker at a funeral business conference. After my talk about how funeral providers can make their services more competent and inclusive, a funeral director who’d been sitting behind me (long story short) was a gay funeral home owner who confided in me that his homes’ websites don’t explicitly market to LGBTQIA+ communities. I asked him why. He said he’d “never thought about it.”
Some funeral providers (even members of the LGBTQIA+ community themselves) assume that their “Come one, come all” marketing will resonate with LGBTQIA+ people. Some funeral providers have been doing this for so long that they don’t see the forest for the trees. In other words, they feel confident that funeral homes are viewed as inclusive places from their standard messaging. We all know this isn’t true, especially in our current divisive culture. It is even more critical that inclusive and competent providers make themselves known.
To help reduce confusion and increase safety, we have created a vetting rubric at Equal Deathcare that we will be posting on the website very soon. We have piloted this rubric with trusted providers. The rubric contains the following domains to assess a provider’s ability to serve LGBTQIA+ people:
Website and Social Media: Evidence of explicit marketing to LGBTQIA+ communities.
Practice/Services: Evidence of experience serving LGBTQIA+ communities.
Human Resources: Evidence of fair treatment of LGBTQIA+ employees, if applicable.
Culture and Community Engagement: Evidence of provider involvement in local LGBTQIA+ community events and education/resources, and known to the local LGBTQIA+ community.
Competence: Evidence of cultural and community competence, such as chosen family, public accommodations law, anti-discrimination law, serving transgender people, and unique needs of queer people and families.
Within each of these domains, we offer items to self-report (provider) or grade (consumer). In creating this tool, our team recognized that not all providers might be “five stars” in each of these domains, and room for growth is a hopeful sign that the provider aims to become a premier provider for all LGBTQIA+ people.
We hope our rubric tool is useful to both providers and consumers. Providers can use it to self-assess their level of inclusiveness and consumers can use it to identify inclusivity. Our goal is to continue to narrow the space between LGBTQIA+ consumers and safe death care spaces.
