L.A. and “Lily Law”: A Talk with David Hanna

As the movie capital of the world for many decades, Hollywood has achieved an almost legendary status the world over. As a geographical location within southern California, however, it is also home to the many people who work within its film industry. The following interview with David Hanna (1917-1993) explores just what day-to-day life was like for the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender (GLBT) population who called Hollywood home during the Golden Age of the movie studio system: 1935 to the early 1950s. As a reporter on several Hollywood papers and a movie publicist, Hanna had a journalist's eye view of the legal and social problems confronting a group of people whose sexual orientation relegated them to a largely pariah status. As a gay man, he had a first-hand knowledge of the strategies of survival developed by Hollywood's GLBT population during those years. The article lays the groundwork for a more systematic study of GLBT Hollywood. In that regard, its introduction contains a short discussion of the methodological problems confronting researchers into that history.     

“Falling into a Place”: Reading for Renewal as Queer Pedagogy

This essay explores reading for renewal as queer pedagogy. Within the context of lesbian and gay literature courses, professors can teach students and themselves how to pull stories—beautiful, celebratory stories—out of the bits and pieces of stones of self-hatred and of suffering. If readers of gay and lesbian texts are to resist homophobic discourse, then they must not only train themselves to recognize signs of queerness within even the most oppressive of narratives, but also seek out those texts whose discussions of narrative theory and identity politics promote queer visibility. Reading for renewal—that is, locating a place of transformative possibility either within the text or within the experience of reading the text within the classroom—is, the author argues, integral to practicing a queer pedagogy.     

Gay,Lesbian, Bisexual,and Transgender (GLBT) Elders

Abstract

Current gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) individuals age 65 years and older grew up before the Gay Rights movement. They have learned over many years to hide their identities in order to avoid discrimination and ridicule. Unfortunately, this secrecy has led to the near invisibility of the elder GLBT population and to poor health and service access. This paper reviews what we know about GLBT elders, describes some of the unique strengths they bring to the aging process, and outlines some of the challenges they face. Micro, mezzo, and macro practice implications are suggested.     

Guiding the Acquisition of Therapist Ally Identity

Abstract

This paper suggests the appropriateness of adopting an ally identity for therapists who work with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) stepfamilies. Using results from in-depth interviews, we demonstrate how research can assist those who wish to acquire knowledge regarding this marginalized group. Such scholarship can be helpful when therapists are acting as allies within therapeutic encounters, in interactions with colleagues, and in public discourse.     

Ojibwe lesbian visual AIDS: On the Red Road with Carole laFavor,Her Giveaway (1988), and Native LGBTQ2 film history

ABSTRACT

After a century of suppression across the Silent, Classic, and New Hollywood eras, Native Lesbian/Gay media began to proliferate in the post-AIDS 1980s and into the second millennium. Her Giveaway: A Spiritual Journey with AIDS (1988) is a key tribal health AIDS video that exemplified a new contemporary media combination of visual, erotic, and theological sovereignty. The video's central Red Road narrative by the lesbian, Ojibwe, and AIDS/HIV+ spokesperson Carole laFavor emphasizes Native American traditional healing methods involving the medicine wheel and a reclamation of Native lesbian/gay identity.     

‘A New Language that Speaks of Change Just As It Steps Toward It’: Transnationalism,Erotic Justice and Queer Human Rights Praxis

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) movements have too often been dominated by US liberal individualist framings of lesbian and gay rights, resulting in the hegemony of US‐focused issues and institutional actions, despite the irony that the US government has been relatively unsupportive of LGBT rights on the international stage. We argue that transnational, grassroots queer movements embody more profound aspirations that do not limit the meaning of queer liberation to singular identity politics or rights‐restraining institutions. Specifically, we point to transnational and Third World‐based queer movements that offer more complex structural analyses of sexual oppression as well as more visionary praxes of sexual rights. Drawing on lessons from two cases of queer human rights praxis from the Philippines and México, we assert that a queer grassroots enactment of human rights allows for multiple subaltern constituencies to find – and to make – a place in human rights discourses; queer identity and actions create social formations that expand human rights agendas to further embody the intersectionality, interdependence and transnationality of daily life. Key to these enactments of queer human rights praxis are prefigurative politics and rooted cosmopolitanism, which catalyze new expansions of human rights to include intersectional framings and practices of erotic justice.     

