A lot of my recent posts have been about my research on the
experiences of LGBT+ people in homelessness services and housing. This post is
about what a revelatory journey this has been for me personally. It’s also a
sort of late coming-out day post.
Some of you may have noticed that my last post – about getting
married – ended up being picked up by The
Times and we became national
news while in Hiroshima on our honeymoon. The only way I could be more out
than that would probably involve riding a unicorn across the pitch during the
FA cup final wearing nothing but a gold lamé thong and a rainbow feather boa.
I came out to my close friends at school when I was 15 and
was out when I went to university as an undergraduate. That was when I came out
to my parents, when I was 19. So I’ve not been closeted, but like many LGBT+
people I always felt awkward; ashamed even. Earlier in the year I listened to
Archive on 4 by Peter Tatchell about the decriminalisation of male homosexuality.
This included clips from the House of Commons debate about lowering the age of
consent between men. I was 12 when that happened in 1994, so just beginning to
realise my difference. The hatred and bile that was spoken snapped me right
back to the bullying and overwhelming, explicit homophobia of my teenage years.
So it’s very little wonder that I was not necessarily comfortable in my
sexuality.
So I was definitely not a Queer academic – my identity as a
gay man was not part of my research. In fact, when I did my MSc in urban and
regional planning in 2005/6, Richard Florida’s work on the creative class was
just coming to the fore and my now-husband suggested I might want to do my
dissertation on gay places. This was also a time when Newcastle Council had
actively planned for the “Pink Triangle” to boost economic development. I
rejected this idea.
Why? Well predominantly because I was being quite a bit “post-gay”,
in that Nate Silver “ethnically
straight”. There was a gay male lifestyle projected to me, through a
particular commercial gay male culture, that I did not (and still do not) feel
a great affinity too. I was never going to be Stuart in Queer as Folk. I also thought the world was “post-gay” (how naïve
I was) and that most discrimination against LGBT people was declining – the fight
had been won.
Because of this, my research to date, has been predominantly
heterosexual, and thus (I now know) heterosexist. By doing fairly “mainstream”
research, I was happily advancing my career. My identity did bump into my work
occasionally, such as when I had to come
out to my students to point out their own homophobia, but other than that,
it did not matter that much. My journey to ending up getting messy with queer
theory started with a
surprise finding about non-straight people from a project I was doing. Even
dealing with that, working out what it meant, and deciding to publicise, left
me feeling a little uncomfortable.
The other day I was reading Michael Warner’s introduction to
Fear of a Queer Planet (1993) where
he writes: "Queers do a kind of practical social reflection just in
finding ways of being queer. (Alternatively many people invest the better parts
of their lives to avoid such a self-understanding and the social reflection it
would imply.)" The bit in parentheses really
resonated with me – this was what I was doing.
In doing my current research project on LGBT+ housing and
homelessness I’ve had to confront queerness. On the one hand, I knew I had to
engage with lesbian and gay studies, and queer theory, to understand how other
people have understood queer lives. Also, I have had to read transcripts from
people who have experienced horrible things, including homophobic and transphobic
abuse. That was a wake-up call to the amount of work we still have to do to
progress equality, and also drove me on to make sure my research helped make
the lives of LGBT+ people better.
And that introduction to queer theory has been immensely
eye-opening, particularly the concept of heteronormativity – as I suggested
when I over-analysed
my own nuptials. As ever, with critical theory, as an applied researcher it
does leave me in the position of: it’s great to deconstruct society, but how do
we reconstruct it again? One of the main recommendations from my research – the
routine collection of sexual and gender identity data – is problematic on this
score. It is suggesting the imposition of essentialist criteria, created by a
homophobic world, onto a queer world. However, here I side with Kath Browne
that it’s better to know so we can do something (especially about things such
as hate crimes) than to not know at all.
So now, I would say I am a queer scholar. The question which
emerges is how much will this impact on my research going forward? Will I queer
my wider research programme on broader aspects of inequality? Will I do more
research with the LGBT+ community? Will I do simple things like being more out
when I present my research or making sure I use pronoun introductions? I need
answers to these questions because it’s something I accuse policy
studies of not doing enough of in my most recent paper!
To conclude, I am now definitely out of the closet. And I'm happy to be accused of homonormativity.
