Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 135-150). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 135-150). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 146-153). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Conflicting literature exists for the relationship between first disclosure, outness, sexual minority identity, and mental health among lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals. That is, while the relationship between LGB identity and mental health has been relatively consistently positive in the literature, the relationship between outness and mental health is more mixed. In addition, the way these constructs differ among race, sex, and sexual orientation are rarely examined. The present study examined the complex relationship between first disclosure, outness, identity, and mental health among 192 lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals collected from an online sample. The study explored differences on these variables by biological sex, race, age, and sexual orientation. The major findings revealed that bisexual males have less developed sexual minority identities and view their identities less positively than do lesbian, gay, and bisexual female individuals. In addition, bisexual individuals overall are less out and come out later for the first time in comparison to lesbian and gay individuals. In terms of race, Caucasians have a stronger and more positive view of their sexual identity in comparison to individuals of color. It was also found that individuals in later stages of sexual identity development experienced a more positive view of their sexual identity. In terms of mental health, it was revealed that a stronger sexual identity was related to better mental health. Greater degree of outness was found to overall have a moderately positive impact on mental health, though age of first disclosure of sexual minority status was, overall, not associated to measures of identity or mental health. When examined more closely, outness had a more complex, dual impact on mental health. Specifically, outness was found to have both positive and negative consequences for mental health, with identity development accounting for the positive aspects of outness. Directions for future research and implications for clinicians are also discussed.

Thesis (Ed.D.) in Educational Leadership--University of Maine, 2005. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 147-151).

Using surveys and interviews with Mississippi Christians, this study provides a more complete understanding of Christians’ beliefs and attitudes toward homosexuality and gay and lesbian civil rights. I analyze how Mississippi Christians make sense of their relationships with gay and lesbian friends and family members and how this differs based on their religious identity. I then consider how these beliefs and attitudes are influenced by social contact with gays and lesbians. I find Mississippi Christians’ views toward homosexuality and gay and lesbian civil rights vary widely from rejection to acceptance. The most conservative views are held by evangelical Protestants who set themselves apart from society through their beliefs about homosexuality. They feel that homosexuality is always sinful and describe almost complete opposition to gay and lesbian civil rights. On the contrary, mainline Protestants continue to move towards full assimilation with secular society. Many believe the Bible does not say anything about homosexuality and that the church should be accepting of gays and lesbians. Mainline Protestants also largely support gay and lesbian civil rights. Catholics fall in the middle of the continuum. They describe a greater degree of ambivalence about the sinfulness of homosexuality and describe conditional acceptance of gay and lesbian civil rights. Social contact with gays and lesbians did not influence evangelical Protestants beliefs and attitudes toward homosexuality or gay and lesbian civil rights. Similarly, conservative Catholics continued to hold on to their more conservative religious beliefs about homosexuality despite social contact. Conservative Christians’ subcultural identity which stands in opposition to homosexuality is stronger than the effects of social contact for evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics. On the other hand, social contact is often a strong enough influence to change beliefs and attitudes toward homosexuality and gay and lesbian civil rights for mainline Protestants and more liberal Catholics. This study demonstrates that conservative religion acts as a negative feature that deters the positive benefits of social contact to overcome prejudice.

No description available.

