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 advisor: William A. Gamson / In 2006, Mariane Valverde announced the birth of what she called, “a new type in the history of sexuality” (155), the Respectable Same-Sex Couple. This work analyzes newspaper coverage of same-sex couples during the Massachusetts campaign for marriage equality to explore the content of and contours around that new socio-sexual category. The processes involved in the incorporation of lesbians and gay men into the governing relations of American society are used to explain the development of this type, and its replacement of the pathological Homosexual. The manufacture of respectability by movement activists is explored via the selection of “public face couples” as a framing strategy that links the lives of these couples to marriage itself and the hardships they suffer due to their inability to marry. The respectability of these couples and their incorporation as economic citizens is also linked to representations of professional status, upward mobility, economic success, and the creation of identity-based markets through entrepreneurial and consumptive practices. Boundaries around this respectability are evident in stories of failure, either to remain together as couples or to act in accordance with marital normative standards, while the boundaries between Heterosexuality and Homosexuality, and among and between same-sex and different-sex couples, are also being re-drawn as marriage becomes available. The broader historical transformation of lesbian and gay life is discusses in the development of new life-scripts becoming available. While these transformations have led to greater possibilities for the living of gay and lesbian lives, the absorption of these lives into governing relations also erases and expels other queer life practices and reinforces other forms of social inequality and injustice. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

"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.

This thesis examines whether the interrelationship of family and gay identity in South Korea is best understood as one of conflict, pitting a traditional, national, and filial constraint against a presumed global, progressive, and individualistic freedom, or whether it requires (or perhaps, in the narratives themselves, already provides) a different, more recursive understanding. This thesis explores the recursivity between gay identity and filial piety among college students in contemporary Korea while also providing a critique of a global gay paradigm that others may argue infiltrates Korean gay discourse. The aim of this ethnography is not just to collect the stories that these young South Korean college men tell about their experiences of being gay and a son, but to trace how my position as a researcher and a friend are shaped by my experiences with other gay Korean men and how those positions are intimately tied to this ethnography as a whole.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Syracuse University, 2009. / "Publication number: AAT 3381574."

The years between 1989 and 1993 witnessed a sea change in the fabric of contemporary artistic practice, with a sudden embrace of previously marginalized identities on the part of museums, galleries and other institutions. This dissertation traces how sexuality, race and gender came to be placed at the center of discussions of contemporary art, and examines the ways in which artists responded to the sudden embrace of marginal identities on the part of museums and other art institutions in the early 1990s by harnessing the potential of this newly increased visibility, and also by developing strategies to offset the spectacularization of their identities. In particular, I focus on the collision between this new institutional desire for difference and the emergence of a notion of queerness that is specifically anti-identitarian and thus in conflict with the imperative to produce art about one’s identity. The dissertation is structured around four exhibitions that each played a crucial role in establishing this reorganization of the art world. This sequence of exhibitions narrates the larger structural shift through gradual steps, but each chapter also serves as a case study, since distinct notions of power emerge from the individual exhibitions. Tied into these divergent, sometimes incompatible understandings of power were competing understandings of the ways in which identity could be engaged politically and aesthetically. In particular, I focus on how a melancholic approach to queer subjectivity was materialized in art at the time, on the resurgence of documentary practices, on psychoanalytically inflected artistic interventions into museum spaces, and on the emergence of new forms of artistic critique.

My project looks at current conceptualizations of identity relating to gender and sexuality in order to understand how queer individuals enact gender as connected to their non-normative sexuality. I will use the notion of "desire" through Butler's (1990) notion of performativity as a part of iterability that reproduces an opposition between what is intended and how it is perceived. This approach creates space to problematize the status of identities that posits the conception of fluidity and dialectic as attached to notions of gendered sexualities - the understanding that sexuality interacts with gender and that these two notions are not compartmentalized. The construction of these systems of categorization allows for an assumption of the role of sexuality as connected to gender that can then be read through discursive practices and performances. This research is placed within a post-structuralist and queer theory discussion that is used to understand identity as separate from an isolated core self and is rather comprehended through a particular connection of gender, sex, desire, and performance. By entering into a queer theory and post-structuralist discussion, this project aims to highlight ways in which gender and sex are not necessarily "intelligible" - in which one's gender enactment follows their sex, which then leads them to be attracted to the "opposite" sex/gender - and by doing so I will be able to understand how non-heterosexuals understand their own sexualized gender. The categories of gender and desire are not mutually exclusive nor are they dichotomous. According to Butler (1990), the heterosexual matrix addresses the power structures associated with hegemonic modes of discourse and thought; therefore, my project embraces this approach to gender and sexuality and how these understandings create a unique performance of repetition that further constructs an identity. This study specializes in the reformulation and re-articulation of a distinct consciousness of compounded identities that are comprised of a sexualized gender involving the performative interplay of sexuality on gender for queer individuals. In addition, this project seeks to understand how queer individuals form, understand, perform, and enact their evolving gender identity as connected to their sexuality. Specifically my research asks: 1) How do queer individuals narrate the construction of their particular identities? 2) How do queer individuals enact their gender as connected to sexuality? and 3) How do queer individuals describe their identities as marginalized? In order to answer these questions I conducted 20 interviews with queer individuals in Portland, OR aged 18-35 in order to get a broad range of life experiences. The use of one-on-one interviews allowed me to get at the interpretative perspective of the participant such that they can clarify the connections and relationships they see between their own sexualized gender enactment and the world around them. This also allowed access to acquire information about the social interplay of gender, sex, and desire and how these individuals may or may not place importance on their queer identity and the processes involved.