COLAGE

Abstract

COLAGE (Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere) is a national, non-profit organization run by and for children who have one or more gay, lesbian, bisexual, and/or transgender (GLBT) parents. Our mission is to engage, connect, and empower people to make the world a better place for children of GLBT parents and families. This article chronicles COLAGE's work within the context of the larger GLBT-family movement. A review is made of the emotional and socio-political challenges that children of GLBT parents face, as well as the benefits and unique perspectives gained from growing up in a family outside of the social norm. Finally, COLAGE is conceptualized in terms of its prominence as a community based intervention for building networks, empowering youth, and ensuring society recognizes, validates, and celebrates all families.     

“My Adoptive Father”

Abstract

Gay men's intimate life worlds have been the topic of some empirical inquiry since the late twentieth century. Drawing on the symbolism of love, friendship, and biology, these studies discuss the recent changes in queer communities that have shaped contemporary discourse about gay and lesbian family life. What appears missing in these intimate accounts are the lesser known readings of gay male intimate relationships which are both sensitive to the complex, interactive, and often contradictory experiences of everyday family life and attentive to the contextual ways these stories become constructed. This paper is a presentation of an experimental case study narrative which grapples with the practical, everyday considerations of what it means to create and sustain a supportive familial relationship between two gay men. Documenting the complexities of this contemporary familial arrangement provides us with some important opportunities for gay storytelling. In this instance, it allowed the author to better understand how two gay men like Ted and Simon came to construct their own notions of a father-son relationship. It also encourages us to explore how new gay identities and relationships are forged and negotiated over time through the biographical lens of family membership.     

Learning from History: A Queer Problem

The author explores the ways in which the development of grand narratives of U.S. history may have influenced the direction, tactics, and expectations of lesbian and gay activists. Moving beyond the critiques of identity politics, this study uses and explains postmodern concepts to outline narratives of U.S. reform, and lesbian and gay histories and suggests that lesbian and gay politics have been formed symbiotically within these narratives, shaping them and allowing them to shape those politics. Finally, proposals for using history and postmodern theory to break from this pattern are offered.     

Gay men's digital cultures beyond Gaydar and Grindr: LINE use in the gay Chinese diaspora of Australia

ABSTRACT

Recent research on gay men's digital cultures has focused predominantly on Western, English-language-based sites and populations. In the case of Australia, a country with an official multiculturalism framework in place and against a backdrop of significant levels of Asian immigration over the past several decades, a more pluralistic approach is needed to critically interrogate the dialectic between platforms, users and wider sociocultural complexities. To this end, the current paper presents research in progress on the social chat application LINE and its use amongst the Chinese diaspora of gay men in Australia. Drawing on data from participant observation carried out over several months during late 2015 and early 2016 in an Australian-based LINE group for local Chinese gay men, we highlight here how LINE functions as an important intermediary for many Chinese men engaging with gay men's digital cultures in this context. In particular, we show how LINE plays a crucial role in Chinese gay men's engagements with gay men's digital culture in Australia by (1) mediating this group's navigations of new social and cultural environments and (2) remediating their experiences within other platforms central to the broader GLBT community.     

Queering reproductive justice: Framing reproduction of gay men from a transnational perspective—Taiwan as a case

This article uses Taiwan as an example to argue that reproductive justice for gay men should be conceptualised within social, legal, and political contexts. Taiwan is the first Asian country to legalise same-sex marriage, yet the law favours heterosexual couples and denies LGBTQ+ reproductive rights. Thus, Taiwanese gay men seek third-party reproduction overseas to become parents. This article exemplifies gay men's unequal conditions from a non-Western perspective. I re-examine scholarly literature on the interlocking concepts of reproductive justice, stratified reproduction, and queer reproduction to answer what reproductive justice gay men need and how their injustice position situates within and beyond the nation-state borders. Drawing on the reproductive justice framework and studies of queer reproduction, this article proposes a transnational perspective to understand queer reproductive justice through the case that elucidates the specific context of Taiwanese gay men. This article aims to make two contributions. Firstly, it reconsiders the reproductive framework from a transnational perspective to argue that gay men's reproductive justice should be conceptualised at the intersection with other dimensions of injustice. Secondly, this article suggests that the transnational approach could be applied as a critical lens for future research in queer reproduction and reproductive justice.     

