Congratulations to Raymond McKie, this year’s winner of the Nicole LaViolette Friends of Lambda Prize at uOttawa!

Raymond is currently in his fifth year of the PhD program in clinical psychology at the University of Ottawa. He holds previous degrees in psychology from the University of Guelph and Trent University. Raymond has been actively engaged in scholarly work on gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (GBMSM) for over ten years. He has published in academic journals and has been interviewed by media about his research, e.g, Grindr Bloop, Playboy, the Conversation, Wilfrid Laurier University Press. He is currently partnered with MAXOttawa and worked with a Community Advisory Board prior to collecting his data. He also co-supervises undergraduate students on LGBTQ+ issues within the School of Psychology on honours theses and directed studies courses.

While Raymond’s primary area of interest relates to sexual consent issues, he has also published or supervised students on topics such as gay/straight male friendships, aspects of technology use among GBMSM, the impact of hearing microaggressions on campuses (e.g. “that’s so gay” and “no homo,) etc.

Raymond’s dissertation will expand upon his previous findings from his M.Sc. research focusing on sexual consent negotiation and previous non-consensual sexual experiences (NSEs). Specifically, he hopes to gain better insight into when challenges with sexual consent occur and the prevalence rate of NSEs. He intends to further this work after obtaining his Ph.D. via community-based programming and mental health service efforts to help alleviate the number of GBMSM with NSEs and/or challenges with sexual consent negotiation.

Congrats again, Raymond!!