Health disparities experienced by youth engaging in same-sex sexual contact in Wisconsin

Background: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) population experience significant health disparities apart from engaging in risky sexual behavior. Beginning in 2007, Wisconsin has included a question on the Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) regarding genders of respondents' sexual partners to identify any disparity at a younger stage for early intervention. Methods: A representative sample of 8,261 students was obtained from a combined data set of Wisconsin and Milwaukee YRBS 2007 and 2009, to compare health risk behaviors of youth who had engaged in same-sex sexual activity (“same-sex”) to those who engaged in only heterosexual sexual activity (“het-sex”). We used SAS 9.1.3 to compute relative risks and conduct Wald chi-square analysis with 95% confidence intervals. Results: Among students who reported having had any sexual contact, 9.5% of the respondents had engaged in same-sex sexual activity. Same-sex youth experience significant disparities in many health risk factors and social determinants compared to their het-sex peers. For example (amongst more than 20 variables analyzed), one in six (16%) same-sex youth felt unsafe at, or on their way to or from school compared to five percent of het-sex youth. One in four same-sex youth (vs. 7% het-sex youth) had a suicide attempt in the previous 12 months. Same-sex youth also expressed less of a sense of belonging at school than did het-sex peers. Results were statistically significant at <0.01 level. Conclusion: Policy changes to implement timely programmatic interventions can help promote mental, emotional and behavioral health to reduce health disparities and address the unique needs of same-sex youth.