Safe Spaces: Gay‐Straight Alliances in High Schools

In activists’ circles as in sociology, the concept “safe space” has been applied to all sorts of programs, organizations, and practices. Few studies have specified clearly what safe spaces are and how they support the people who occupy them. We examine one social location typically understood to be a safe space: gay‐straight alliance groups in high schools. Using qualitative interviews with young adults in the United States and Canada who have participated in gay‐straight alliances, we unpack this complex concept to consider some of the dimensions along which safe spaces might vary. Based on interviews with participants, we derive three interrelated dimensions of safe space: social context, membership, and activity.     

Is Homophobia Associated with an Implicit Same-Sex Attraction?

Some theorists propose that homophobia stems from underlying same-sex attraction. A few studies have tested this hypothesis, yet without a clear measure of implicit sexual attraction, producing mixed results. For the first time, we test this attraction-based account of homophobia among both men and women using an implicit measure of sexual attraction. No evidence of an attraction-based account of homophobia emerged. Instead, implicit same-sex attraction was related to positive evaluations of gay men and lesbians among female participants. Even in targeted analyses examining the relation between implicit same-sex attraction and homosexual evaluations among only those theoretically most likely to demonstrate an attraction-based homophobic effect, implicit same-sex attraction was not associated with evaluations of homosexuals or was associated with more positive evaluations of homosexuals. In addition, explicit same-sex attraction was related to positive evaluations of gay men and lesbians for male participants. These results are more in keeping with the attitude-similarity effect (i.e., people like, rather than dislike, similar others).     

From Organizational Sexuality to Queer Organizations: Research on Homosexuality and the Workplace

Organization scholars historically ignored the crucial importance of sexuality in the workplace. But in the last 20 years, scholars influenced by the ‘sexuality in organizations’ perspective have documented the ways that the management and deployment of workers’ sexuality are key elements in organizational life. While most of these studies have documented persistent privileging of heterosexuality in work organizations, a recent trend is to investigate a new organizational form: the gay‐friendly workplace. We review legal and policy changes in US workplaces that have made them more accepting of gay and lesbian employees. Then we examine ethnographic studies of gay‐friendly organizations. Although they are certainly an advance over previous homophobic workplaces, the literature suggests that they may reproduce inequalities of race, class, and gender. Few studies have investigated ‘queer organizations’, which we identify as a rich area for future scholarship.     

Clause Segmentation by 6‐Month‐Old Infants: A Crosslinguistic Perspective

Each clause and phrase boundary necessarily aligns with a word boundary. Thus, infants' attention to the edges of clauses and phrases may help them learn some of the language‐specific cues defining word boundaries. Attention to prosodically well‐formed clauses and phrases may also help infants begin to extract information important for learning the grammatical structure of their language. Despite the potentially important role that the perception of large prosodic units may play in early language acquisition, there has been little work investigating the extraction of these units from fluent speech by infants learning languages other than English. We report 2 experiments investigating Dutch learners' clause segmentation abilities. In these studies, Dutch‐learning 6‐month‐olds readily extract clauses from speech. However, Dutch learners differ from English learners in that they seem to be more reliant on pauses to detect clause boundaries. Two closely related explanations for this finding are considered, both of which stem from the acoustic differences in clause boundary realizations in Dutch versus English.     

The intersection of youth masculinities,decreasing homophobia and class: an ethnography

This article examines the emergence of progressive attitudes toward homosexuality among working‐class boys in a sixth form in the south of England to develop an intersectional analysis of class, youth masculinities and decreasing homophobia. Drawing on three months of ethnographic data collection, I find that working‐class male youth intellectualize pro‐gay attitudes and that homophobic language is almost entirely absent from the setting. I document the presence of homosocial tactility, as well as the valuing of friendship and emotional closeness. However, these behaviours are less pronounced than documented among middle‐class boys, and I use these findings to advance understanding of how class influences the development of inclusive attitudes and behaviours. Inclusive masculinity theory is used to understand these findings, refining the theory and extending it to a new demographic.     

