In Shanghai, China there is an establishment where men can go to dance (the old-fashioned “dancing hall”) and socialize with other men every Friday and Saturday night for 2 h (7:00–9:00 pm). I have been doing research in Shanghai for over a decade, and this venue predated me; I am told that it has been around for more than 15 years. The two striking characteristics of this place are that the average patron is aged 60 and above (the oldest gentleman I have met was 83 in 2010), and they are all “Tongzhi” (the Chinese term for “gay”). I am told many of them are currently married, with wives and children. My initial reaction is to the questions: “How have they maintained a sense of community being Tongzhi while homosexuality was illegal in China until 1997? How did (do) they manage being married with children and, often, at the same time have same-sex sexual encounters if not relationships?” Even when legal punishment for homosexuality has been removed from the penal code, the society is not welcoming these men with open arms—being a homosexual still carries a lot of stigma, especially in the form of shame to the family (“losing face”) which is the cardinal sin in Chinese culture (Chow 2000).

Here in the United States LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) individuals have come a long way since the days of Stonewall. Homosexuality was de-listed as a mental illness in 1973 (Bayer 1987). Although LGBT individuals still face challenges in adopting children, many have successfully done so. Still others have chosen to have their own biological children via arrangements such as artificial insemination. More and more celebrities (e.g., Neil Patrick Harris of “How I Met Your Mother”) and global business leaders (e.g., Tim Cook of Apple) have publicly acknowledged their homosexuality. At the time of this writing, it is legal for same-sex couples to marry in 35 states as well as in the District of Columbia. Nonetheless, many LGBT individuals continue to face daily discrimination (Meyer 2003); young LGBT youth are often bullied at schools (Kosciw et al. 2015).

Meanwhile, many countries (e.g., Egypt, Russia, and Uganda) have very draconian laws against LGBT individuals. Even the scenario I have encountered in China is not all rosy, in that Tongzhi must possess various coping strategies to maneuver their daily lives. Despite facing such adversity or hostility many LGBT individuals do strive and maintain their sense of self-worth. How do they do it? The collection of papers in this special issue attempts to provide some answers to this question. I will attempt to analyze two overlapping issues in these papers, and how they might inform LGBT research using a resilience lens.

It is no surprise that LGBT individuals with supportive families report higher self-esteem and better mental health—as observed in sexual minority women in the US (Zimmerman et al. 2015) and LGBQ youth and adults in Israel (Shilo et al. 2015). Borrowing a term from learning theory, this sort of support is akin to “intrinsic reinforcement”—coming from within the individual or his or her family. When these sorts of supports are not available, some LGBT individuals resort to making their own reward system (“extrinsic reinforcement”), as opposed to normative social structures, by reaching out to like-minded individuals or communities. Zimmerman et al. (2015) found that sexual minority women in “highly rejecting families demonstrated resilience by finding connections and esteem in sexual minority communities to a greater degree than did non-rejected peers.” Similarly, Mak et al. (2015) found that “… Social media is an important source of social capital for LGB individuals. It enables them to develop a sense of group membership by means of community surveillance, identity expression, and emotional support.”

When LGBT individuals are dealing with intersectional interests such as ethnic versus sexual identity as in the case of being Latino/a versus a LGBT identity (Gray et al. 2015) or religious versus sexual identity (Foster et al. 2015) the framework of “intrinsic versus extrinsic reinforcement” loses some of its explanatory power for addressing resiliency. What we have here is more than competing “identities,” but also differences in socio-cultural boundaries—macro-social determinants—that shape and/or regulate what is a “permissible” or “desirable” identity to have and how that identity should be expressed. For example, military conscription is a rite of passage for Israelis at age 18. Despite the non-discriminatory policy by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), “most LGB soldiers prefer not to disclose their sexual orientation in the army … Even if they have come out in the civilian” world (Shilo et al. 2015). In other words, the military culture exerts a stronger influence on individual behaviors (sexual or otherwise) than other social and cultural institutions. It becomes more complicated for them to use some forms of intentional social support because the networks don’t really know how to deal with/incorporate their other identity statuses—the networks providing this support tend to have a middle class bias in their composition, values and worldviews. They often are gender stratified, as well.

The above analysis has brought us to the fact that sexual identity formation and its correlates such as “coming out” and “self-sexual labeling” (e.g., being a proud gay man) are not universal or “desirable” processes as often postulated by Western scholars. In addition, the benchmark of “resiliency” is more than just having “high self-esteem.” If we are to understand what makes certain LGBT individuals strive in the face of adversity, we need to have a better understanding of how certain macro-social determinants (e.g., access to education, income, and mental health care as well as pre-existing and social networks), might contribute to resiliency. They are the intersectional linchpins of many LGBT individuals. In other words, resiliency is a way for people (in our case LBGT individuals) to (re)claim certain aspects or values in their lives, such as the patrons in the Chinese dancing hall. The dancing hall is their community or haven—a form of safe, macro-social determinant allowing these men to access their Tongzhi community. Meanwhile, they carry on with their lives (fulfilling family obligation) without being trumped by the identity of being a “Tongzhi.”

Given that there are differences in contours (e.g., being a gay Christian vs. being gay in the military) and developmental trajectories in resilience among LGBT individuals in reference to these macro-social determinants, it would be useful for future research to describe and examine how their respective structures and mechanisms, as well as processes, contribute to resilience. For example, four of the papers (Mak et al. 2015; Kosciw et al. 2015; Shilo et al. 2015; Zimmerman et al. 2015) in this collection recruited their participants using the Internet. This technology has become a common practice for data collection for many social and behavioral sciences researchers. To what extent has this global, e-approach become a major force in shaping and/or regulating health and psychosocial well-beings? We will briefly examine two examples.

For LGBT individuals in the Mak et al. (2015) study, they “actively” used [an individual choice (process)] social media (“mechanisms”) to create a sense of community or belonging (a “structure” of identity)—the foundation of their resiliency—not available to them in their biological families. Meanwhile, the use of e-approach (“mechanisms”) to promote resiliency in LGBT individuals can also come from organized LGBT entities. As noted by Zimmerman et al. (2015), “… Sexual minority communities … such as the GLBT National Help Center … provides … peer-support via instant messaging … and online links to local LGBTQ centers and resources.” In other words, the use of e-approaches for promoting resiliency among LGBT individuals, especially those living in less than friendly environments, seems to be limitless. Indeed, as argued by Jacobs (2012) in her book, People’s Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet, that despite the so-called “Great Firewall” Chinese digital citizens use the Internet to reclaim a part of their self (sexual self via pornography) in a country that denies many of their fundamental human rights. Nonetheless, further research is needed to articulate which aspect of the e-approach is undergirding these socio-cultural factors for resilience among LGBT individuals. And, this is historically new. Until the mid-1990s, LBGT people had to access social networks in more traditional ways, often only easily available in large and mid-size cities.