“Closed door” and “open and accepting”: Ambivalent LGBTQ community in River City

• In Event: 1466 - Section on the Sociology of Sexualities Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 8. Sexuality and Space

Abstract

Using interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and ally (LGBTQ+) community members as well as ethnographic observations, this paper analyzes post-gay LGBTQ community in River City, a small, Midwestern city. My findings reveal a formation I call ambivalent community: even as participants express a desire for LGBTQ community, they express a simultaneous desire for LGBTQ identities to “not matter.” This project suggests that identity-based communities maintain desires for identities to become less relevant and acknowledgment that identities still matter. This project further challenges linear narratives of progress in a time of changing identity relevance and proposes ambivalence as a dimension of community that should be explored in other community cases. Overall, this project extends theories of community, and place; challenges the conceptual boundaries of LGBTQ communities and identities; and identifies communities as simultaneously pre- and post-gay.

Author

• Clare Forstie, Farmingdale State College