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Recent studies on the experiences of gay Asian men demonstrate that members of these groups experience both subtle and blatant forms of racism within lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) communities. This study expands on previous research by examining how gay Vietnamese American men experience racism within the gay community of Southern California, how racism affects members of this group mentally and emotionally, and their responses when facing racism. Based on 17 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with self-identified gay Vietnamese American men living in Southern California, this study found that they experienced racism similarly to other gay Asian men. Race and racism shape the everyday experiences of gay Vietnamese American men through the racial paradox of gay desire as they are either deemed undesirable and rejected as a potential sexual and romantic interest, or they are racially fetishized. However, members of this group do not experience racism passively but actively respond through various acts of resistance and intra-racial and ethnic community-building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other gender and sexual minority (LGBTQ+) community are disproportionately affected by illicit substance use, yet sexual orientation and gender identity are largely omitted from criminology frameworks. LGBTQ+ identity is incorporated into Akers' Social Structure-Social Learning (SSSL) model to suggest that existing disparate substance use patterns may be attributed to variation in substance-related definitions, peer models, and reinforcement. Data from 2,349 young adults were used to estimate structural equations models. LGBTQ+ respondents reported greater substance use than peers. Consistent with theoretical expectations, this relationship was fully mediated by social learning constructs. This study justifies incorporating sexual orientation and gender identity into the SSSL model and suggests peer-based substance use interventions are particularly influential within the LGBTQ+ community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the visual culture of social network applications (apps), using "safer-sex design" as an anchor to contemplate how different practices of looking at HIV co-constitute viral visibility. Drawing on science and technology studies and queer theories, this article traces viral visibility from its digital production through its marketization, and finally to its implications for gay men's sexual communication in Taiwan. Through interviews with gay Taiwanese men and a social app developer and the visual analysis of Hornet, Grindr, and Scruff, this article describes how the precarity of viruses, knowledge of HIV prevention, and social stigmas against sexual minorities are brought together, staged, and made eligible (and ineligible) for public viewing. This article demonstrates how digital platform designs work to facilitate gay men's sociosexual communication while ironically reinforcing stigmas against HIV/AIDS in Taiwan, and suggests a critical approach to the visual culture of social apps and queer health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ways gay and queer men employ the concept of 'play' in relation to sex. Using Judith Butler's theory of performativity to analyse the experiences of 16 individuals from Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia who identified as a gay and/or queer man or a member of the gay community, I present how my participants used 'play' to refer to casual and/or kinky sexual encounters, describe certain safer sex practices, and delineate the difference between queer and straight sexual identities. 'Playing' also involved a range of personally cultivated rules connected to the pursuit of well-being. When these rules were broken, the activity no longer felt 'playful' and became risky for some. 'Play' was ultimately a way for my participants to discuss how risk, pleasure, desire, identity, relationships, and personal well-being related to sexual practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this study is to explore the inclusiveness of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) adolescents in junior high school from the perspective of LGBTQ adolescents in Sweden. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with 10 GBTQ adolescents aged 16 to 19. The study was approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (Dnr: 2019-03816). A Braun and Clark inspired thematic analysis was performed through a theoretical lens inspired by Berger and Luckmann. The analysis resulted in three themes: (a) a navigator among peers as friends and bullies, (b) adults in school supported inclusion in and exclusion from the group of peers, and (c) non-heterosexuality and non-binary gender understanding as teaching projects in junior high school. In summary the LGBTQ adolescents face multiple challenges related to identity development in hetero- and cisnormative school environments, including adults and peers and their (re)actions. Inclusive and exclusive strategies exercised by the self, adults, and peers affect adolescents' experiences of their school time. Initiatives to increase awareness and knowledge about the LGBTQ subject in school can lead to enhanced inclusion but also to an enhanced sense of not belonging. Inclusive initiatives can contribute to enhanced inclusion or its opposite, motivating further research into LGBTQ adolescents' experiences of junior high school from a relational perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional explicit and implicit bias are associated with real-world discrimination and marginalization. We extended this research area by focusing on sexual minorities and where same-gender couples live. Using data on 2,939 U.S. counties from Project Implicit and other publicly available sources, we found that measures with known associations with systemic anti–lesbian, gay, and bisexual (anti-LGB) bias are similarly associated with regional implicit and explicit anti-LGB bias. Furthermore, we found that fewer same-gender couples reside in counties with more explicit and implicit anti-LGB bias, above and beyond other factors that likely influence