A preliminary look at relationships between married gay men and lesbians and their parents-in-law: Five case studies

With marriage between lesbians and between gays now legal in the United States, it is important to gain an understanding of how in-law relationships function for this population. Five case studies, part of a larger study of in-law relationships, are presented that help further knowledge of the potential obstacles that some couples may face in relation to their in-laws. Common experiences include relationships improving over time; struggling with acceptance; feeling closer to parents-in-law because other adult children or adult children-in-law have fallen out of favor; recognizing the significant role that the child-in-law’s spouse plays in the relationship between the child-in-law and the parent-in-law; understanding the role that the larger community plays; considering both parents-in-law as separate voices in the in-law dyad; and experiencing feelings of ambivalence that arise between family members. Practice implications for clinicians are included as are implications for future research.     

Assessing the Tongzhi Label: Self-Identification and Public Opinion

Tongzhi is one of several Chinese terms that refer to individuals who are attracted to the same sex. Using data from two different surveys in Hong Kong, this research note examines how the term tongzhi coexists with other terms. We investigate the prevalence of self-identification as tongzhi, and we explore the extent to which using the term tongzhi influences public attitudes toward gay people and gay rights. Activists began popularizing the term tongzhi in the late 1980s, but less than one third of the participants in our 2008 survey of sexual orientation minorities (n = 728) described themselves as tongzhi. Using a split-ballot experiment in a 2013 public opinion poll (n = 831), we found that attitudes toward gay people and gay rights were not significantly impacted by whether questions were phrased in terms of tongzhi or the main alternative term tongxinglianzhe. We discuss how our findings can enrich understandings of earlier research and illuminate avenues for future study.     

Rural Men,Sexual Identity and Community

The relationship between rurality and men's sexuality remain relatively unexplored. This study addresses the knowledge gap in the research literature by focusing on men who have sex with men in rural areas across Ontario, Canada. Employing a constructivist grounded theory methodology, interviews were conducted with 32 men across 28 geographic locales consisting of populations of less than 10,000 people. Men identified as gay, bisexual, queer/bisexual, or refused labels. These self-selected identifiers were then explored to determine how participants conceptualized and organized their sexual identities in relation to context. Participants held divergent management strategies that resulted in two general identity grouping: “natives” and “transplanters.”     

“Still Raped Over Here”: Gay Male Femininity and the Rewards of Camp Ambivalence in Richard Day’s Girls Will Be Girls

ABSTRACT

Girls Will Be Girls (GWBG) delivers a substantive queer-feminist critique of heteronormative animus toward women and gay men through jokes that weaponize that animus for insurgent purposes. The film’s rape and abortion jokes showcase the provocative notion that negative representations of femininity might be wielded strategically and, in fact, more resonantly because they resist recuperation by marginalizing normative hierarchies. GBWG’s enactment of gay male femininity deploys queer dissidence by ameliorating pain through mockery while emphasizing the costs of heteronormative and patriarchal inflictions. This essay offers a test case for a queer feminist politics—one that, without discarding the imperatives for and rewards of more materially grounded political work, mines the critical as well as affective affordances of rage, mockery, and indignity against heteronormativity’s arbitrary but still formidable injunctions. A queer feminist reading of camp denaturalizes heteronormativity with a potency that queer theory and feminist theory might harness yet more effectually in less divided collaboration.     

Comparative Relationship Stability of Lesbian Mother and Heterosexual Mother Families: A Review of Evidence

It has been concluded from a review of the literature involving only one study that lesbian parents were more likely to have unstable relationships. Other scholars have struggled with considerable controversy over how much was or was not known about the stability of lesbian parent relationships as well as whether such relationships were more or less stable than heterosexual parent relationships. Arguments have been made on all sides of the issues. A careful review of the literature suggests that more is known about the stability of lesbian parent relationships than previously suspected and that, on average, such relationships tend to be less stable than those of married heterosexual parents. Less is understood about the factors that may influence relationship stability for gay or lesbian parents, creating a critical need for additional research, especially with different demographic subgroups of lesbian and gay parents.     

Sexual Dysfunction,Paraphilias and their Relationship to Childhood Abuse in Men who have Sex with Men

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to examine 1) the occurrence of sexual dysfunctions and paraphilias and 2) the relationship between childhood abuse and current sexual disorders in a MSM sample. Participants were MSM in the Midwest who completed baseline surveys prior to attending a sexual health seminar. Most men reported a sexual dysfunction or paraphilia. Thirty-nine percent of the sample reported childhood abuse. Results indicated childhood abuse was associated with a significant increased risk of male erectile disorder (OR = 1.83) and secondary sexual dysfunction (OR = 2.01). The intent of the study was to generate hypotheses to guide future research efforts.     

Marketing the Damaged Self: The Construction of Identity in Advertisements Directed Towards People with HIV/AIDS

This paper explores the identities projected in advertisements directed towards HIV positive individuals and people with AIDS. Fifty such advertisements were collected from three popular American magazines for gay men over a period of seven months. Analysis of the ads reveals a paradoxical presentation of people with HIV/AIDS, which offers simultaneous conflicting images of hope and fear, power and weakness, innocence and guilt. An interactive sociolinguistic model through which this contradictory discourse might be understood is presented, drawing on Goffman's insights on stigma management and the presentation of the self in social interaction. Advertisements directed towards people with HIV/AIDS, it is suggested, present a contradictory discourse in which the advertisers are positioned as 'the wise', offering to mediate the conflicting identities of the stigmatized. The identity values enacted in this contradictory discourse are further measured against American conceptions of communication and the self as observed by Carbaugh and others. The possible consequences of these positionings on the roles made available to people with HIV/AIDS in the wider social context are discussed.     

Differences Between Partners From Heterosexual,Gay, and Lesbian Cohabiting Couples

Partners from four types of couples without children (gay unmarried, lesbian unmarried, heterosexual unmarried, and heterosexual married, Ns=1,412, 1,310, 1,036, and 1,728, respectively) were compared to partners from heterosexual married couples with children (N =3,116) on mean levels of variables from a model of relationship adjustment as well as on the strength of links posited by the model. Although 82% of the mean‐level comparisons were significant, only 36% of the comparisons had effect sizes that were at least small in strength. Type of couple affected links between variables in only 33% of the instances, with effect sizes trivial in strength. Findings support the view that despite variability in structure, close dyadic relationships work in similar ways.