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Gay neighborhoods, like the legendary Castro District in San Francisco and New York's Greenwich Village, have long provided sexual minorities with safe havens in an often unsafe world. But as our society increasingly accepts gays and lesbians into the mainstream, are \"gayborhoods\" destined to disappear? Amin Ghaziani provides an incisive look at the origins of these unique cultural enclaves, the reasons why they are changing today, and their prospects for the future. Drawing on a wealth of evidence--including census data, opinion polls, hundreds of newspaper reports from across the United States, and more than one hundred original interviews with residents in Chicago, one of the most paradigmatic cities in America--There Goes the Gayborhood?argues that political gains and societal acceptance are allowing gays and lesbians to imagine expansive possibilities for a life beyond the gayborhood. The dawn of a new post-gay era is altering the character and composition of existing enclaves across the country, but the spirit of integration can coexist alongside the celebration of differences in subtle and sometimes surprising ways. Exploring the intimate relationship between sexuality and the city, this cutting-edge book reveals how gayborhoods, like the cities that surround them, are organic and continually evolving places. Gayborhoods have nurtured sexual minorities throughout the twentieth century and, despite the unstoppable forces of flux, will remain resonant and revelatory features of urban life.

Smoking rates among young sexual minority women (YSMW) are disproportionately high as compared to heterosexual populations. While this disparity has commonly been attributed to the sexual minority stress process, little empirical work has explored what may protect YSMW from high rates of smoking. Using data (N = 471) from a cross-sectional study designed to investigate YSMW’s (age 18–24) smoking behaviors and correlates; we explore the relationship of LGBT community connections, YSMW’s social network characteristics, and stress to smoking behaviors (i.e., status, frequency, amount). Through this analysis, we find support for LGBT community connection as well as friendships with other sexual minorities as protective in relation to YSMW’s smoking behaviors. We discuss the implications of our results, highlighting the need for future longitudinal research and interventions designed to bolster YSMW’s connections to the LGBT community and their social networks.

IntroductionStudies emphasize that the time elapsed between self-awareness of one’s sexual orientation and its disclosure to others (disclosure gap) can be an indicator of psychosocial adjustment of sexual minorities.MethodsThis study examined the coming out experiences and disclosure gap of three generations of sexual minority men: adults, 25–39 years; middle-aged, 40–59 years; and seniors, 60 or more years. A sample of 274 cisgender men was recruited, with ages ranging from 25 to 79 years. Data was collected between 2018 and 2019.ResultsAlthough most men had disclosed their sexual orientation to significant others, there was a wide variation on the coming out timing and experiences across the three age cohorts. Senior sexual minority men realized and disclosed their sexual orientation later than middle-aged men, while the latter realized and disclosed later than their younger counterparts. The disclosure gap followed a similar trend increasing with age. Regression analyses revealed that high levels of self-stigma explained a larger disclosure gap among the middle-aged, whereas low community connectedness explained a larger disclosure gap among seniors. No significant predictors emerged among adults.ConclusionsOverall coming out experiences worsened with age, with the older cohort reporting realizing and disclosing their sexual orientation later in life, taking longer to come out after identifying as sexual minorities, and feeling less accepted by others after coming out.Policy ImplicationsThis study highlighted some of the social factors that may improve sexual minority’s psychosocial well-being and possibly counterbalance the negative effects of stigma, namely, connection to the LGBT community.

Sexual minority young people (SMYP) show higher levels of substance use than their heterosexual counterparts. This study aims to test potential LGBT community‐specific reasons assumed to affect substance use and their relationships to LGBT community participation/connectedness and substance use behaviour. Eight LGBT community‐specific reasons for substance use were tested in an online survey with 1,556 SMYP. Respondents agreed that the LGBT community had liberal attitudes towards substance use (80.5%, n=1,079) and that the media portrayed substance use as a part of the community culture (66.5%, n=904). Participants disagreed that excessive partying is a part of the community (34.7%, n=470). Significant but weak correlations between reasons and community participation/connectedness or personal substance use behaviour were found. Subgroup analyses indicated male and gay/lesbian participants showed differential agreement levels to some of the reasons. Young people’s perceptions of substance use within the LGBT community are not associated with community participation/connectedness or personal substance use. Further research is needed to better understand what factors lead to elevated levels of substance use in SMYP. This may assist in the development of adequate public health responses. Targeting problematic beliefs may have little impact on substance use in SMYP.

