Workplace friendships among social work,counseling, and human service educators: Exploring the impact of sexual orientation and friendships in workplace empowerment

Workplace friendships are deliberate bonds between people in the workplace in which various degrees of confidence, care, emotional support, solidarity, honesty, and trust are shared. For lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) academics in higher education, such friendships may be particularly important as sources of social and institutional support. In this study, the authors examine the relationship between workplace friendships and workplace empowerment among a sample (N?=?204) of LGB and non-LGB educators in social work, counseling, and human services. The findings, taken from this sample of university educators, indicate that sexual orientation and workplace friendship opportunities can predict workplace empowerment. Implications of the study are that workplace behavioral health practice and research that supports LGB and non-LGB workers in developing meaningful relationships at work can positively impact the higher education workplace.     

Relationships and identity of gay men in Mexico: A qualitative approach

Relationships are a fundamental element of human and social interactions because they provide us with meanings around physical and abstract objects that allow us to make sense of our reality and identities. There is little Mexican research regarding how gay men construct a sense of identity through their social interactions. This article describes the relationships that gay men in Mexico City have within their families, with their friends, and with their partners. Fifteen in-depth interviews are analyzed through elements of Grounded Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis. Results show that family reproduced homophobia with participants that taught them that their gay identity is socially unaccepted. This is deconstructed through friendships with other gay men. Partner relationships are lived as one of the last milestones in the construction of a gay identity. Some men question hegemonic values around sexuality through polyamorous and polygamous relationships. Conclusions show the importance of these social relationships for gay men's emotional well-being, but that their relationships are often impacted by cultural and interpersonal homophobia.     

The complexities of friendship: exploring how gay men make sense of their workplace friendships with straight women

Despite the contemporary attention paid to the gay male–straight female friendship dyad within popular culture and a growing scholarly interest in male–female friendships, not enough is known about the friendship dynamics between gay men and straight women, particularly in the workplace. I draw upon qualitative findings from in‐depth interviews with 28 gay men employed in a range of work roles in the UK to document their existence and shed light on how gay men understand, value and give meaning to workplace friendships with women. Study findings reveal the paucity of textual cues and practices to direct the development and maintenance of these friendships. Overcoming this, study participants are shown to be inventive in their approach to doing friendship. As problematic as some friendship ties are for understanding differences along the lines of sexuality and gender, the opportunities for challenging heteronormative ways of relating in workplace friendship are regarded as more promising.     

Working at Intimacy: Gay Men's Workplace Friendships

Despite scholarly efforts to challenge the dualistic stereotype of men as rational and women as emotion experts, academics have paid little attention to the issues that arise when gay and lesbian sexualities are introduced into such debates. This article highlights the heterosexist content of much of the research on gender, emotion and organization, and argues the relevancy of investigating the largely neglected topic of intimacy and friendship in the work lives of gay men. Engaging with feminist, queer and sociological research that examines friendship in the lives of individuals who belong to sexual minority groups, I explore in this study the diversity in the way gay men find and work out intimacy in the context of workplace friendships with other gay men and with heterosexual men and women. The data for this article are drawn from in‐depth interviews with ten gay men employed in one UK National Health Service Trust. Study findings problematize conceptualizations of friendships at work as being bereft of intimacy, of little value and clearly distinguishable from business relationships. Dichotomous modes of thinking about the impact of gender and sexuality on intimacy and friendship are also challenged.     

ANTICIPATORY AND ACTUALIZED IDENTITIES: A Cultural Analysis of the Transition from AIDS Disability to Work

Throughout the course of their lives, many people living with HIV/AIDS have prematurely retired onto AIDS disability. A new trend, however, has swept across the nation. Where once people were getting sick, leaving work, and embracing inevitable death, now, with advances in medical technology, many people with HIV/AIDS are renewing their lease on life and discovering a desire to go back to work. To learn how gay men's identities are impacted as they transition from AIDS disability back to the labor market, I conducted three months of fieldwork at an employment placement agency in San Francisco. During fieldwork I distributed informal questionnaires to 120 gay men and then formally interviewed 10 additional gay men who had either transitioned or were considering transitioning from AIDS disability back to work. Analyses reveal that cultural, structural, and medical contradictions typify the return to work. As gay men experience and live through these contradictions, their identities split into anticipatory and actualized components. By facilitating a reassessment of meanings and values, anticipatory identities cognitively and emotionally prepare individuals as they brave the road back to work. This version of identity represents a romanticized confluence of worker (role) identity, gay (status/master) identity, and overall sense of self (self-concept). Personal experiences with stigma, shame, and discrimination along with complexities of the workplace and medical services, however, prevent the maturation of anticipatory identities when seeking reemployment. This results in loosely coupled and situationally informed actualized identities . The relationship between these two identities suggests that many people living with HIV/AIDS—and indeed others who experience stressful life transitions—face complex choices between quality-of-life issues and the ability to survive according to external cultural and structural constraints.     