Relationship Education and Therapy for Same‐Sex Couples

The gay and lesbian community suffers higher rates of discrimination, mental health problems, and relationship break‐up than their heterosexual counterparts. In this paper we analyse the challenges confronting same‐sex couples, and the implications for couple education and therapy with same‐sex couples. We describe some similarities in the challenges confronting heterosexual and same‐sex couples (e.g., negotiation of shared realistic relationship expectations, effective communication). These similarities suggest existing evidence‐based approaches to couple therapy and relationship education are likely to assist same sex couple relationships. We also describe distinctive challenges for same‐sex couples (e.g., homophobic discrimination, internalised homophobia, and low support from many families for same sex relationships). These distinctive challenges suggest some adaptation of existing approaches to couple education and therapy could enhance their relevance and effectiveness to same sex couples.     

Early Understanding of Subject and Object Wh‐Questions

In this study, we used the splitscreen preferential looking paradigm to test 13‐, 15‐, and 20‐month‐olds' developing understanding of simple matrix what‐questions of the forms “What hit the X?” (subject‐question) and “What did the X hit?” (object‐question). Infants responded appropriately to subject‐questions by 15 months of age, and to both subject‐ and object‐questions by 20 months. At no age did infants look longer toward the object overtly mentioned in the question, as might be expected based on a surface account of early language acquisition. This suggests that infants may have some understanding of these complex structures long before they are produced.     

Can a Click be a Word?: Infants' Learning of Non‐Native Words

Forms that are nonlinguistic markers in one language (i.e., “tsk‐tsk” in English) may be part of the phoneme inventory—and hence part of words—in another language. In the current paper, we demonstrate that infants' ability to learn words containing unfamiliar language sounds is influenced by the age and vocabulary size of the infant learner, as well as by cues to the speaker's referential intent. When referential cues were available, infants at 14 months learned words with non‐native speech sounds, but at 20 months only those infants with smaller vocabularies succeeded. When no referential cues were present, infants at both 14 and 20 months failed to learn the same words. The implications of the relation between linguistic sophistication and non‐native word learning are discussed.     

Phonological Specificity in 12‐ and 17‐Month‐Old French‐Speaking Infants

The literature reports some contradictory results on the degree of phonological specificity of infants’ early lexical representations in the Romance language, French, and Germanic languages. It is not clear whether these discrepancies are because of differences in method, in language characteristics, or in participants’ age. In this study, we examined whether 12‐ and 17‐month‐old French‐speaking infants are able to distinguish well‐pronounced from mispronounced words (one or two features of their initial consonant). To this end, 46 infants participated in a preferential looking experiment in which they were presented with pairs of pictures together with a spoken word well pronounced or mispronounced. The results show that both 12‐ and 17‐month‐old infants look longer at the pictures corresponding to well‐pronounced words than to mispronounced words, but show no difference between the two mispronunciation types. These results suggest that, as early as 12 months, French‐speaking infants, like those exposed to Germanic languages, already possess detailed phonological representations of familiar words.     

Including Curriculum Content on Lesbian and Gay Issues

Abstract

This paper presents a rationale for requiring content on lesbian and gay issues in the social work curriculum. Recent research suggests that a considerable percentage of social workers possess homophobic attitudes. Some support exists for making education a tool to reduce negative attitudes toward the gay population. However, students are unlikely to receive adequate information about this population before they enter the social work curriculum. The goals of including content on lesbian and gay issues are to decrease homophobic attitudes and to prepare students to provide effective social work practice with lesbian and gay clients. Methods and resources for incorporating content on lesbian and gay issues in human behavior, direct practice, policy, community organization and research courses of the social work curriculum are presented.     

Dimensions of style: Context,politics and motivation in gay Israeli speech1

Sociolinguistic research has traditionally examined stylistic variation as a way of understanding how speakers may use language indexically. Quantitatively, research has sought to correlate observed patterns of variation across such external parameters as context or topic with the ways in which speakers linguistically orient themselves to their immediate surroundings or to some other socially‐salient reference group. Recently, this approach has been criticized for being too mechanistic. In this paper, I present a new method for examining stylistic variation that addresses this critique, and demonstrate how an attention to speakers' motivations and interactional goals can be reconciled with a quantitative analysis of variation. I illustrate the proposed method with a quantitative examination of systematic patterns of prosodic variation in the speech of a group of Israeli men who are all members of various lesbian and gay political‐activist groups.     