Rebellion and repudiation of the mainstream recur as motifs throughout Christopher Isherwood's novels and life, dating back to his early experience of the death of his father and continuing through to the end of his own life with his vituperative rant against the heterosexual majority. Threatened by the accepted, by the traditional, by the past, Isherwood and his characters escape to the margin, hoping to find there people who share alternative values and ways of living that might ultimately prove more meaningful and enlightened than those they leave behind in the mainstream. In so doing, they both discover that the margin is a complicated place that is more often menacing than redemptive. Consistently, Isherwood's fiction looks at margins and the impulse to flee from the mainstream in search of a marginal alternative. On the one hand, these alternative spaces are thought to be redemptive, thought to liberate and nourish. Isherwood reveals that they do neither. To explore this theme, the dissertation focuses on three novels, The Berlin Stories (The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin), A Meeting by the River, and A Single Man, because ach of these novels corresponds to marginal journeys of Isherwood--namely, his sexual and creative exile in Berlin from 1929 to 1933, his embrace of Hindu philosophy, and his life as a homosexual. Each of these novels positions characters outside of the mainstream in order to subvert a redemptive message and depict the margin as a very dark and dangerous place. Chapter 1 focuses on the period from 1929 to 1933 when Isherwood lived in Berlin and on the collection entitled The Berlin Stories, which includes The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin. That fiction tells of the variegated landscape that was Weimar Berlin. In that landscape, Isherwood discovers and examines others who, like himself, seek alternatives to the mainstream: the bohemian Sally Bowles, the Landaurer family, who as Jews fear the rising Nazi tide, and the politically ambiguous Mr. Norris. His portraits of these people and the world they inhabit expose not only the darkest corners of mainstream Berlin, but also the futility of attempts to flee from the mainstream to more satisfying alternatives. Chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to Vedanta, one of the six schools of Hindu thought that would become central to Isherwood's life from July of 1939 until he died in 1986 and that is at the heart of Isherwood's final novel, A Meeting by the River (1967). In that work the margin and the mainstream are juxtaposed throughout. Rhetorically, the novel is rich and clearly one of Isherwood's finest. One approach to the novel emphasizes the redemptive power of the margin. The monastic life and all that it entails spiritually free one from the burdens of the material world. A compatible approach to the novel emphasizes the power of self-discovery as a bonding agent between the brothers. I argue for an alternative reading of the novel, one that emphasizes Patrick's journey and the implicit peril of the moral relativism endorsed by Vedanta. Patrick is nothing more than a con artist. And finally, Chapter 4 examines Isherwood's finest novel, A Single Man, the story of George, who is left alone after the death of his lover, Jim. Isherwood's homosexuality asserts itself both covertly and overtly throughout the novels, though today many of the positions reveal themselves as nascent attempts to understand sexual identity in personal, social, and political terms. A Single Man is Isherwood's most sophisticated and probing look at what it means to be a homosexual. The militantly political is ever present. And yet, the novel is in many ways a contemplative piece, one of stunning beauty that grows out of the simple fact that George's lover of many years has died. In reflecting on the cottage where they lived, George reminisces early on that "they loved it because you could only get to it by the bridge across the creek; the surrounding trees and the steep bushy cliff behind shut it in like a house in a forest clearing. `As good as being on our own island,' George said." In essence, George and Jim cut themselves off from the world. They live unto each other and in a community of like-minded people. Together on the margin, they are content and fulfilled. And yet, when Jim dies, George is abandoned and adrift. He is deprived of mainstream consolation--public memorials, spousal recognition, and children--and deserted; he is a sobering portrait of isolation and despair.

