Gay Identity Development

Gay Identity Devlopment will be the topic for my PhD dissertation. The follow is a (long) exerpt from my qualifying exams that asked me to sketch out the study. (As is typical for the exams, I wrote about 25 pages total in 48 hours, so some of the writing is a little rough--please excuse that.) 

I have a longer literature review that details more explicitly the historical nature of identity and makes a stronger arguement for the need to extend the current reserach (most of which was done in the late 70s and early 80s).

I. Warrant for the study

            Current theories of gay identity development focus primarily on the coming out process for gay and lesbian individuals. They start with the vague awareness that one might have feelings that are different from others and end with a gay identity that is fully integrated into other aspects of the personality. While they may have accurately captured the coming out process, they do little to inform individuals on how this process happens. They also fail to account for the different ways in which a gay identity manifests itself and evokes specific behavior. This exploratory study will attempt to frame a method and direction for examining these issues.

            The American landscape for gays and lesbians has vastly altered since the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City, which many see as the beginning of the modern gay and lesbian civil rights movement; there have been changes to the way that gayness is perceived in society since the major research on this topic has been done. AIDS, for example, changed the way that society saw gay men as well as the ways in which gay men saw each other (Epstein, 1996; Monette, 1998). It redefined the issues that bounded the community together (Kramer, 1998; Shilts, 1998). The advent of the internet, too, has altered the type and style of interaction within the gay community. Individuals are coming out at earlier ages, there is greater and less negative media representation of queer lives. Not only has consensual gay sex been decriminalized by the Supreme Court; lower courts have actually found support for gay marriage, Constitutionally. These changes were, for the most part, unthinkable in the early 1970s when homosexual development was opened up as a valid research topic by its depathologicalization by the American Psychiatric and American Psychological Associations. The academic study of gays and lesbians has also evolved (Halberstam, 1998; 2005). Queer studies is a valid course of study at many institutions of higher education (Piontek, 2006; Wilchens, 2004); its implications have not been well studied within educational theory, let alone practice (Butler, 1999; 2004). What this means is that the current theories are incomplete and outdated.

            This lack of study of the implications has had its consequences in the gay male community. There has been a rise in HIV infection rates among young gay men since 2000, for example (Centers for Disease Control, 2005). Anecdotal evidence suggests that many of these new infections are among individuals who felt that high risk behavior (drug use and the unprotected sex that often accompanies it) was simply a part of what it meant to be a young gay male in an urban center. A better understanding of how young men internalize these ideas and fail to gravitate to healthier lifestyles would be eminently beneficial to the gay community and would have likely applications to how other groups of people come to see (self-)destructive behavior as normal or appropriate.  

II. Literature Review

Any point of departure for a historical study is necessarily arbitrary. To select a given event or moment in time as the beginning of something inevitably excludes individuals or events that preceded it, which may have contributed to that event’s happening. That said, such beginning are a necessary evil, the one that I chose as the first important development in the study of gay identity was in 1869, when Hans Ulrich first introduced the word “homosexual” into the modern vocabulary (Miller, 1995). He was not alone in his interest in sexuality, Walt Whitman, for example, was writing about “the love of comrades” around the same time. Also, the punishment for sodomy was reduced in England from death to 10 years to life in prison in 1861 (Spencer, 1995).

But what Ulrich did, by giving a new, more clinical, more medical name to sodomites, was open the door for individuals to have a non-criminal and non-moral label to apply to themselves. Others would pick up on the phenomenon of the homosexual; Freud, for example, would write extensively about the topic just a few years later. It was in this time that there was a movement, pushed by the medical and psychological communities that saw homosexuality, though still deviant, as inherent to individuals. Not a moral corruption, but a medical one that should not be criminalized. Freud, in his “Letter to an American Mother” (1935/1963) wrote to a woman distressed that her son was a homosexual; his position is clear and unambiguous:

Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, gut it nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, is cannot be classified as an illness, we consider it to be a vibration of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. … It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too. (1)

Freud and his followers further explicated this position in terms of an unresolved Oedipus complex. By today’s standards, this position sounds incredibly negative, but for the time it was quite a liberal position (Ferenczi, 1914/1963).