Redefining Sex and Intimacy: The Sexual Self-Images,Outlooks, and Relationships of Gay Men Living with HIV/AIDS

This paper examines how gay men living with HIV disease come to terms with the profound sexual implications of their illness. Based on interviews with 25 gay men diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, this paper highlights (a) the disruptions that these men experience in their sexual feelings and self-images as a result of their illness; (b) the challenges they encounter in negotiating and sustaining sexual relationships; (c) the declines they experience in their sexual attractiveness, desire, and capacities as their illness advances; and (d) the changed meanings they give to sex and self as they come to terms with the erotic implications of their illness and try to preserve valued, intimate identities. In focusing on these themes, this paper offers an “insider's view” into key dimensions of the moral experience of gay men with HIV/AIDS. It also illustrates how the moral experience of these men shifts over the course of their illness, especially in response to the changes and challenges that arise in their intimate relationships and subcultural networks. On a broader, analytic level, this paper addresses a research question that has been neglected in previous studies of the experience of illness—that is, how does serious illness affect the sexuality of diagnosed individuals, particularly their construction of sexual and intimate identities? Through examining this question, this paper contributes to and extends the growing interactionist literature on the consequences of illness for self.     

Marijuana,Gender, and Health-Related Harms: Disentangling Marijuana's Contribution to Risk in a College “Party” Context

Sociological studies suggest that there is social change occurring in the acceptance of lesbians and gay men in the workplace. Compared to prior decades, there are more businesses that welcome, value, and even privilege nonheterosexual sexual identities and relationships. Few studies have analyzed workers' experiences in these types of work contexts. In this article, we explore the experiences of “out” LGB women and men who work for organizations that they consider “gay-friendly.” In-depth interviews demonstrated that, although gay and lesbian workers feel that they are accepted in “gay-friendly” organizations, they nevertheless described differential treatment because of their sexual identity. We discuss evidence of stereotyping, sexual harassment, and gender discrimination in their work experiences. Although the movement toward greater acceptance of gays and lesbians in the workplace has made significant progress, the transformation is so far incomplete. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this research for the study of equality in organizations.     

Friendship Talk as Identity Work: Defining the Self Through Friend Relationships

This paper places friendships at the center of individuals' identity work, examining how individuals construct self‐identities through their talk about friend relationships and networks. We conceptualize this “friendship talk” as a subcategory of identity talk. From interviews with emerging adults, we find three strategies of friendship talk: envisioning self through others, betterment distancing, and situating with networks. These strategies demonstrate unique ways identity construction occurs through talk about friends. Individuals verbally connect with and separate from friends while constructing desired selves and moral identities. We suggest that friendship talk strategies may be generic social processes that apply beyond emerging adulthood.     

Difficult friendships and ontological insecurity

In this paper we explore some of the negative aspects of friendship. In so doing we do not seek to join the debate about whether or not friendships are more or less important than other relationships but rather to explore precisely how significant friendships can be. Based on written accounts submitted to the British Mass Observation Project, we analyse how friendship, when it goes wrong, can challenge one's sense of self and even produce ontological insecurity. Friendship, it is argued, is tied into the process of self‐identification and so staying true to friends, even when the relationships becomes uneven or tiresome, can be a sign of ethical standing. Meeting ‘old’ friends can also become very challenging, especially if one does not wish to be reminded of the self one once was. The paper contributes to the growing interest in relationships beyond kin.     

