Approaching LGBTIQ-Police Officers: An Easy to Reach Group?

We (two experienced qualitative researchers) started our research on the political activism and sexual citizenship of LGBTTIQ-police officers in Germany with the expectation to collect a few semi-structured expert interviews, expecting the LGBTTIQ-police officers to be a hard to reach group. Using the snowball procedure we were surprised by numbers of those interested to be interviewed, and the expert interviews turned into narrative talks, bringing the research from the expertise of the LGBTTIQ-activists to the discrimination and exclusion experiences, intersection of the profession, authority belonging, gender regimes, sexual citizenship and sexual identity. Approaching the group with qualitative methods we made experiences, which changed our research frame and made us re-frame our identities as researchers and to question our approach. From researchers we turned into LGBTTIQ-community members; our interview partners seek to turn us from observers into a medium of communication with the authority, to be able to raise critics and claims without losing their loyalty towards the police. The research on this special group brought us to our limits: limits of neutrality, limits of anonymity, for your interview partners refuse being anonymous and thus provide us with data, which has to be anonymized and secured in a very specific way. Further on, the data collected so far, points to discriminatory practices and the necessities of application we as LGBTIQ-researchers cannot ignore. We aim at sharing our experience for a critical discussion and exchanging ideas on qualitative research methods in the field of gender and politics.