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Negotiating Black & Gay: Collective Identity Making in a Youth Health Organization

Sun, August 23, 2:30 to 4:10pm, TBA

Abstract

This paper explores the strategies used by Black gay young adults to respond to homophobic messages and experiences throughout the life-course and to claim a simultaneous gay and black identity. Based on 50 in-depth interviews and over two years of ethnographic participant observation at UpLiftLA, a youth-development and HIV prevention organization in Los Angeles, this work highlights how negotiations of seemingly incompatible racial and sexual identities occur within the organizational space. Drawing on Hunter’s three-type identity negotiation model of racial and sexual identities (interlocking, up-down, and public-private), I identify how these ideal-types come to be via organization-based socialization. I propose that UpLiftLA provides an environment to counter the negative messages received about the concurrent nature of their sexual and racial identities by transmitting messages and instructing one another about the different strategies to lessen negative responses from others within their communities through a process of narrative storytelling. In studying the young men who frequent the organizational space, I emphasize the continuous negotiation of these identities as they are re-shaped, challenged, and fortified. Thus, this project highlights responses to external monitoring of racial and sexual identities, while simultaneously displaying the dialectical processes of creating community-accepted Black gay identities.

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