Relational Health and Masculine Gender-Role Conflict in the Friendships and Community Relationships of Bisexual,Gay, and Straight Men

This study examined how men's masculine gender-role conflict and the importance men placed on interpersonal relationships in defining their self-identities predicted their relational health experiences in same-sex, dyadic friendships and community relationships. Using an Internet sample of 283 self-identified bisexual, gay, and straight men, results of hierarchical linear regression analyses indicated that for men across sexual orientations, the more importance men placed on interpersonal relationships with other men, the greater the degree of relational health they experienced in dyadic friendships. Additionally, for bisexual and gay men in dyadic friendships with other men, gender-role conflict was inversely related to the relational health of their friendships. In the domain of community relationships, the importance that bisexual and straight men placed on interpersonal relationships in defining their self-identities and levels of gender-role conflict predicted relational health experiences. For gay men, however, feelings of masculine gender-role conflict, alone, predicted poorer relational health in community relationships. Study limitations, clinical implications for practice, and future research directions are discussed.     

Who Adopts Queer and Pansexual Sexual Identities?

Some nonheterosexual individuals are eschewing lesbian/gay and bisexual identities for queer and pansexual identities. The present study aimed to examine the sexual and demographic characteristics of nonheterosexual individuals who adopt these labels. A convenience sample of 2,220 nonheterosexual (1,459 lesbian/gay, 413 bisexual, 168 queer, 146 pansexual, and 34 other “write-in”) individuals were recruited for a cross-sectional online survey. In support of our hypotheses, those adopting pansexual identities were younger than those adopting lesbian, gay, and bisexual identities, and those adopting queer and pansexual identities were more likely to be noncisgender than cisgender, and more likely to be cisgender women than men. The majority of pansexual individuals demonstrated sexual orientation indices within the bisexual range, and showed equivalent patterns of sexual attraction, romantic attraction, sexual behavior, and partner gender as bisexual-identified men and women. In contrast, three-quarters of queer men, and more than half of queer women, reported sexual attraction in the homosexual range. This study found that rather than a general movement toward nontraditional sexual identities, queer and pansexual identities appear most appealing to nonheterosexual women and noncisgender individuals. These findings contribute important information regarding who adopts queer and pansexual identities in contemporary sexual minority populations.     

Normal Queers: Straight Parents Respond to Their Children's “Coming Out”

This article explores how normative understandings of gender, family, and sexuality provide the foundation for stigma, an avenue out of deviance, and the means by which stigma is perpetuated. Using participant‐observation and interview data from a support group for families of lesbian women and gay men, I examine the destigmatizing identity work with which straight parents responded to their children's lesbian and gay identities. The parents' reliance on conventional understandings of gender, sexuality, and parenting invoked and affirmed heteronormative conceptions of normalcy. This redrawing—and not fundamentally challenging—of the lines defining sexual normalcy left intact systemic logics supporting heterosexist sexual hierarchies.     

Coming Out,But Into What? Problematizing Discursive Variations of Revealing the Gay Self in the Workplace

There is a substantial mainstream literature on coming out in organizations, which investigates the positive effects for gay people of being out at work, but very few contributions that challenge the discourse of coming out. Taking as its starting point Butler's famous question ‘So we are out of the closet but into what?’, this paper problematizes coming out discourses in the workplace. We report on a study in which ten men were invited to talk about their coming out in the workplace. There were three main ways through which our participants constituted themselves as gay men when they talked about coming out: by defining themselves as, and admitting to, being gay; by introducing themselves as being in a gay relationship; and by adopting legitimate subject positions such as the Other, the different one, or the normal gay. Through our analysis, discussions and conclusions, we show how participants position themselves within different discursive variations, thus revealing the multiplicity of ‘the gay self’ and highlighting how coming out repeats and supports normative systems.     

Examining identity development among gay men of color

Within the past few decades, there has been an explosion of articles examining “gay identity.” Yet, much of this work continues to center on the experiences of gay White men or fail to adequately examine the process of identity development, even when “identity” is central to the discussion. This review outlines 4 theoretical perspectives used to explore gay men of color and identity development. Taken together, these 4 perspectives can offer a rich opportunity to explore the ways that gay men of color come to develop an identity that simultaneously addresses their racial and sexual identities. I argue that examining identity development among gay men of color can help sociology better understand the identity process and provide new insights into examining intersectionality by demonstrating that identities are not only intersectional but also contextual.     

