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This article examines how two lesbian mothers from a bigger empirical study navigate conflicting demands emanating from social expectations to be "good mothers" and the imperative to be "out". Drawing on in-depth narrative interviews based on their subjective cityscapes of Cape Town and their sexual life stories, the article examines how the participants construct and perform their mothering and sexual identities, while negotiating their relationships with their children. This negotiation is analyzed through the lens of the counter narrative – "private resistance/public complicity with good mother ideologies. The discussion explores the participants" thinking behind their mothering practices as they negotiate their, at times, conflicting interests between mothering and enacting their lesbian sexuality. These negotiations reveal the dynamic, complex understanding required of coming out processes and performing motherhood which form part of their queer world-making practices. Their productions of queer world-making reveal their lesbian motherhood as sites which undermine the binaries of being in/out of the closet, a lesbian/mother, good/bad mother. Rather their navigations of the identities of lesbian and mother should be considered as enactments of living in "borderlands". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses two queer comics from Finland in the 2010s, H-P Lehkonen's Life Outside the Circle (2017-2018) and Edith Hammar's Homo Line (2020), analysing them as identity work and acts of queer world-making. Both comics depict migration and foreground identity formation in relation to place. The analysis focuses on the intersectionality of queer identities, marked as minority positions with regard to power structures related to gender and sexuality--where a binary conception of gender and heteronormativity dominates, with systemic hierarchies related to place and different national and regional cultures. Utilising the genre conventions of romance and autobiography, the comics renegotiate hetero- and cis-normative identifications and envision alternative queer spatial formations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores Black queer country music listening, performance, and fandom as a source of pleasure, nostalgia, and longing for Black listeners. Country music can be a space for alliance and community, as well as a way of accessing sometimes repressed cultural and personal histories of violence: lynching and other forms of racial terror, gender surveillance and disciplining, and continued racial and economic segregation. For many Black country music listeners and performers, the experience of being a closeted fan also fosters an experience of ideological hailing, as well as queer world-making. Royster suggests that through Black queer country music fandom and performance, fans construct risky and soulful identities. The article uses Tina Turner's solo album, Tina Turns the Country On! (1974) as an example of country music's power as a tool for resistance to racial, sexual, and class disciplining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the relationship between black masculine performances, the club space, and men on the "down low” (DL). Some black men who have sex with other men, who dis-identify with normative descriptors of sexuality, refer to themselves as “men on the down low.” The assumption about DL men, in recent publications, is that they do not reside in identifiably gay or queer spaces. This essay examines “The Gate”—a gay black club in Chicago—as a space which allows DL men to negotiate their masculine ideals and queer desire, challenging the traditional closet-threshold paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]