Assessing Societal Attitudes’ and Laws’ Independent Associations With Sexual Minority Disclosure Behaviors

Disclosure rates of sexual minority status shift based on the levels of structural stigma in sexual minority individuals’ environments. However, most measures of structural stigma combine multiple aspects of sexual minority individuals’ environments together, leaving open questions of whether different aspects of structural stigma are each associated with disclosure. Here, two studies indicate that societal attitudes and government policy toward sexual minorities are uniquely and specifically associated with disclosure. Study 1 found in a representative population-wide sample (number of countries = 28; N = 114,098) that tolerant societal attitudes and supportive governmental policies were both positively associated with greater levels of disclosure behavior, above and beyond other nonspecific factors (e.g., political conservatism). Study 2 replicated these findings on an individual level (number of countries = 23; N = 81,744) and found that attitudes and policies were associated with disclosure via perceptions of stigma. These findings suggest that sexual minorities assess their societal contexts, perceive signals related to their minoritized status, and manage their public identities accordingly.