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This paper seeks to develop a queer approach to the study of personal relationships. In the context of the significant transformations in the organization of personal life which have taken place over the past thirty years, it argues that sociologists must de-centre the family and the heterosexual couple in our intellectual imaginaries. The paper first provides a critique of sociology for the heteronormative frameworks within which it has studied personal relationships. It then goes on to propose an extension of the framework for the analysis of contemporary transformations of intimacy, arguing for the importance of a queer analysis of social change, and suggests that there is a need for research focusing on those living at the cutting edge of social change. It ends with an overview of the findings of recent research on the relationship practices of those who are living and loving beyond the heteronorm.

This paper presents a first reflection on the data of a research study carried out in Barcelona. The public debate on same-sex marriage reveals social tensions around issues of gender, sexuality, conjugality, procreation and parenthood. The symbolic representations and ideological discourses on these issues show their constructed character when a single variable – the sex of the spouses – presents itself as changeable. This process brings to light the deep structure of homophobia as reactive motivation, the politicized character of the scientific discourses used in the debate, and the differences in the cultures of the identity politics in the different nation-states.

The author presents and analyzes the attitudes of mental health practitioners whose models of reading are still based on the pathological paradigm of homosexuality. The material presented in this paper is the result of an analysis of discourses produced within discussion groups (organized for research purposes) that included psychiatrists and psychologists as well as gays and lesbians who had gone through processes of therapeutic treatment (for a number of reasons, and not only because of issues related to homosexuality). The levels of homophobia and heterosexism that continue to subsist in the Portuguese clinical context reveal both compliance with unquestioned models of training, and the difficulty that gays and lesbians may face in a process that perpetuates – and may even increase – the social discrimination that affects them.

This paper centers on the way in which the specific difference of the Portuguese social formation has determined and manifested itself in the socio-genesis of LGBT associations in the last three decades. It is possible to establish a three-stage periodization which has primarily a heuristic value: the first stage, from 1974 to 1991, can be divided into two phases, before and after the appearance of the AIDS epidemic in Portugal; the second, between 1990-1991 and 1995-1997; and the third, from 1997 until now. The production of knowledge on LGBT associations has to be interconnected with two further lines of enquiry: one on its old and new detractors and opponents, and the other on the community that the associations represent or that emerges from them, with a history, an identity and a culture that explain the reasons for adherence or resistance to them.