“Let's Talk about the Institution”: Same‐Sex Common‐Law Partners Negotiating Marriage Equality and Relationship Legitimacy

The 2005 Canada‐wide legalization of same‐sex marriage provided same‐sex couples with access to an institution they had previous been excluded from. Yet not all couples choose to marry. In this paper, we examine why this is the case, considering the role of personal, political, and historical factors. We draw on 22 interviews with people in common‐law same‐sex relationships in Toronto to examine how they understand their relationship within the new context of marriage equality. We find that participants feel they are held accountable to marriage as a default relationship legitimacy norm, indicating that this new institutional access is accompanied by a set of social expectations. Despite their awareness of the need to navigate a social context favoring marriage, participants individualize their relationship decisions as personal rather than political. Participants often contradict themselves as they articulate what marriage means to them, suggesting that, in this period of legal and social transition, people are negotiating multiple meanings, societal messages, and traditions when it comes to making sense of their relationship. We discuss the implications of these findings for LGBQ activism and the framing of sexuality‐based inequalities in Canadian society.     

Human Rights in the 20th Century

Summary

This article seeks to answer the question raised in its title. To that end, the evolution of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights is discussed in the context of lesbian and gay rights, internationally and in the United States. The political and psychosocial dynamics of homophobic hatred are addressed, including the correlation of human rights abuses to heterosexism and the denigration of the feminine. The article discusses institutionalized gay oppression that serves to deny human rights, demonizing gay and lesbian people to such a degree that hate crimes become feasible. Finally, the importance of the globalization of non-governmental organizations on behalf of LGBT human rights advocacy is stressed.     

Discursive shifts associated with coming out: A corpus‐based analysis of news reports about Ricky Martin

This study seeks to shed light on the discursive effects of a public sexual identity declaration as they surface in the language used to construct the social actor in question. Subscribing to queer linguistically informed critical discourse studies, it builds on and advances the theoretical discussion of coming out in language and sexuality studies. The investigation analyses a corpus of news reports about Ricky Martin, comparing two sub‐corpora, one with texts published before and another with texts from after Martin's public coming out as a gay man in 2010. A keyword analysis is performed to identify linguistic traces of central discourses manifesting in the two corpora. The quantitative analysis is complemented by an in‐depth qualitative analysis of the discursive construction of ethnicity and sexuality in two sample texts. The findings are discussed in the light of discursive shifts between pre‐ and post‐coming‐out phases and clashes between coming‐out stereotypes and the coming‐out experiences of Latino gay men.     

Closeted cosmopolitans: Israeli gays between centre and periphery

Abstract In this article I present observations of gay life conducted in Tel Aviv in 1993 and 1998. Despite the invisibility of gay venues and the absence of gay political action, the men studied in 1993 (mostly professionals and artists) nevertheless did not express resentment or a wish to move to the Western havens of gay life with which they had been acquainted as frequent travellers. However, the gay scene in Tel Aviv seemed very different a few years later. A number of leading gay men made a successful claim for public recognition and a growing constituency of gay men and women came out to demonstrate for minority rights and a share of public space. Rather than relating the growth of gay empowerment solely to the idea of globalization or ‘postmodernism’, in this article I seek to consider the social context in which these worldwide influences take place. The introduction of two stages of observation displays the dynamic nature of social phenomena that ethnographers might often confront in their present‐day research projects.     

Studying Modern Nation‐State in a World‐Historical Perspective: The Instance of Iraq

By examining conceptual and historical approaches on modern state and state formation in the context of Iraq, this paper addresses four interrelated methodological aspects of studying state formation (1) to contest the simplicity of Eurocentric knowledge production in studying state formation especially in the periphery, (2) to bring capital and nation‐state into a relational analysis and to call for research on how they constitute each other historically and geographically, (3) to integrate methodologically local and world‐historical context in understanding the historical complexity of state formation, (4) to problematize the concepts of “capital relation” in order to recognize nature and transformation of nature in the study of state formation.     