This dissertation considers a neglected legacy of the long 1960s (1959-1975): the struggle to form lasting connections across seemingly irreparable social divides. Through a comparative analysis of North American novels by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Linda Hogan, Tim O'Brien and Susan Choi, I identify a common story their works all share: the narrative of affiliation. These novels of affiliation, I argue, represent the creation of lateral bonds of attachment among individuals of different races, ethnicities, genders, sexualities and classes. As a transgressive and unruly form of interpersonal relationship, affiliation works to bridge divisions by joining together the contradictory feelings of erotic desire and friendship. Defining an overlooked sub-genre of the post-1960 North American novel of development, this project illuminates the heterogeneous bonds of solidarity that undoubtedly arose during the sixties, yet have been continually silenced by national discourses of identity and multiculturalism. In the wake of neo-liberalism, 1960s collective projects for social change, including the New Left, the civil rights movement, Black Nationalism, feminism, and the Asian American movement, among others, appear historically and ideologically separate, and even antagonistic. In stark contrast, this dissertation illuminates the common ethics of affiliation that aligned these disparate movements and was built from collaborative, immanent and provisional attempts at repairing suffering and disparity. Positioned not within, but alongside the fraught history of the sixties, this project offers a new portrait of the subterranean modes of experimental living that animated the era.

This dissertation examines the emergence of queer personhood among black publics and medical cultures in South Africa over the past century. Based on more than two years of fieldwork in South Africa, it contains both a historical and an ethnographic component. The historical research was comprised of archival research and 16 life history interviews exploring how black South Africans reference multiple cultural fields of sexual and gender identities to elaborate composite formations of sexual subjectivity and personhood. In the ethnographic component, I conducted participant-observation and 70 in-depth interviews among various groups, including a number of queer, non-governmental organizations and two global health, HIV-focused clinical sites. In these settings, I examined how social actors, in the context of community settings and global health and community development projects, address sexual and gender nonconformity. Existing scholarship on gender and sexuality in South Africa presumes the existence of only one cultural field of gender and sexual identities in this social field. In contrast, my dissertation argues that multiple cultural fields and sexual ideologies have emerged coevally here. One is a liberal field of sexual subjectivity consisting of globally diffuse concepts of sexual personhood that are historically rooted in a psychiatric style of reasoning, such as homosexual, heterosexual, etc.; the other fields are more localized and are based on ethnic cultural fields of sexual and gender identities. However, they have incorporated aspects of, a globally diffuse psychiatric and anatomical style of reasoning about sexuality. Whereas the `global' liberal sexual ideology dictates a strict alignment of sex and gender, and has done so for some time, the ethnic sexual ideologies I examine, until recently, have not. My work explores the interrelationship of these multiple cultural fields. It follows the enactment of composite sexual subjectivities that are produced when social actors call upon multiple cultural fields of meaning about gender and sexuality. The study demonstrates how race and class mediate the co-emergence of these multiple cultural fields, and how they are entwined with political and economic ideologies and global health knowledge systems. The introductory chapter maps the theoretical and empirical terrain as well as the main questions that are discussed and proposed through the rest of the monograph. The second chapter is a historical analysis of gendered and sexual personhood among black South Africans during the twentieth century. Chapter 3 maps how discourses about cultural authenticity are being used to both contest and constitute LGBTQ sexualities as African. As these cultures and sexual ideologies co-emerge, Chapter 4 examines how they have become entwined with particular political traditions and ideologies during the past century. Chapter 5 explores the ways that biomedicine and public health only reference the a liberal sexual ideology when producing knowledge about black queer bodies and populations in the context of global health HIV interventions. Specifically, I explore the enactment of the MSM and WSW epidemiologic risk categories within HIV science. In Chapter 6, the disjuncture between global health knowledge and everyday experiences of gender and sexuality are highlighted through an ethical case study of the implementation of the HIV intervention known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP. The case study concretely demonstrates how the symbolic violence enacted by medical cultures, which only reference the liberal cultural field, conditions structural violence in the form of unjust distribution of health resources among queer groups. The analyses presented in this dissertation suggest new avenues for queer and feminist anthropological inquiry throughout the sub-Saharan African region. In particular, this scholarship contributes to a novel understanding of the political economy of global health and sexuality by exploring how knowledge production and circulation about sexuality within global health contributes to gendered health disparities.