"I'm not proud, just gay"

Through their language, the young people in this sociolinguistic analysis reject stereotypes from within queer culture and strive to be “normal”.

This journal article details research with an LGBT youth group. The young people live in a conservative, working-class, Northern English town, where they experience homophobia and ‘othering’ regularly. The article explains the strategies that they use to negotiate this; they reject certain stereotypes from queer culture (such as Gay Pride or being ‘camp’) and aim to minimise the relevance of their sexuality to their social identity.

It is argued this reflects both the influence of neoliberal, ‘homonormative’ ideology, which casts sexuality in the private rather than public domain, and the stigma their sexuality holds in their local community. These findings point to the need to understand identity construction intersectionally. 

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