Differentiating selves: middle‐aged gay men in Manchester's less visible ‘homospaces’

Scholarship on gay bars/‘villages’ has overshadowed study of ‘homospaces’ (gay fields of existence) less available/inaccessible to a wider public – websites, saunas and social/support groups. Based on interviews with 27 men aged 39–61 living in Manchester, this article addresses what middle‐aged gay men's accounts of these particular homospaces say about their experiences of age/ageing and how relations of ageism work within them. Specifically, I focus on how study participants use ‘ageing capital’ in these fields to differentiate themselves from their younger counterparts in three ways. First, ageing capital is implicated in capitulation to gay ageism and a reverse ageism – visible in accounts of differentiation from the ‘superficial,’ reckless ways of sexualized space that participants associated with younger gay men. Second, it was visible in accounts of resistance to/questioning of gay ageism – strategies that could make sexualized homospaces more habitable. Third, ageing capital was implicated in negotiation with ageing/gay ageism – visible in ambivalent stances hovering between compliance and resistance – towards ageing and ageism, which could reinforce constraints on uses/display of the body. The first and third accounts indicate the multidirectional character of gay ageism, limits on the deployment on ageing capital and show how middle‐aged men can undermine their generational claims to represent a more authentic form of gay male embodiment. En route, I also complicate stereotypical thinking that gay social/support groups represent more inclusive, empowering space whilst overtly sexualized spaces of the ‘gay scene’ represent the opposite.     

How to Describe It? Why the Term Coming Out Means Different Things in the United States and France

Drawing on 30 in‐depth interviews with U.S. and French lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals, we find important similarities in how U.S. and French respondents strategically managed the visibility of their sexual identities but differences in the vocabulary used to discuss those experiences. Specifically, all of the Americans used the expression coming out spontaneously while only five French respondents did so. Instead, French respondents typically rejected coming out in favor of other words or expressions. Rather than simple effects of speaking different languages, these differences stemmed from distinct connotations given to the same—widely diffused—expressions within each local context. Unlike their American peers, who saw the expression's origin in their own history and used in everyday lives, most French respondents resisted what they perceived to be an American cultural object imported by the French media. We also find evidence that the meaning of coming out is changing in both contexts such that in the future, the French and Americans may perceive and use it more similarly. This research contributes to our understanding of the intersection between language, meaning, and political context, within a cross‐national setting.     

Eighteen‐Month‐Olds,but not 14‐Month‐Olds,Use Social Context to Bind Action Sequences

We demonstrate that 18‐month‐olds, but not 14‐month‐olds, can anticipate others' actions based on an interpretation of shared goals that bind together individual actions into a collaborative sequence. After viewing a sequence of actions performed by two people who socially interact, 18‐month‐olds bound together the socially engaged actors' actions such that they later expected the actors to share the same final goal. Eighteen‐month‐olds who saw nonsocially engaged actors did not have this expectation and neither did 14‐month‐olds when viewing either socially or nonsocially engaged actors. The results are discussed in light of the possibility that experience in collaborations could be necessary for understanding collaboration from a third‐person perspective.     

The Adolescent Sexual Development of African American Gay Men with AIDS: Implications for Community-Based Practice

ABSTRACT

This qualitative study describes the adolescent sexual development of ten African American gay men living with AIDS. The informants retrospectively describe the challenges of being a gay adolescent in a mostly heterosexist and homophobic environment. They report unsupportive homophobic and heterosexist family members, community members and school officials. They also describe their burgeoning sexual orientation, sexual initiation as well as consensual and non-consensual sexual experiences with their peers. Additionally, several informants describe seeking sexual experiences with adult men. Later they suggest the adult men became their primary sources of emotional and psychological support. Implications for community practice, intervention and research with both African American gay adolescents and adult men living with AIDS are discussed.