Concealment stress (hiding a sexual orientation)
The ongoing work of keeping a sexual orientation hidden: tracking who knows, editing stories, changing pronouns, steering conversations and staying alert to being found out. Hiding can protect a person where being out is unsafe, and the same hiding can wear them down and keep them away from people like them.
What drives it
Every conversation carries a second task, watching for anything that might give one away, and the risk never ends because the secret can always come out. Pachankis’s 2020 review states the bind: concealment can create the stress of hiding, protect against discrimination and keep a person apart from community, all at once. For identification it explains a tiredness, distance or flatness that doesn’t match how easy someone’s life looks from outside.
How it shows
Work
A partner called ‘my friend’ or given a different name. Skipping the team drinks where partners come. Long, careful answers to ‘doing anything this weekend?’ and the stiffness that follows.
Relationships
Two phones, two sets of friends, or a partner who never appears in photos. Friends who feel they never quite know the person. A partner who is out and growing tired of being hidden.
Self
Notice how many small edits you make in a day, and whether you feel more tired after time with people who don’t know than after time with those who do.
What tells it apart
Covering (Yoshino, after Goffman): Covering (Yoshino) is toning down an identity others already know about, such as being openly gay at work and leaving a partner at home for the office party. Concealment hides the identity itself. One person may do each in different settings.
Expressive suppression: Expressive suppression hides feelings in the moment. Concealment hides a fact about the self over months and years, and it may bring suppression with it.
Social anxiety: Social anxiety fears being judged for anything at all. Concealment stress is more likely when the unease centers on topics that could give the orientation away and lifts with people who already know.
A test
Ask the person to count, for one ordinary day, the times they changed a word, a story or a plan to keep their orientation from showing. A long count, with tiredness or distance that eases around people who know, may point to concealment stress.
Questions to carry
- In which conversation today did I change a word to keep something hidden?
- What would I lose, and what would I gain, if one more person knew?
Go deeper
- Read: The Velvet Rage, Alan Downs, 2005, second edition 2012. Written for gay men by a clinical psychologist, from his practice and his own life. He traces adult shame back to a boyhood of feeling different and sets out three stages of moving out of it. It is widely read and many readers say it named something for them. The stages come from his clinical work and haven't been tested in studies that we found. A related idea, that some gay men make up for stigma by achieving, was tested later by Pachankis and Hatzenbuehler (2013). It says little about women, bisexual or trans people.
- Study: Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations: Conceptual issues and research evidence, Ilan H. Meyer, Psychological Bulletin, 2003. The paper that set out minority stress. Using meta-analyses of earlier studies, Meyer found higher rates of mental disorders among lesbian, gay and bisexual people than among heterosexual people. He explained the gap by stress from stigma: prejudice events, expecting rejection, hiding, and internalized homophobia, with coping that softens some of it. It is a review and a model, and later studies tested its parts. It covers lesbian, gay and bisexual people. Hendricks and Testa adapted it for trans people in 2012. The full text is free to read.
How strong the research is
mixed. John Pachankis’s model (Psychological Bulletin, 2007) treats the ambiguity of social situations and the threat of being found out as the core stressors of a stigma that can be hidden. A meta-analysis of 193 studies with 92,236 people (Pachankis and colleagues, Psychological Bulletin, 2020) found concealment linked to slightly more depression, anxiety and distress and slightly less substance use, with single studies pointing in every direction. The link was stronger in younger samples and recent studies and weaker in bisexual samples, and most of the data were cross-sectional. In a five-year follow-up of 222 HIV-negative gay men (Cole and colleagues, Health Psychology, 1996), those who concealed had more cancer and infectious disease. In lab studies (Critcher and Ferguson, 2014), people told to hide their orientation in an interview did worse on later tasks, though the studies rest on ego-depletion research, whose main effect came out near zero in a 23-lab replication (Hagger and colleagues, 2016).
Where it comes from
Erving Goffman, Stigma, 1963, on the ‘discreditable’ person whose stigma can be hidden. John Pachankis, ‘The psychological implications of concealing a stigma: a cognitive-affective-behavioral model’, Psychological Bulletin, 2007
On the family tree: John Pachankis