While the general social climate in the U.S. has become more accepting and tolerant of sexual minority individuals, heterosexist discrimination, prejudice and violence continues to affect LGBT individuals, families and communities. While much research literature exists on the experience of minority stress and the psychological consequences of minority stress on sexual minorities, little research has been produced that examines sexual minority coping. Within the last decade, heteronegativity has been suggested as a possible coping response to heterosexism. The goal of the present study was to understand sexual minority responses to heterosexism (including heteronegativity) in a variety of contexts and circumstances. The present study involved individual interviews with twelve adult, self-identified sexual minority participants. Utilizing Consensual Qualitative Research (CQR), an inductive qualitative methodology of data analysis, eight domains were discerned from examining the experiences of lesbian and gay men’s coping with heterosexist individuals, systems and environments. These domains were: (a) assessing sexual orientation in context; (b) observation of change; (c) messages/social influences; (d) social systems; (e) categorizing; (f) empowerment; (g) resignation; and (h) equality. Eight subcategories existed under the domain of assessing sexual orientation in context: family, childhood, coming out, heterosexuals, work, harassment, acquaintances, and general. The domain observation of change yielded six subcategories: general, personal, advocates of change, heterosexuals, family, and gay and lesbian community. Under the domain of messages/social influences, six subcategories existed: general messages, peers, heterosexuals, gender roles, media, and family. Five subcategories contributed to the domain of social systems and include: religious institutions, educational systems and institutions, political parties, systems and institutions, media and general. In terms of how individuals categorized others, the fifth domain, six subcategories constituted this phenomenon: general categorizing, social institutions, challenged assumptions, gender roles, beliefs about heterosexuals, and gay and lesbian. Empowerment is a domain comprised of five subcategories: disengagement, coming out, advocate, engagement, and values/beliefs. Four subcategories contributed to understanding the domain of resignation: avoiding confrontation, rationalizing, pressure, and suppression. And under the domain of equality, two subcategories were explicated: parity and social institutions. Results of the study were consistent with aspects of minority stress including stigma consciousness and stigma and self-esteem. One important contribution of the findings from the present study reveals three overarching components to coping with heterosexism. These components were discernment, disclosure and concealment, and self-empowerment. Implications for trainees, educators, and practitioners were outlined.

"Queer Things" takes the connections between homosexuality and materiality, and those between literary texts and cultural objects, as major repositories of queer history. It scrutinizes the objects that circulate within the works of Oscar Wilde as well as in the output of high fashion designers and the critics and consumers who engaged with them, in order to ask how gay identities and affiliations are formed and expressed through things. Bringing recent critical interest in the subtleties of nineteenth-century "thing culture" into contact with queer theory, I argue that the crowded Victorian object-world was a crucial location not only for the formation of social attitudes about homosexuality, but also for the cultivation of homosexuality's distinctive aesthetics and affective styles. In attending to the queer pleasures activated by material attachments that have otherwise been deployed or disavowed as stereotypes, my project reconsiders some of the most celebrated works of the gay canon, and inserts into it some compelling new ones. Furthermore, in illuminating the Victorian origins of modern gay style and the incipiently modern gayness of Victorian style, it adds nuance and new substance to our understanding of the elaborate material landscapes inhabited by Victorian bodies and represented in Victorian texts. The first part of the dissertation uses extensive archival research to excavate a history of queer men's involvement in women's fashion in the mid-nineteenth century. In the first chapter, juxtaposing accounts of the famous Boulton and Park drag scandal with a simultaneously emerging genre of overwrought fashion criticism, I argue that an (over)investment in fashionable objects and a detailed knowledge of fashionability became important sites for the develop of gay-effeminate social styles. The second chapter positions Charles Worth, founder of the modern system of haute couture, as the progenitor of a queer species of cross-gendered, non-heterosexual relations between male high-fashion designers and female clients. Though they are not based on same-sex eroticism, I argue that these relations deserve consideration as queer. The second part of the dissertation considers the representational functions of objects in several works across the career of Oscar Wilde. The third chapter presents a reading of De Profundis, Wilde's infamously hard-to-read prison letter, which focuses on how the text interweaves anxieties about the transmission of material objects into its complex affective structure. The fourth chapter considers the effects of the risky but irresistible attractions of that letter's addressee, the widely-loathed Bosie Douglas, on Wilde's aesthetic practice. Juxtaposing Bosie's charms with those of Algernon Moncrieff in The Importance of Being Earnest, and then moving to the little-read letters which document the final post-prison years of Wilde's life, I suggest that the frustrating states of intemperance and indolence become sites, for Wilde, of erotic excitement, artistic innovation, and political resistance.

Thesis (M.S.W.)--York University, 1998. Graduate Programme in Social Work. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 186-205). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ39237