Innocence, Perversion, and Heather's Two Mommies

This paper begins by untangling the twisted threads linking homosexuality and childhood in the mind of America, and explaining how contemporary constructions of homosexuality have become entwined with modern conceptions of childhood. The author draws on the literature on the invention of childhood and especially the pioneering work of Jonathan Silin to show how the entrenchment of capitalism and arrival of compulsory schooling have created a hegemonic form of family and produced a child at once innocent and ignorant. The author then probes the construction of the homosexual in the late 19th century and uncovers interconnections between this new social typology and representations of childhood. By examining how these linkages are historically embodied in incidents of sex panic, the author argues that the psyches of lesbians and gay men who are in relationship with children (as parents, teachers, coaches . . .) are often suffused with anxiety and self-doubt. Hence a gay movement emerges rife with hyper-traditional representations of children and youth. Contemporary queer representations of childhood are then explored through a focus on children's books designed for the offspring of lesbian and gay parents. The author suggests that contemporary gay advocacy, which attempts to dislodge perversion as the central representation of homosexuality, will be unsuccessful until activists abandon tactics that infantilize children and perpetuate a vision of childhood as vulnerable, innocent, and unknowing.     

‘I am bodied’. ‘I am sexual’. ‘I am human’. Experiencing deafness and gayness: a story of a young man

This paper examines experiences of Deaf gay people through the eyes of a young Deaf man growing up in the predominantly hearing and heterosexual society of the Czech Republic. In the current disability and gender studies discourse there are several personal accounts of people with disabilities who also identify as gay or lesbian, but narratives about Deafness and gayness are rare or missing. To ‘queer’ the issue of Deafness and disability a little further, most Deaf people claim to be a linguistic and cultural minority, not disabled. Being Deaf and gay suggests a double identity and quite often exclusion from the majority hearing and heterosexual society. The story of 24‐year‐old Jan illustrates the struggle and challenges of a minority within a minority.     

Gift Giving, Identity, and Transformation: The AIDS Memorial Quilt

Those who have originated the AIDS Memorial Quilt have often referred to it as a gift. In this essay, the author discusses theories related to gift giving to discuss the quilt and its constructed effects for those who experience it as a gift. In particular, Weiner's notion of inalienable possessions is highlighted to address how the quilt, as a gift that is kept inalienable from its original creators, maintains historical identity and immortality for its originators, many of whom are gay and bisexual men. Also, Hyde's notion of erotic gifts is presented to consider the quilt's ability to draw people together, create feeling-bonds among them, and affect their transformation.     

The Danger of Desire: Anal Sex and the Homo/Masculine Subject

Anal eroticism between men has been a recurrent focus in psychoanalytic theory for over a century. Many theorists conflate anal eroticism with danger, particularly danger to masculinity and male gender identity. Defensive resistance to aggressive penetration and fear of receptivity are repeatedly invoked to understand anal erotic excitement and actions. The author reviews numerous papers on this topic from a broad spectrum of psychoanalytic theories, including drive theory, queer theory, and relational psychoanalysis and seeks to expand the discourse on anal eroticism between men.

Although danger and dangerousness may be an aspect of individual anal erotic experience, it is not an essential or obligatory aspect of it; its construction as dangerous restricts the meanings that anal sexuality can carry. This imposes a defensive function on anal erotic desire or marginalized identity upon the practitioner when this is unwarranted.     

Whose Problem is This?

Abstract

This paper is concerned with how the needs of lesbian and gay youth are situated and defined in educational contexts and the intended and unintended consequences of framing their needs in particular ways. It is based on a case study of a senior college in New Zealand where a strategy for dealing with gay and lesbian youth was framed within a climate of market-driven educational reforms and where queer youth were viewed within the discourse of being “at risk.” This enabled the school to promote itself as providing a caring and nurturing environment without jeopardizing its position in the marketplace. However, this strategy had the unfortunate consequences of re-pathologizing lesbian and gay students and constructing their sexuality as a personal problem.     