            In the era preceding WWII, the combination of urbanization and a lessening of the criminalization of homosexuality, a larger community started to develop in the US as well, in New York City. This culture was thoroughly explored by Chauncey (1995) in his book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. This new community, much like the Harlem Renaissance, which also flourished during this time, crossed boundaries of gender, class, and race. Within this community, however, homosexuality was becoming a defined culture for the first time. There was a language and a manner of dress, behaviors and rules. Interestingly, though, these individuals only identified themselves as homosexual if they were the passive partner in sex. They embraced the femininity that had been associated with homosexuality since the Renaissance, but now, they seemed to do it for different reasons. Now the lack of masculinity was associated not with moral corruption, but with mental ones. Spurred on by the psychoanalytic belief that homosexuality was a deformed form of masculinity. The men of NYC embraced this idea and took to calling themselves fairies and wearing women’s sweaters and jewelry.

            After World War II, the climate chilled immensely for gay men, even in the urban centers. Police started cracking down on gay bars and raids and arrests were common (Marcus, 1995). But these fairies had tasted a sense of freedom and desired to return to that state. The individuals found themselves in stronger and stronger positions of leadership and influence within the city. Where a medical pathology was an advancement at one point, gay men and women wanted more now. They wanted an identity that was not pathological, not deviant. They were beginning to see themselves as normal. They convinced a psychologist, Evelyn Hooker, in 1957 to publish a paper that was a study of the psychological differences between heterosexual and homosexual men. She found none. Although it would take another 16 years, her paper and the ones the succeeded it contributed to the removal homosexuality as a psychiatric and psychological disorder. This opened the way for the study of the development of a gay identity as a normative, rather than a disordered process.

            Following quickly on the heels of the de-pathologicalization of homosexuality were a quick flurry of studies that examined the developmental process of gay identity (Cass, 1979; 1983; 1984). This process was modeled after the developmental models for racial identity. By the 70s the world had seen the civil rights movements for both blacks and women. Gay men and women decided to model their approach for rights after these individuals. The models for gay identity reflect that thinking. Work that has been done since has not primarily altered this general stance (D’Augelli, 1991); attempts have been made to connect gay identity to other forms of development (Abes and Jones, 2004) without questioning the underlying premises. More contemporary scholars, outside the field of psychology, have questioned the comparison of sexual orientation to ethnic identity.

            Foucault, for example has problematized the “tendency to relate the question of homosexuality to the problem of ‘Who am I?”…Perhaps it would be better to ask oneself ‘What relations, through homosexuality, can be established, invented’” (1997). This represents a new way of thinking about being gay. Like the previous historical epochs where individuals were religious abominations, criminal sodomites, psychological inverts, self-designed fairies, or ethnic gays, this new generation of homosexuals has new ways of being. David Halperin (1995), for one, calls it becoming queer as opposed to simply being gay.

            There have been further historical turns in the history of gay identity that have yet to be examined thoroughly in the literature of higher education. The advent of HIV/AIDS is usually addressed as a prevention issue, for example, but it is not unreasonable to think that the reality of this disease has also changed the way in which gay men relate to their sexuality. Just as the rise of cities was documented as vital to the creation of a gay identity, as it allowed people to connect with others like themselves; so too can the rise of the internet be seen as a new way for individuals to “meet” each other. This cannot be ignored in any theory that hopes to capture the development and expression of a gay identity in contemporary society. Finally, there is a need to examine the ways in which the current media and political discussions and representations of gay men in America effect the perceived options available for being gay for younger gay men.

III. Research Questions

This, exploratory, qualitative study will examine the ways in which young gay men actualize their sexual identity. It will attempt to uncover the ways in which their self-image, peers groups, and media work together to create an understanding of what it means to be gay. Where previous studies have examined the coming out process as an integration of a gay identity into the whole person, this will explore how young men’s understanding of the meaning of that identity impacts their behaviors and decision making processes.

If you made it this far, congratulations and thank you for reading. :)