same-gender-couple residency. These findings further suggest that explicit and implicit measures of regional bias are capturing similar, if not the same, construct of a region's culture of bias toward particular groups. Couched specifically within the ongoing systemic political antagonization of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, plus (LGBTQ+) community, these findings also highlight the importance of considering contextual (in addition to individual) factors that reinforce systemic inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 2019, the Vatican published its first-ever document on gender theory. This document was directed at Catholic educational institutions and draws on theology and philosophy, while excluding science on gender identity and testimonies from transgender people, to suggest gender theory is an ideology endangering the family. The case of Jane, a practicing Catholic and teacher–leader in a Catholic secondary school, contributing to cross-disciplinary curriculum development, school accreditation, and student mentorship, is used to anticipate problems of practice which may emerge as this document's guidance is applied at the school level. Ecological systems theory and communities of practice theory are used to analyze this case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The HBO miniseries It's a Sin (2021) offers viewers a kind of social history of the AIDS epidemic in the U.K. Across its five episodes, the program depicts ordinary people's first encounters with the pandemic as they manage misinformation, overcome their disbelief, and, eventually, come to terms with the shock and trauma of its impact on the gay male communities of 1980s-era London. The result is a program in which viewers are asked to question how they might have navigated past events under such circumstances, a period in which a mysterious illness moved from the shadowy periphery to the very center of a community's existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Context: Within critical research broadly, scholars increasingly turn to stories and storytelling to pursue equity in educational contexts. Such scholarship does, however, primarily focus on the composition or creation of stories. Expanding the scope of storytelling research, this article turns to queer and trans knowledges to highlight a parallel set of storytelling practices—de-composing practices—and demonstrates their impact on historically marginalized community narratives and the pursuit of equity and justice in the field of education. Purpose/Objective/Research Question or Focus of Study: As critical calls for storying, counter-storytelling, and restorying increase within critical research in education, this article theorizes a parallel literacy practice, de-storying, as part of a set of de-composing practices. Defined as the habitual and often subconscious unimagining of community narratives in alignment with dominant narratives, de-storying shows how certain stories of marginalized communities come to be consistently unimagined. This article focuses particularly on queer community narratives and de-storying's impact in the form of unimagined ancestors, elders, guardians, and peers. Research Design: A narrative inquiry project, this research study shares data from an inquiry community of nine queer educators. Gathering together 13 times over the course of an academic year, these educators engaged in a structured restorying process and through speculative storytelling reimagined and rewrote narrativized experiences of queerphobia. In particular, small stories demonstrated how de-storying affected these educators' storytelling practices and, furthermore, revealed that three dominant community narratives (i.e., heteronormativity, queer fatalism, and homonormativity) compressed the potential small stories these educators told. Conclusions/Recommendations: Findings from this project illustrate how de-storying practices resulted in four unimagined community narratives across participants: missing queer ancestors, elders, guardians, and peers. De-storying occurred across various intersections of participants' identities. Findings from this study advance critical approaches to storytelling by revealing de-storying as one of many potential de-composing practices. This article concludes by inviting the theorization of additional de-composing practices in order to center the most marginalized stories within education—namely, those that are actively unimagined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the body of literature on LGBT+ populations within the United States place urban areas and so-called gayborhoods as goals and eventualities, paralleling early US studies on immigration. Using a multistage, mixed-methods approach, consisting of secondary analysis of the Pew 2013 Study of LGBT Persons (N = 1197) and in-depth interviews (35 gay men, 2 trans-identifying individuals, 1 heterosexual woman, and 2 lesbians), we found that rural LGBT+ residents engaged in both short-term and long-term travel to mitigate feelings of being spatially segregated from the loci of gay social life—what Ghaziani (2019a) refers to as cultural archipelagos. However, rural residents also used their geographical location to resist dominant narratives about LGBT+ life. Some of our respondents felt that living in rural areas better situated them to be activists and advocates for LGBT+ rights, while others simply did not feel they could be comfortable within more urban contexts. These findings suggest that rural LGBT+ residents may have delinked their sexual selves with their cultural and political selves, thus illustrating the plurality of rural queer voices that exists. As we also argue, while residence category should be considered as influencing one's experience, care must be used to avoid overly deterministic accounts. Finally, this article extends earlier work by Brekhus (2003), Mattson (2015), and Ghaziani (2019a) by presenting the meaningfulness of travel to and from queer cultural strongholds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role and impact of Gay Health Action (GHA), a voluntary AIDS organisation that operated in the Republic of Ireland between 1985 and 1989. Drawing on their publications and media engagement, it argues that GHA played a significant role in educating the general public about AIDS, while this group also challenged ideas about sexual health and dispelled negative stereotypes associated with homosexuality. In doing so, the activities of GHA begin to outline the initial public response to HIV/AIDS during the 1980s, while also contributing towards an emergent body of research on the changing nature of Irish society during the late-twentieth century. It suggests ways in which attitudes to the gay community were evolving and highlights the need for further research on AIDS, examinations of which can contribute towards the emergent histories of social change and health policy in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We offer exploratory reflections on the matter of sexual misconduct affecting sexuality minority male students by males in positions of authority in the university, based on interviews with eight sexual violence service providers and five men across Canada with lived experience, as well as information gathered through our recruitment work. Data were interpreted using thematic analysis. Our results indicate that there is a need to think through the specificity of sexual misconduct involving men in university settings. Several dynamics operate to perpetuate a willed ambiguity on this issue that allow abuses of power to go unchecked. These include difficulties in having a conversation on this topic, the sexualization of gay male culture, gender dynamics among gay men, 'queer' justifications, risks of social isolation, and financial precarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociopolitical landscape for queer people has changed dramatically in recent decades; however, progress has been both halting and uneven. While this is evident in many areas of professional and private life, this study focuses on the experiences of queer students in STEM learning environments in US colleges and universities. Specifically, we explore student expressions of temporality and futurity with regards to their STEM experiences and aspirations. Engagement with queer theory, especially queer formulations of time and space, alerted us to the importance of sociopolitical developments of the past several decades—particularly the rise and entrenchment of neoliberal politics in both academic STEM arenas and gay and queer politics. Engaging with queer temporality and spatiality, neoliberalism, and the homonormative turn, we found three interdependent themes: (1) the (re)negotiation of queer politics within academic disciplines linked to the neoliberal state; (2) the multiple bifurcations of self, time, and space required to simultaneously navigate queerness and STEM; and (3) the development of utopian projections of the future intended to reconcile queer identity, neoliberalism, and STEM. These findings point to a tension between queer identities and STEM fields arising not from the nature of the fields themselves but from science's interconnectedness with a neoliberal economy. This tension not only structures participants' current experiences in STEM learning spaces but also flavors the way they consider their futures as queer scientists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have studied migrant gay men, but few have examined the changing salience (i.e., a subjective importance a person attributes to a particular identity) of sexual identity across cultural contexts. Drawing on 45 in-depth interviews, this study investigates the experiences of two groups of Polish migrant gay men—one that migrated from various parts of Poland to Warsaw, and one that emigrated from Poland to Chicago—to examine the differences in their respective sexual identity salience. I find that the interaction of the cultural climate, structural factors, and respondents' individual status characteristics can better account for between- and in-group differences among the Chicago and Warsaw men. Respondent's occupation, educational attainment, work environment, race, same-sex experiences before migration, the timing of migration, and English langue fluency variably affected how and when sexual identity mattered to these men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Ireland's 2015 Marriage Equality referendum, emerging trends, variances and understandings of LGBTQ identities have begun to emerge on Irish television. At the crux of this post-marriage equality queer visibility lies a friction between the assimilation of queerness to an acceptable homonormative alternative to monogamous heteronormativity versus broader representations of indeterminate variety and fluidity. In exploring the dynamic between assimilation and representation, the article makes a two-pronged argument. On the one hand, post-marriage equality television becomes a site of containment, performing a regulatory function configuring queer visibility through a homonormative paradigm, reflecting the mainstreaming evident in the marriage equality campaign. On the other, post-marriage equality Irish television has enabled cultural scripts to emerge pertaining to the challenges still remaining for the gay community in response to more intersectional, complex understandings of diverse LGBTQ experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of growing visibility, recognition and acceptance of lesbian motherhood and gay fatherhood in countries such as Britain, it is important to ask how younger generations of sexual minorities approach the possibility of becoming a parent. Drawing on interviews with lesbians and gay men who do not have children but may have them in the future, I explore how people become aware that having children is an option. By attending to how this consciousness manifests in conversations and how conversations shape the consciousness, I illuminate specific dynamics that raising the topic of parenthood creates in intimate interactions. My data show that it is often unclear to men and women who form same-sex relationships whether they are socially expected to have children. I argue that this ambiguity requires a kind of 'coming out' through which feelings about parenthood are made explicit. Using the concept of coming out, I ask: What if we were to think of people in terms of their 'reproductive orientations' rather than sexual identities? I suggest that, similar to expressing sexual identities, articulating reproductive orientations involves aligning with particular life trajectories based on binary logic. However, with ambiguous expectations about parenthood, neither having children nor remaining childfree is explicitly normative. As such, unlike coming out as lesbian or gay, which transgresses norms surrounding sexuality, coming out as wanting or not wanting to have children challenges normativity itself. I reflect on how this 'normative challenge' makes it possible to imagine parenthood and 'childfreedom' as intimacies of equal value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I examine the public discussion of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in the UK and investigate how this treatment and its key beneficiaries were framed by the British press between 2012 and 2016. Drawing upon an archive of articles published in national newspapers, I identify the discursive transformation that PrEP underwent during this period, as it moved from being a 'wonder drug' that benefited the health of the general population, to a 'promiscuity pill' that threatened the lives of the most vulnerable. I illustrate how this transformation was accompanied by a shift in the representation of gay men – who were almost universally positioned as the future beneficiaries of PrEP in the UK. Utilizing critical discourse analysis methods, I explore how gay men went from being 'upstanding citizens' to 'dangerous outsiders', and how the British press mapped older stereotypes of the diseased gay male body onto newer homonormative representations of the 'good gay' and the 'evil queer'. This analysis reveals the precarious status gay men occupy in 'post-equalities' Britain – a status that requires adherence to a particular code of sexual and moral conduct, and the disavowal of long-term health inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Queer criminology has primarily focused on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people as victims and perpetrators of crime, as well as on the criminalization of non-heterosexual practices. In this article, we contribute to the emerging discussions on how queer theory can be used in relation to criminological research by exploring desistance processes from a queer temporality perspective. Desistance research emphasizes how and why individuals cease offending and is often guided by a teleology in which individuals are expected to mature and develop new, non-criminal identities. Work on queer temporality, in contrast, has developed thinking that destabilizes chronology and troubles normative life trajectories. In this article, we draw on queer temporality perspectives, particularly the concepts of chrononormativity and afterwardsness, in analysing narratives of young men who have used sexual violence against women partners in Sweden. We demonstrate how criminal identities may develop in retrospect, after desisting, and that identity and behaviour may not necessarily go together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The key role of digital and mobile media for refugees is increasingly acknowledged, but while the literature on the topic tends to celebrate the advantages of digital media, it is important to also acknowledge limitations. Thus, the focus on the creation and maintenance of connections through digital media may obscure experiences and practices of disconnection. This is certainly the case for forced migrants with non-normative sexual orientations, for whom experiences of homophobia within the family and ethno-cultural community in the country of origin may extend to fraught situations in the country of residence. As with digital media in general, it is important to consider the 'offline' social and cultural conditions determining online media uses. This article focuses on the specific challenges for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer refugees, both in general and in Belgium, drawing on desk research and expert interviews, as well as nine in-depth interviews with gay-identifying male refugees. While the refugees are relatively positive about the Belgian situation, they do identify a number of challenges. They use digital media to stay connected to family and other people in the country of origin, but often this connection has become difficult. Social media and dating sites also offer a way to connect to other gay men, but these connections can be equally fraught, particularly in the country of origin for danger of exposure but also in Belgium as social media transcend national boundaries. For this reason, some participants created new or parallel profiles, to keep their gay lives disconnected from their family lives. Overall, then, digital media are a tool not only of connection but also of strategic disconnection for gay refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade represents a critical moment in the story of Serbia's democratisation process and highlights the threat that right-wing extremism poses to democratic rights and personal freedoms. Through a focus on patterns of visibility and visuality in the coverage of different protagonists in the streets of Belgrade, we explore the ways in which distinct communities perform their affinities, their right to be seen in public spaces, and rejection of 'the other'. We conduct a visual framing analysis across four news programmes (RTS, Prva TV, TV B92 and Pink TV), emphasising the stylistic-semiotic choices which work to construct the contested spaces of the city. In shifting attention to how the news images work to create the spaces of political 'appearance' and the potentials for political agency through mediated visibility, the article explores the uneasy ambivalence of the democratisation process for authorities and the resulting marginalisation of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in news coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the widely hailed importance of gay bars, what we know of them comes largely from the gayborhoods of four "great cities." This paper explores the similarities of 55 lone small‐city gay bars to each other and the challenges they pose to the sexualities and urban literatures. Small‐city gay bars have long been integrated with straight people in their often red‐state communities; they are undifferentiated and unspecialized subcultural amenities not just for LGBT people, but for straights as well, fostering cosmopolitan lifestyles for large geographical regions whose residents nevertheless prefer small‐city living for reasons, including proximity to kin or nature, and the fact that many big‐city pleasures can be found everywhere. Contrasts between these findings and previous scholarship reveal the ways in which the latter has often implicitly defined urbanism and cosmopolitanism in terms of commercial diversity, as do studies of gentrification or gayborhoods. Small cities provide a way to integrate studies along the urban–rural interface, including places left to rural studies by both sexualities and urban scholarship. As an analytic object of comparison, small cities can help to disentangle urban effects from the cosmopolitanism of modern life generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research has examined straight allyship to the queer community from allies' perspectives, but little is known about how queer people evaluate straight allies. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 20 LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) students from a large, public university in the southeastern United States, we show that respondents formulate their expectations by leaning on their understanding of their own queerness in relation to other privileged and marginalized identities they possess. We find two opposing camps of thought: one that allies should be attuned to the individual needs of queer people in their personal lives, and the other that they should be actively dedicated to supporting the broader queer community. Some respondents expressed sentiments of both camps, showcasing how expectations range with diverse identity constellations. We conclude with discussions of how diverse expectations complicate allyship as a vehicle for social change, and the implications of these results for allies' roles in queer rights movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although a sizeable body of research has examined the labor market outcomes for sexual minority men, suggesting that gay and bisexual men earn less than their heterosexual counterparts, fewer studies have addressed whether any apparent earnings disadvantages for sexual minority men extend to economic insecurity more broadly. Using 1991–2016 U.S. General Social Survey (GSS) data, we examine three measures of economic insecurity—household income, perceived financial satisfaction, and views about family income—among gay and bisexual men. We find that most sexual minority men experience multiple types of economic insecurity with larger disparities present for bisexual men. Consistent with the labor market literature, we observe that family structure and human capital acquisition primarily accounted for economic insecurity disparities for gay men, and family structure partially explained disparities for bisexual men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2004, Sanlo published a proposed method to examine the lives and experiences of lesbian, gay, and bisexual college students and their persistence to graduation. Transgender students were not included except with regard to their identifying as a sexual minority. To date, neither further articles nor research of a similar nature have been published. Even with heightened visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students on college campuses, the literature still does not capture the specific and unique experiences of health, scholarship, and persistence of this population. These scholar–practitioner authors share their various experiences as directors of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) centers and why retention studies of the LGBTQ population are necessary as well as why transgender or gender-nonconforming students must also be included in such studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting in New York City in the 1970s, gay men and lesbians created public access television programs to shine a spotlight on their experiences, communities, concerns, and businesses. This article asks, "How did public access programming provide an emerging televisual forum for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people to circulate community affects, experiences, and activism?" Looking to the "AIDS" episode of the 1983 cable access series Our Time, this article traces emerging affective responses to the AIDS epidemic, fear and anger in particular, present in the episode. This article argues that the content and aesthetics of the episode produce a televisual emotional pedagogy about AIDS, making sense of the rising panic to channel these feelings toward collective action. While little research has explored gay and lesbian public access programming, this article reveals that it provides a significant contribution to television history and to mediated archives of feelings in response to AIDS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An exploratory, community-based research project examined the paths of migration and mobility of Canadian Indigenous people who identify as Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer (LGBTQ). A total of 50 participants in Winnipeg, Manitoba and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada were interviewed, many of them telling stories about the multiple layers of domestic violence, violence in communities, state and structural violence that they experienced. In order to better respond to relationship violence experienced by Indigenous Two-Spirit/LGBTQ people it is necessary to understand the specific and historical context of colonization in which relationship violence occurs. We further need to align our efforts to end relationship violence with broader anti-violence struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public stigma surrounding HIV is related to heightened emotional distress, poor psychological functioning, and reduced subjective well-being in people living with HIV. For men who have sex with men (MSM) living with HIV, they may also face stigmatizing attitudes within the gay community, which create an additional burden to their health. Grounded in the psychological mediation framework, the present study examined the underlying psychological processes through which HIV stigma from the public and within the gay community influences the mental and social health of MSM living with HIV. Findings from 206 Chinese MSM living with HIV in Hong Kong indicated that negative self-concept, maladaptive coping, and peer isolation mediated the effect of HIV stigma on mental and social health. The study revealed the cognitive, regulatory, and interpersonal processes underlying HIV stigma and health. Feeling intense HIV stigma from the public and within the gay community may render MSM living with HIV more vulnerable to negative self-concept, maladaptive coping, and peer isolation, which contribute to poor mental and social health. To combat prejudice and discrimination against people living HIV, stigma reduction initiatives should be implemented not only in the public, but also in the gay community. Cognitive-behavioral interventions can also be used to restructure negative self-beliefs and build adaptive emotion regulation skills, which can improve stigma-related health outcomes among MSM living with HIV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite significant attention on gay men's substance use, much remains unknown about how environmental factors may contribute to gay men's elevated drinking patterns. We undertook a qualitative study of 51 gay bar patrons in San Francisco and Oakland, CA, in an effort to better understand the context of drinking motivations and management within the gay community in San Francisco and Oakland and to identify areas for potential interventions to encourage drinking moderation. A thematic analysis framework guided the process used to identify overarching themes and organize data around the social ecological framework. A focus on drinking motivations and management strategies emerged as a recurring theme across interviews. In this article, we describe alcohol consumption and management strategies that suggest that gay bar patrons experience encouragement from the individual, interpersonal, community, and structural levels to drink and that environmental and internal motivators for drinking often override participant's intentions and individualized strategies for moderation. Our findings suggest an unmet need for assistance in helping men to create effective harm reduction strategies around drinking, as well as an opportunity for creating interventions that address community- and structural-level motivators for drinking and management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on bareback behaviours and identities constitutes a wide field of academic work. Literature on this issue has focused on the associated psycho-sociological factors, on the evolution of gay sociabilities and on the discursive and socio-political uses of bareback sex. But few of these studies have explored local appropriation of the terms in non-English-speaking contexts. The present article aims to provide an empirical illustration of this process in the French context. It is based on a qualitative study of the impact of a series of sexual health workshops for men who do not use condoms (‘barebackers’). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the effects that constructions of lesbianism – generated and circulated widely throughout Anglo-American media – had on normative discourses of gender and sexuality amongst British migrants, living in the affluent coastal tourist town of Sitges, in Spain. Marketed as a cosmopolitan location par excellence, Sitges’ identity is built largely on its reputation for playing host to an internationally diverse gay community, subsequently understood to evince an atmosphere of openness and tolerance. And yet drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon (1952/1967) and Kelly Oliver (2001), I suggest that the visibility of feminine lesbianism in this context was resignified through those media images, constituting a ‘double misrecognition’, which saw all female homosexuality paradoxically become invisible at the exact moment representation was explicitly deemed to have been achieved. Far from elaborating a cosmopolitan ‘openness towards difference’, I argue that the resulting double misrecognition actually substantiated highly conservative gender norms, even as it masqueraded as the opposite. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the growing worldwide social acceptance of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. Topics discussed include consideration of LGBT-related matters as taboo in China; visualization of the gay community in Beijing, China with location based social media; and adoption of ray-casting rendering in medical, engineering, and environmental uses.

Through autoethnographic poetry, I take the reader on a journey through my experience of moving to Laramie, Wyoming, to become faculty at the University of Wyoming. As a gay male who is still haunted by the 1998 brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, I engage in storytelling: relaying my personal experiences of living in modern-day Laramie, showing the reader my fears, obstacles, and revelations through prose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding how people in any given population think about and experience their sexuality is fundamental to developing and implementing good health policy, research, and practice. Yet despite several decades of focus on sexual identity and HIV risk within health research, gay men as a category are often treated in an uncomplicated way. This article reports on focus group discussions held with 45 gay and other men who have sex with men in New Zealand to identify how they talked about issues of gay identity and gay community/ies. The men negotiated and renegotiated their gay identity and being gay was reported as just one part of most men’s lives. Many men did not like to be labeled as gay and downplayed aspects of their gay identity. Only a few men proclaimed being gay. Men reported very mixed experiences with the gay community/ies. Understanding how men experience being gay, provides information vital to enhancing policy, research and practice responses to gay men’s health issues. A major challenge for health service provision to appropriately engage with men who have sex with other men but resist being labeled as gay was identified. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article I offer a discourse analysis of Tiziano Ferro coming out in a regulatory Italian context. The critical texts for analysis come from the first page of the entertainment section of two Italian newspapers, Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica, where Ferro, an Italian pop star, came out of the closet in as public a way as possible. The pages contain a letter from the singer, other articles (editorial and comments), an interview and images. I present a discourse analysis of these newspaper pages, highlighting how the construction of this narration of coming out, with its ideology-laden and rhetorical discourse, combined visual aspects and written texts. In this way I deconstruct the narrative of coming out; I discuss the intertwining of the regulatory discourses so that homosexuality is made acceptable in the Italian social landscape, and the consequences of this coming out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relevance of community in the face of mounting individualism remains a pressing sociological issue. Social fragmentation challenges traditional communities of shared identifications and collective memberships while flexible relationship options lead sociologists to question the real benefits of friendships and the viability of personal commitments. These issues are sharply defined in current debates about ‘gay community’ and whether sexual practices can generate solidarity among a diversified social group. AIDS educators have long relied on notions of ‘gay community attachment’ and sociologists enthusiastically explore the innovative potential of gay and lesbian friendships for rethinking community today. Drawing evidence from a national e-male survey of the social relationships and sexual behaviour of over 4000 gay and bisexual men, we suggest that community pessimism is exaggerated. We contest unified sexualized notions of (gay) community and identify a potential for solidarity within these men’s friendships, sexual relationships and personal communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

America's popular culture war narrative has often portrayed the evangelical community and the gay community as fundamentally oppositional groups whose range of disagreements center around arguments over the morality and nature of homosexuality. Against the backdrop of these arguments, we undertake a qualitative study of a congregation of gay evangelicals, specifically investigating how pastoral leadership attempts to manage sexual relationships amid a congregation that is firmly and self-consciously rooted in both its gay and evangelical identities. We look at the particular goals and ideals that pastoral leadership espouses for sexual relationships, and we explore how these goals and ideals represent, draw from, and potentially help integrate the congregation's competing cultural identities. We find that pastoral leadership strives for what we are calling a 'blended approach' to managing sexual relationships-an approach that simultaneously emphasizes traditional evangelical sexual norms (such as commitment, stability, monogamy, and longevity), while allowing these norms to be significantly tempered by a strong recognition of the private and public contexts that have shaped the gay community's understanding of sexual and relational life. We speculate that this blended approach to managing sexual relationships may be pointing the way toward future developments within some predominantly-heterosexual evangelical congregations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gay neighborhoods serve as vital places for gay men’s socializing, yet few studies have examined their contributions to gay men’s health—either directly or indirectly via residents’ social networks. Drawing from theoretical perspectives on community and networks, we test hypotheses concerning whether gay neighborhoods and social network factors are associated with patterns of recent illicit drug use among a sample of 740 urban gay men from New York City. Higher odds of drug use were observed among individuals who resided in gay neighborhoods, had networks composed predominantly of other gay men, and had increased socialization with gay men. Network factors did not mediate associations between gay neighborhoods and drug use. These findings highlight the need to better contextualize the health risks faced by gay men by accounting for both neighborhood and network structures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the hierarchy of masculinities, old men and gay men are clearly subordinated. Many assume, therefore, that old gay men are doubly stigmatized; however, we argue that the picture is decidedly more complex. In this article, we explore the bodily experiences of aging through analysis of intensive interviews with 10 gay men who are in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. We focus on the interpretations and strategies these gay men use to make sense of their aging bodies. We identify several themes relating to how these men think about their own bodies, the bodies of other gay men, and their place within gay communities. Their aging corporeal experiences allow us to examine ageist notions about aging and being old and to explore how this thinking, which valorizes youthfulness, shapes their aging experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the representation of Hindi motion picture actors in mass media. Particular attention is given to the emergence of some actors as gay icons in India and in the diaspora. Based upon analysis of the way celebrities in the motion picture industry in Bombay, India, also known as Bollywood, are represented in India's press, reveals that the media has played a central role in this emergence. The article focuses on Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan and points to a trend in actors confronting and negotiating sexually ambiguous onscreen and off-screen roles.