The issue of sexuality and human rights has generated increasing international attention in recent years. This is particularly the case in societies emerging from chronic ethnonationalist conflict, where scholarly debates on the impact of ethnonationalism on sexual rights, such as abortion and the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender people (LGBT), generate much controversy and division. It is with this disagreement in mind that this paper focuses on the influence of ethnonationalism on attitudes towards the legalisation of samesex marriage and abortion. Using nationally representative data from Northern Ireland, the results suggest that while ethnonational identity is a significant positive determinant of attitudes towards same-sex marriage within both the Catholic population and among supporters of their main political party (Sinn Féin), it is also a key negative predictor of attitudes to abortion, albeit solely among Sinn Féin supporters.

Given hostility within segments of LGBT communities toward same-sex marriage, how do Australian activists justify their efforts toward achieving marriage equality? In this article, we expand the social movement literature by examining how activists construct identity, meaning, and goals in contradistinction to others within the same movement. We draw on interviews with Australian lesbian and gay activists to examine what enables them to pursue the contested goal of same-sex marriage in light of internal movement critiques that marriage equality will undermine the significance of lesbian and gay identity and impair activism on other issues as a result of the view that equality has been achieved. We expand debates over the post-gay trajectory of lesbian and gay activism and identity by illustrating how activists attach different, what we term, mobilizing meanings, to the same movement goal which enables them to withstand internal movement critiques. We provide a typology of mobilizing meanings that can be applied more generally.

The present study explores the close friendship patterns of transgender individuals by considering the role of gender identity (trans men, trans women, non-binary) and LGBT affiliation (affiliated, non-affiliated) on friends’ identities. Participants were 495 transgender individuals who completed a questionnaire reporting their identities as well as the identities of their close friends. Friendship patterns were explored based on the number of friends who identified as transgender/cisgender, sexual minority/heterosexual, and LGBT affiliated/non-affiliated. Overall, participants reported more cisgender (vs. transgender) friends and more sexual minority (vs. heterosexual friends), suggesting that the majority of their friendships are experienced in a cross-gender identity context. However, important friendship patterns were distinguished across LGBT affiliation and gender identity of the participant. Trans participants who were LGBT affiliated (vs. non-affiliated) reported more transgender friends, more sexual minority friends, and more LGBT affiliated friends. With regard to gender identity, trans men reported more sexual minority and more LGBT affiliated friends when compared to trans women. In addition, trans women reported more non-affiliated friends than both trans men and non-binary individuals. Discussion focuses on the implications of the findings regarding the distinct experiences of trans individuals across gender identity and the common assumptions behind research that frames transgender experience within the larger LGBT community.

Mignon R. Moore brings to light the family life of a group that has been largely invisible—gay women of color—in a book that challenges long-standing ideas about racial identity, family formation, and motherhood. Drawing from interviews and surveys of one hundred black gay women in New York City, Invisible Families explores the ways that race and class have influenced how these women understand their sexual orientation, find partners, and form families. In particular, the study looks at the ways in which the past experiences of women who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s shape their thinking, and have structured their lives in communities that are not always accepting of their openly gay status. Overturning generalizations about lesbian families derived largely from research focused on white, middle-class feminists, Invisible Families reveals experiences within black American and Caribbean communities as it asks how people with multiple stigmatized identities imagine and construct an individual and collective sense of self.

The repression of sexual diversity prior to the advent of Pride is the subject of a growing number of documentary films released in the second decade of the 21st century, including Espino Diéguez's La memoria homosexual (Homosexual Memory) (2019). An analysis of this documentary as a case study reveals that the enunciad ve strategies of the documentary genre are suitable for the recovery of a queer audiovisual memory capable of rescuing experiences of shame and oppression from perspectives more clearly aligned with Pride. This kind of recovery of historical memory casts a double temporality as the narrative of memorialized experiences is determined by discursive premises that belong to the present historical moment -a time in which a hegemonic democratic memory coexists with the hypernormalization of sexual diversity.