Transnational queer sociological analysis of sexual identity and civic‐political activism in Hong Kong,Taiwan and mainland China

The sociology of homosexuality lacks engagement with queer theory and postcolonialism and focuses primarily on the global metropoles, thus failing to provide a plausible account of non‐Western non‐normative sexual identities. This research adopts the author’s newly proposed transnational queer sociology to address these deficiencies. First, it critiques the Western model of sexual identity predominantly employed to elucidate non‐Western, non‐normative sexualities. It does so by examining not only the queer flows between West and non‐West but also those among and within non‐Western contexts to produce translocally shared and mutually referenced experiences. Second, the proposed approach combines sociology with queer theory by emphasizing the significant role of material, as well as discursive, analyses in shaping queer identities, desires and practices. This article employs the approach to examine young gay male identities, as revealed in 90 in‐depth interviews conducted in Hong Kong (n = 30), Taiwan (Taipei, n = 30) and mainland China (Shanghai, n = 30) between 2017 and 2019. More specifically, it highlights the interplay between the state and identity by investigating the intersection and intertwining effects of these young men’s sexual and cultural/national identities, revealing three different forms of civic‐political activism. The article both demonstrates the way in which sexuality and the state are mutually constituted and provides nuanced analysis of the heterogeneity of contemporary homosexualities in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China. In applying a new sociological approach to understanding sexuality, this research joins the growing body of scholarship within sociology that is decentring the Western formation of universal knowledge.     

Heavenly Monsters: The Politics of the Male Body in the Naked Issue of Attitude Magazine

The male body in contemporary gay culture is subordinated to distinct aesthetic and ethical norms that reflect an all-male idolization of the young, muscular, smooth, and transcendent physique. The queer body is manipulated in different techniques including daily work at the gym, diet, hair supplement/removal, tanning, and dying. Liberating the body from heteronormative oppression does not necessarily guarantee the liberation of the (gay) body from other powerful systems that produce and commercialize body fascism. This article problematizes these body politics and economy of identity focusing on the naked issue of Attitude (October 1999), a six-year-old British life-style glossy magazine. This analysis mainly focuses on the illuminating interview with five gay men who express their intimate feelings and criticize the body worship in the gay media: an over-weight man, a skinny man, a psoriasis sufferer, an old and heavily tattooed and pierced man, and a bodybuilder who works as an escort.     

The resources of ageing? Middle‐aged gay men's accounts of Manchester's gay voluntary organizations

Middle‐aged men's experiences of gay voluntary organizations (GVOs) are neglected in research. To address this knowledge gap, this article extends Bourdieusian theorizing beyond that deployed by Hakim (2010) and Green (2008) concerning ‘erotic capital’ to demonstrate how norms in GVOs can facilitate or frustrate mobilization of ‘ageing capital’ by middle‐aged gay men living in Manchester (UK), which has implications for comparable cities within and beyond a UK context. Based on interviews with 22 men aged 39–55, this article demonstrates how ‘ageing capital’ can facilitate challenge to gay ageism but also how such ageism can frustrate and even overwhelm men's capacities to deploy ageing capital in generic GVOs, thus reinforcing intergenerational conflict and expression of ageism towards younger gay men. In doing so, this article contributes to knowledge about the reproduction of the relations of ageism in a particular field of gay existence.     

Identity and Ideas: A Roundtable on Identity Politics

This roundtable discussion examines the issue of identity politics and how identity influences and is influenced by gay/queer politics and theory. The participants discuss how identity politics affects political organizing and activism, how different identity communities can build coalitions, how the language related to identity is evolving, and how sexual attractions and practices interact with identity. The discussants look at how the influx into the gay and lesbian movement of new groups that challenge traditional identity boundaries—e.g., bisexuals and transgendered people—is affecting the movement. Finally, the discussants examine how “idea-based” politics may supplant identity-based politics as a new inclusive paradigm.