This guest blog, written by Dr. David Messenger, an emergency and intensive care physician and head of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Queen's University, was first published on the Faculty of Health Sciences Dean's Blog.
Recently, I took part in a panel discussion organized by Queen's medical students. A small group of faculty and resident physicians came together to speak about our individual experiences as LGBTQI2S+ persons in medical school, residency training and early practice. As the oldest panelist, I looked forward to learning how different becoming an LGBTQI2S+ doctor must be now compared to my own experience.
When I started medical school at Queen's in 1998, the landscape looked much different than it does today. Sexual orientation had only just been added to the Canadian Human Rights Act; same-sex marriage rights were still seven years away. At 21, I had yet to come out to my family and many friends, and I had just started my first gay relationship (with my now-husband). I was keenly aware of a need to tread very carefully as I took my first tentative steps out of a meticulously-constructed closet.
As a gay medical student, I felt relatively isolated. Rather than seek community with the tiny group of visible LGBTQI2S+ med students, I avoided associations that might result in my being "outed". I felt certain that coming out would be a liability to any number of my ambitions in medicine, particularly matching to a competitive specialty residency program. I worried about how I'd be viewed and treated by preceptors, colleagues, and by patients if I presented as anything other than the norm that was modeled for me in medicine. Gay clinical faculty exemplars or mentors? None were visible to me through my decade of training at Queen's. Normalization of LGBTQI2S+ patients in the curriculum? Other than being taught to ask "do you have sex with men, women, or both?" when taking a sexual history, and discussions about gay patients in the context of HIV, I don't recall much explicit reassurance that medicine welcomed the inclusion of the LGBTQI2S+ experience in its ranks.
