This is a study of collective identity formation among Montreal gay men before 1970. Using a theoretical framework based on schema theory and discourse analysis, I show that the success of the gay movement after that date was founded on the efforts of men who identified as gay in the decades before gay liberation. In their daily lives, their involvement with gay friendship groups, and their participation in gay social life in the clandestine world of bars and other venues of gay sociability, these men created a complex web of knowledge in gay-specific schemata and discourse forms that provided the basis for a gay rhetoric to counter the social taboo on homosexuality. Using data from thirty life history interviews, I have documented in detail the raw's struggle to come to terms with their difference, the influence on them of family, peer groups and authoritative discourses condemning homosexuality, the ways in which they found and entered the gay world, and the processes of learning its social conventions, I have outlined the continuous growth of the institutional foundations of the gay world, especially bars, focusing on the similarities and differences between Francophones and Anglophones, as well as those between working-class and middle-class gays in Montreal I detail the social control exerted by police over gay men's lives and the growth of symbolic forms, including language and shared discursive themes, which the new gay spaces made possible and through which the collectivity was made manifest. Finally, I show that the increasing unwillingness of ordinary gay men to accept their ostracism led to the growth of a gay culture of resistance based on these shared schemata. The leadership of individual gay men in private and in public opened the way for the social, cultural and political transformations of the social organization of homosexuality after 1970.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.34522 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Higgins, Ross. |
| Contributors | Rousseau, Jerome (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Anthropology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001615946, proquestno: NQ36983, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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