Using interviews and friendship mapping with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and ally (LGBTQ+) community members as well as ethnographic observations, this dissertation analyzes post-gay LGBTQ community in River City, a small, Midwestern city. My findings reveal a formation I call ambivalent community: even as participants express a desire for LGBTQ community, they express a simultaneous desire for LGBTQ identities to “not matter.” This ambivalence is further demonstrated in the friendship networks and friendship talk of LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ allies, those supportive of LGBTQ people but who did not claim an LGBTQ identity. Friendship networks enable community formation in surprising ways: close friendships do not connect LGBTQ people to a sense of community, while, for non-LGBTQ allies, friendships with LGBTQ people create community connections. This project suggests that identity-based communities maintain desires for identities to become less relevant and acknowledgment that identities still matter. These communities are continually in flux, as LGBTQ community is created by and for allies; new LGBTQ organizations and events develop, emerge, and fail; and friendships between LGBTQ people both are and are not important. This project further challenges linear narratives of progress in a time of changing identity relevance and proposes ambivalence as a dimension of community that should be explored in other community cases. Overall, this project extends theories of friendship, kinship, community, and identity; challenges the conceptual boundaries of LGBTQ communities and identities; and identifies communities as simultaneously pre- and post-gay.

Last modified

• 10/16/2018

Creator

• Clare Marie Frostie

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N25F29

Subject

• Sociology

Keyword

• gender
• community
• rural sociology
• sexuality
• friendship

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright