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How do museums use displays, rooms, objects and written and oral narration to depict uncertain sexual reputations? This paper draws on observations at two museums: The Emily Dickinson Museum and The Jane Addams Hull House Museum. The women whose lives these museums depict have what we propose thinking of as"uncertain sexual reputations": that is, each figure's sexual reputation, among the general public and scholars, are either multiple and discordant (Dickinson) or cautiously uncertain (Addams). We argue that the museums use displays and artifacts-such as dresses, poems, and letters - to depict Addams and Dickinson as unusual women in order to convey their uncertain sexual identities in a palpable way. In so doing, these women's sexualities and sexual practices - whatever they may have been - become an aspect of their unusualness; unusual women envelop uncertain sexualities. Constructing these women as unusual draws attention to them as remarkable and out of the ordinary, yet doing so can also evade further discussion about their biographies or act as a kind of universal response to questions about uncertainty. That is, they use the presentation of actors as "unusual" to gesture to the possibility of a non-normative sexual history without having to consistently and overtly characterize their sexuality. While veiled, we propose that the "unusual female character" is itself a kind of (veiled) sexual reputation. We suggest that our findings might point to a broader trend in how people and institutions deal with other uncertain or controversial topics and reputations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I expand the act of queer visibility to include everyday acts of visibility. While other research connects queer visibility more to political activism or gender transgression, sixty-six LGBTQ people in a rural and urban site describe their everyday negotiations around acts such as being associated with their partner in public, responding to homophobia, and public displays of affection. In these instances, participants' own culturally influenced beliefs about sexuality influence how they choose to act and interact. Participants in the small town describe a moral framework of "respect" that compels them to refrain from acts of visibility while urban participants feel they have a "responsibility" to enact a visible gay presence. Contrary to other research that suggests that LGBTQs have moved "beyond the closet," however, the majority of participants in both sites more frequently describe refraining from acts of visibility due to a stated fear of consequences than engaging in them. Like the different processes of deliberation LGBTQs engage in based on acceptable social beliefs about sexuality, participants in the two sites differently map places that they consider safe and then act according to this intraindividual process of deliberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on interviews with thirty-five LGBTQ people in a rural region of the Midwest, this paper documents the "intragroup boundaries" that LGBTQ people draw between themselves and other gay people. Participants reject the urban, gay male norm depicted in media and popular culture, as well as in some academic scholarship. Contrary to other scholarship and hypotheses about how marginalized communities construct identity and community, LGBTQ people in this region also distance themselves from other gay people. And rather than draw on local culture to construct a distinctly rural gay identity, they instead assert an "individualism." LGBTQ people in this region describe drawing intragroup boundaries because of 1) the material, geographic, and cultural constraints making them unwilling and unable to identify with hegemonic depictions of what it means to be gay 2) a strategy for acceptance from the dominant heterosexual, religiously and politically conservative local community in which they live. Extending the concept of symbolic boundaries to include those who draw boundaries between themselves and members of their own sub-group, this paper highlights the unintended consequences and personal costs to LGBTQ people who employ this strategy, and the resulting difference and inequality that boundaries produce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]