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Martyrdom and American Gay History: Secular Advocacy, Christian Ideas, and Gay Assimilation" is an analysis of gay martyr discourses from the 1970s through 2014. In particular, the dissertation examines the archives, narrative representations, memorials, and media depictions of Harvey Milk, Matthew Shepard, Tyler Clementi, and AIDS. The project's primary focus is to investigate the role of religious rhetoric in facilitating American gay assimilation. Discourses of gay martyrdom reveal that secular gay advocates habitually employed Protestant Christian ideas in order to present gay Americans as similar to the dominant culture of straight Christians, a strategy that became increasingly prevalent by the end of the twentieth century after gays were blamed for spreading a national plague through sexual licentiousness. In turn, discourses of gay martyrdom expose the recurrence of Christian ideas in promoting, while concurrently foreclosing, the parameters of gay social inclusion. "Martyrdom and American Gay History" also questions the politics of martyrdom and analyzes why some deaths have been mourned as national tragedies. Milk, Shepard, and Clementi, the three most commonly-invoked gay martyrs, represent a narrow fraction of gay Americans that only includes white, middle-class, gay men. The dissertation demonstrates that discourses of gay martyrdom have promoted assimilation, not diverse sexual freedoms or capacious possibilities for queer lives. Ultimately, Protestant Christian dominance in the United States has been obfuscated whenever Christianity has been depicted primarily as an antigay monolith. Discourses of gay martyrdom reveal the role of Protestant Christian dominance in secular gay advocacy, and the ways in which Christian ideas have shaped and foreclosed possibilities for acceptable gay American citizens. / Religion

Philadelphia, like other major North American cities, has neighborhoods that are informally known as gay neighborhoods. This project examines how Philadelphia's Gayborhood is mediated, and how representations and markings of the Gayborhood are shaped by different discourses, namely tourism and urban development. Marking Philadelphia's Gayborhood justifies the presence of LGBT individuals in the city by linking LGBT lives to economic activity and "positive" urban change. This dissertation reads media texts about Philadelphia's Gayborhood against participant observations of everyday life and events in the Gayborhood, with particular emphasis on the activities of the Philadelphia Gay Tourism Caucus (PGTC). Starting in 2002, the PGTC formed and produced specific tourism materials targeting the LGBT community, including print and television advertising campaigns, the rainbow street signs, and a dedicated map of the Gayborhood. These products highlight the Gayborhood as evidence of Philadelphia's gay-friendliness. Philadelphia's attractiveness for LGBT travelers is rooted in the visible presence of the city's LGBT community; Philadelphia's established LGBT everyday life allows LGBT travelers to come and already belong in the city. To support this message, the PGTC and the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation market the city to both visitors and locals. New media platforms, namely social media, help promote events, both supporting local organizations, as well as creating visible LGBT everyday life to attract visitors. The meanings of the Gayborhood are then explored through its physical markings and LGBT events that emphasize its location. First, Philadelphia's Gayborhood is placed in the context of visibly and symbolically marking a "gay" city. While visual markers may provide indication of LGBT presence, certain symbols become stereotypical and caricatured, limiting the possible meanings of being LGBT-identified in public. Events such as the Pride Parade also serve to define the boundaries of belonging in the LGBT community. A central tension is the distinction between belonging and access, which are often conflated by an emphasis on legal, anti-discrimination discourses. LGBT history is also a central theme of Philadelphia's LGBT tourism promotion. By examining LGBT history walking tours, this project argues that not only do historical projects highlight stories that might otherwise be unseen, they also produce visibility of absences in contemporary discourse. The Gayborhood also functions as an archive exhibit, ultimately supporting a liberal project of belonging through economic and political activities. Parts of the archive are currently present, but access to the LGBT archive requires further inquiry or participation. By considering the Gayborhood as an exhibit of the LGBT archive, we also can consider aspects of the archive as restricted from the public, or still impossible to articulate intelligibly to the public. This project ends with a reconsideration of what it means to articulate and communicate ideas about LGBT identity in space. Current representations and understandings of the Gayborhood still serve a homonormative and homonationalist project that privileges the activities and everyday lives of wealthy, white, gay men. Returning to thinking about gay men's cruising and public sex, this project closes with an examination of how mobile communication technologies and methods allow for public sex to occur in new ways. Marked LGBT neighborhood spaces still have the potential to change how we understand the relationship between sexual lives and public space. / Media & Communication