This article analyses the inequality of access of people to the international policy process. It is argued that this presents an important challenge for global social policy considerations. The work explores the question of how these inequalities are produced, maintained and reproduced by looking at the relationship between international organizations and non-governmental organizations. As an entry point discussions of social exclusion are introduced and then linked to the concept of durable inequality. This move provides a way of looking at how conditions of exclusion are maintained and reproduced over time. Two instances of IO/NGO relationship are looked at as illustrative examples. The first case looks at the processes whereby international gay and lesbian organizations are trying to obtain formal NGO consultative status with the United Nations by applying to the UN's Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). The second case looks at the role of NGOs within the formal structure of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), which has created a new perspective for international organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines discourses of gay visibility in the online gay community of StraightActing.com. In this discourse the "flamer" and other "gay-acting" gender performers are frequently criticized for fear of their power to teach gay and straight people that one particular type of gay person is the norm. The author argues that this conceptualization of the term norm attributes gay visibility the power to construct a singular gay identity as preferred and positions gay men to fight among themselves for dominance over that one identity. It is essential we conceptualize the power of the visibility as able to produce multiple conventions of gay identity. The battle over control of a "gay norm" demonizes those who perform different degrees of transgression and impedes progress toward queer liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically examines how the public health governance of HIV/AIDS has constructed the racialized biopolitics of the gay Asian Australian community. The old biopolitics of health that excluded the Asian at the turn of the 19th century is now eclipsed by a new biopolitics that foregrounds the racialized body as a site of inclusion. The new biopolitics has emerged from within policy innovations in Australia's multicultural sexual health programs. Since the mid-1990s, the diversity of Asian communities was recognized in various AIDS councils through the employment of ethno-specific social workers, carers and peer-to-peer educators. This article problematizes how diasporic gay Asian sexuality has emerged in queer, mainstream and modern Australia through such a viral politic of containment. These policies, I argue, have paradoxically contributed to the production of a new queer Asian Australian body aesthetics that has enabled the conditions of possibilities for new sexual subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has long been argued that stereotypes have led many gay Asian men to have negative feelings about themselves and other gay Asians, to the idealization of white men as potential partners, hostility, towards other gay Asians, internalization of the stereotypes as passive and submissive, and being sexually objectified by some white men. To counter the effects of the stereotypes, critics and theorists of the gay Asian experience suggest increasing the visibility of Asian role models in the gay community developing a strong sense of self-identity by choosing Asian men as potential partners, and encouraging involvement with the mainstream gay community. In contrast, we explore resistance to the stereotypes at a personal level, using narratives obtained through a series of interviews to analyze the ways in which gay Asian men negotiate and (re)frame the social stigma associated with their bodies and desire for white men. We argue that gay Asian men do not simply accept the negative stereotypes imposed by the dominant culture; rather, they actively resist and continuously reconstruct meanings about their bodies and desires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gay men's use of the internet for social and sexual purposes is now so common that some predict an end to gay bars. In New York City, where this study took place, the use of the internet by men to meet other men seeking sex without condoms, called bareback sex, has created concerns among public health and gay community HIV/AIDS workers. This study of six popular bareback internet sites seeks to understand the nature of this new online sexual culture, initially by investigating the sites themselves through the methodology of cyber-cartography. That investigation suggested that masculinity as an analytic in gender studies might offer some value in understanding what was happening on these sites. Issues of race and ethnicity also emerged to challenge any singular notion of masculinity. This paper suggests that masculinity itself might need some recalibration, and that we may also need to rethink these sites as evolving ethical sexual cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the issue of gay men being victimized while they are on vacation. The article asserts that tourist victimization in general is an issue that receives very little attention, yet both heterosexual and homosexuals tourists are highly likely to suffer criminal victimization. The article analyzes whether the problem is more prevalent in the gay community. The article reports that through its findings it did discover that gay men do receive a higher level of victimization than heterosexuals. Several other findings were discovered in the investigation, including most of the crimes are not reported, gay men's lifestyle choice does play a role in the victimization, and offenders of homophobic crimes are usually other tourists.

This exploratory study investigated the experiences that older adults infected with HIV/AIDS had accessing medical and social services, and compared their experiences to those of younger infected adults. Thirty-four individuals between ages 30 and 65 were interviewed, and data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The study found that overall, older adults aged 50-plus were able to access the medical and social services they needed to cope with being infected. Most study participants reported positive experiences with accessing medical services. Like younger adults, older adults accessed a variety of medical services and organizations, although to a slightly lesser degree. Older adults also accessed a variety of social and emotional supports and social organizations to a similar or greater degree than younger adults. The older adults’ positive and directive attitude, knowledge of the disease, and available supports, in addition to living in the gay community, explain their ability to access services. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Discusses the histories of public sex and sexual sites conducted within queer communities, which surfaced clearly during the AIDS epidemic. Link between queer geographies and social spaces; Attitude of gays toward public sex; Impact of the AIDS crisis on the sex-related activities of gays.

Through the personal narratives of four gay men coming of age during the 1970s, this paper questions the relevance of the modernist ‘coming-out’ story in Ireland. This story, so prevalent in British and North American studies documenting the history of the gay and lesbian movement there has remained largely untold in Ireland. This paper reveals a uniquely Irish ‘coming-out’ experience shaped by tire schools, families and communities in which tire men lived and whose stories cannot be adequately explained within a modernisation perspective so frequently used to explain social change in Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]