Hamjensgara belongs to family; exclusion and inclusion of male homosexuality in relation to family structure in Iran

This paper looks at current struggles of Iranian gay men to form new sexual identities that are directly tied to family structure and based on values of emotional bond and commitment to a same-sex partner. Based on fieldwork conducted among Iranian gay men in 2012–2014 and through looking at Iranian gay men’s terminologies, Hamjensgara and Gay in particular, I will clarify how Iranian gays, in a way different from that of Western LGBT activists, are trying to portray a positive image of their sexuality in relation to local family standards so they can be integrated into the Iranian family structure, which is the central space of regulating identities in Iran.     

Employment and Sexual Orientation:

Economist, sociologists, and other social scientists have begun to study the influence of sexual orientation on individuals in the labor market, particularly with respect to employment discrimination. The conceptual framework developed in this paper connects lesbian, gay, and bixexual workers' disclosure of their sexual orientation to the economic and social characteristics of the workplace. Disclosure creates the potential for discrimination by employers and coworkers. The framework shows how sexual orientation operates independently and in interaction with other important characteristics such as race and gender. A review of existing research supports the hypothesis that discrimination against gay workers exists. Both workplace groups for gays and lesbians and those who work gay and lesbian workers (such as supervisors, personnel managers, and counselors) need to understand the relationship between disclosure and discrimination in order to make workplaces supportive of lesbian, gay, and bisexual workers.     

“It Takes a Man to Put Me on the Bottom”: Gay Men’s Experiences of Masculinity and Anal Intercourse

In anal intercourse between gay men, men who are typically insertive (“tops”) are often perceived as, and may identify as, more masculine than those who are typically receptive (“bottoms”). “Versatile” men, who may adopt either position, may be perceived as more gender balanced and may transcend the gender-role stereotypes associated with self-labeling as top or bottom. The aim of this study was to explore how gay men’s beliefs about masculinity were associated with their beliefs about the gendered nature of sexual self-labels and their behavior in anal intercourse. Individual semistructured interviews were undertaken with 17 UK-based gay men. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) identified that perceptions of tops and bottoms as gendered social identities varied depending on the extent to which gay men subscribed to the mandates of hegemonic masculinity, the dominant masculinity in Western society. The findings also suggested that some gay men differentiated between top and bottom as social identities and topping and bottoming as gendered behaviors. This had implications for gay men’s behaviors in anal intercourse. It is suggested that future efforts to engage with gay men about their sexual behavior should account for their beliefs regarding the gender-role stereotypes associated with gay sexual self-labels.     

Articulations of Same-sex Desire: Lesbian and Gay Male Dating Advertisements

A survey of self and other categorisation in 200 lesbian and gay male dating advertisement texts, taken from current magazines and newspapers, reveals the discursive means by which homosexual advertisers in our corpus commodify and market sexual/self-gendered identities. Detailed analysis of a sub-sample of the advertisements allows us to trace the discourse processes and conventions used in formulating identity in such texts. We interpret these discourse practices in relation to a social critique of gay attitudes, beliefs and lifestyles. The different conventions for self-commodification followed by lesbians and gay men in this survey suggest generalisable differences in sexual stance and cultural identification     

Sexual and gender identity work on social media

How do sexual and gender minorities use social media to express themselves and construct their identities? We discuss findings drawn from focus groups conducted with 17 sexual and gender minority social media users who shared their experiences of online harms. They include people with gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, queer, asexual, non-binary, pansexual, poly, and kink (LGBTQ+) identities. We find that sexual and gender minorities face several challenges online, but that social media platforms provide important spaces for them to feel understood and accepted. We use Goffman's work to explore how sexual and gender minorities engage in ‘front region’ performances online as part of their identity work. We then turn to Hochschild's concepts of ‘feeling rules’ and ‘framing rules’ to argue that presentations of self, or front region performances, must include the role of feelings and how they are socially influenced to be understood.     

Air Male: Exploring Flight Attendant Masculinities in North America and Thailand

Flight attendant work, although now referred to with gender-neutral terminology, continues to be archetypically feminine. Male flight attendants are often assumed to be gay, which frequently includes an emasculated, hyper-sexualised dimension to the stereotyped minority within the female-dominated occupation. The ways in which straight men navigate this occupation and its gendered/hypersexualised connotations problematises both the notions of a gay community as well as flight attendant work as inherently or necessarily feminine. Based on ethnography amongst flight attendants who work for two international airlines, this paper considers how notions of masculinity and heteronormativity operate in a feminised occupational role and how workplace dynamics affect gendered senses of self and relations with others, including with coworkers and in the public.