In this dissertation, I analyze narratives about how gays and lesbians think about urban space and communities in relation to their sexual identities. My research addresses discussions about assimilation and acceptance of gays and lesbians into U.S. culture and the residential departure of LGBTQ communities from enclaves characterize by the late 20th century. I also consider the extent to which gay and lesbian adults have move beyond experiences of living in the "closet." Have gays and lesbians entered the urban mainstream, or are they still relegated to the margins? To answer this, I asked three other main questions. First, I asked if sexual identity was still considered to be an important part of decision making processes for those who identified as gay and lesbian, and if so how this influenced choices about urban space use. Second, under the hypothesis that sexual identity was still a factor in decision making regarding urban space, I asked if there were any differences for gays and lesbians with various intersectional identities. Given that we know other factors like gender, race, class, and family can influence these choices for most people, I wanted to determine if such factors played a role in these experiences. Third, and specific to the site of my research, I asked what places in Philadelphia held meaning for gays and lesbians with regard to their sexual identities and sense of community. I identified two main narrative themes that described how gay and lesbian people thought about and made decisions about occupying different places in Philadelphia. The first I refer to as the "assimilation narrative," which represents cultural acceptance and residential integration into mixed populations. The second narrative is what I refer to as the "marketplace narrative," which is based on the idea of maximizing the chances of finding compatible partners in the city, as well as the social ties and resources that come with participation in these social markets. I found that my participants employed both types of narratives, but assimilation narratives were much more common when talking about residential decisions, while marketplace narratives were dominant in a discussion of a symbolic and ambient LGBTQ community. The process of finding and participating in a sexual marketplace was facilitated by the prominent, visible Gayborhood district in the city. This was described as a place that was symbolically linked with the ambient LGBTQ community, and participants could typically rely on these to represent them and to provide opportunities to find marketplaces regardless of where they lived. Those with multiple marginalized identities, especially women and people of color, more often felt unable to rely on the Gayborhood to facilitate this process. These participants described difficulty feeling as if they belonged in many of the places there, which they often viewed as more representative of white, gay men. People in these groups frequently put more work into the process of finding or creating marketplaces for themselves. Assimilation narratives were much more common when discussing residential choices, since participants could often rely at least partially on the ambient community and visibility of the Gayborhood for marketplaces. Residential choices involved sexuality-related considerations, though narratives about this process were typically described as a way of avoiding unfriendly neighborhoods and minimizing safety risks rather than choosing to live in proximity to other gays and lesbians. Participants referenced 11 neighborhood areas as those most friendly or comfortable for gays and lesbians, and most of them lived among these areas. Those who did not live in these neighborhoods discussed the additional work they did to manage their identities and marketplace ties in relation to the other factors that outweighed sexuality. Assimilation narratives were less relevant when discussing living places like unfriendly neighborhoods and workplaces, and narratives about being in or out of the closet sometimes resurfaced there. Some groups were also described as uninterested in assimilation, and some participants struggled with balancing radical politics and the benefits of assimilating. My findings in this research are based on the qualitative analysis of 54 semi-structured interviews with adults identifying primarily as gay, lesbian, queer, and who identify themselves as being primarily interested in same-sex relationships. This group represented whites and people of color evenly, slightly more women than men, and people across a range of ages from 18 to 58 years. People with and without children were both represented in the sample. I also conducted a brief ethnography of the 11 neighborhoods most often associated with the dominant narrative themes. I present descriptive data profiles on these neighborhoods drawing on data from the 2010 U.S. Census and 2008-2012 American Community Survey estimates. In Chapter 1, I provide an introduction to this topic and my specific research questions and findings, as well as an overview of the theoretical framework and methods I used. In Chapter 2, I provide a historical perspective on gay, lesbian, and LGBTQ communities and neighborhoods both generally and in Philadelphia. In Chapter 3, I discuss the "Gayborhood," a downtown district that visibly and symbolically represented the LGBTQ community in this city. In Chapter 4, I explore how those with intersecting marginalized identities often failed to experience an inclusive marketplace in these supposedly shared spaces. I also discuss work these groups sometimes did to gain access to spaces that they could utilize to create a sense of place, shifting between assimilation and marketplace narratives. In Chapter 5, I discuss participants' choices to live in neighborhoods other than the Gayborhood, and how assimilation narratives involved identity management work in negotiating factors like family, economics, and safety in relation to sexual identity in these neighborhoods. In Chapter 6, I talk about how gays and lesbians drew upon social networks and technology when finding gay, lesbian, and queer places both in Philadelphia and when traveling. In Chapter 7, my concluding chapter, I address the limitations of this particular research, the possibilities for future research based on the findings of this work, and implications for both LGBTQ communities and individuals in thinking about who among us is being left in the margins of society while others among us find our paths into the mainstream. / Sociology

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Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Curriculum and Instruction / Jeong Hee Kim / Sexual orientation is only one facet of diversity (Banks et al., 2005), but teacher preparation may not adequately address sexual prejudice (Lamb, 2013). Sexual prejudice arises when heterosexuality is assumed to be the default for all students. School environments reinforce heteronormativity (Dean, 2010; Foucault, 1990; Himmelstein & Bruckner, 2011) such that when hate speech or physical violence occur against the non-hetersexual or the transgender student, teachers may not be prepared to respond appropriately. Prejudice toward gender or sexually variant students may not be adequately addressed in teacher preparation to challenge the reproduction of heteronormativity in school environments. A mixed method approach was followed to address the beliefs and attitudes of pre-service (undergraduate) and in-service (graduate) teachers toward sexual minorities through an online survey and face-to-face interviews. Group means of the PREJUDICE scale for each independent variable were analyzed for statistical significance. The total variance of the PREJUDICE scale was accounted for by personal characteristics only (political, 38%; religious, 9%; non-heterosexual friends, 18%; and family members, 5%; participant sexual orientation, 8%; and finishing the survey, 6%). Neither demographic nor educational characteristics accounted for statistically significant differences in group means of the PREJUDICE scale. College-level coursework completed in multicultural education did not significantly account for any of the total variance in PREJUDICE scores. Significantly lower levels of sexual prejudice were associated with having non-heterosexual friends and family members or being non-heterosexual, and there were no significant effects from educational interventions. However, one-on-one interviews provided stories of direct experience with sexual minority youth in K-12 classrooms. A majority of qualitative participants had questioned their conservative backgrounds and the familial/societal messages they had received regarding gender and sexual variance. Their questioning was strengthened by having non-heterosexual friends and family members. In addition, several participants had worked directly with sexual minority youth in their own school buildings and classrooms. Had this study been limited to a survey, the lived experiences of these pre-service and in-service teachers would have been lost. Having friends and family members who are non-heterosexual transcended their socialization and facilitated their development as social justice allies.