Moving “Out,” Moving On: Gay Men's Migrations Through the Life Course

Abstract

Research in the field of sexuality and space has begun to explore the relationships between gay and queer sexual subjectivities and migration. Much of this research examines the regulation and policing of queer international migrants or identity formation processes among younger queer people migrating within countries. This study, although located partially within the second category, broadens and deepens existing accounts of gay men's migrations within countries by focusing on life circumstances and events beyond an initial coming-out process and considering the migration experiences of gay men at multiple points in the life course. This study uses life course theory to contextualize the migration narratives of 48 self-identified gay men in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and Washington, DC. The findings lend credence to recent claims that migration is central in the lives of gay men and other queer people but extends the concept of gay migration to include more than just the disclosure or initial development of a gay identity. They reframe migration as a tool used to negotiate a variety of life circumstances and transitions (e.g., establishing careers, creating meaningful community identities) rendered challenging by variegated landscapes of stigma and inclusion in North America.

性慾与空间的场域之研究, 已着手探讨同性恋及酷儿的性主体和迁徙之间的关联性。该研究多半检视对于酷儿国际迁徙的管制与维安, 抑或是年轻的酷儿在国内迁徙的身份认同形构过程。儘管本研究部分属于第二类的范畴, 但却透过聚焦超越最初出柜过程的生命境遇与事件, 并考量男同性恋者在其生命历程的多重时间点中的移居经验, 扩展并深化对于男同性恋者在国内进行迁徙的既有解释。本研究运用生命历程理论, 脉络化四十八位来自加拿大安大略省渥太华以及美国华盛顿特区、自我认同为男同性恋者的迁徙叙事。研究发现印证以下主张: 迁徙对男同性恋者及其他的酷儿人们的生活而言至关重要, 但也延伸了男同性恋迁徙的概念, 用以包含不只是同性恋身份认同的揭露或是最初的发展。它们将迁徙再概念化为用来协商北美的社会污名与包容使之具有挑战性的各种生命境况与变迁地景 (例如建立事业、创造有意义的社群认同) 之工具。

La investigación en el campo de sexualidad y espacio ha empezado a explorar las relaciones entre las subjetividades homosexuales y la migración. Un gran volumen de esa investigación se ha dedicado a examinar las regulaciones y el control policial de este tipo de migrantes internacionales, o los procesos de formación de identidad entre los homosexuales más jóvenes que migran entre países. Aunque ubicado parcialmente dentro de la segunda categoría, el presente estudio amplía y profundiza los registros existentes de las migraciones internas de homosexuales varones, concentrándose en las circunstancias de vida y eventos que ocurren tras el proceso inicial de dejar de esconderse y considerando las experiencias migratorias de hombres gay en múltiples puntos del curso de la vida. El estudio utiliza la teoría del curso de la vida para contextualizar las narrativas migratorias de 48 hombres auto-identificados como gays en Ottawa, Ontario, Canadá, y en Washington, DC. Los hallazgos aportan credibilidad a recientes afirmaciones de que la migración es central en la vida de hombres gay y gente de similar condición, pero extiende el concepto de migración gay para incluir otras cosas además de la revelación o el desarrollo inicial de una identidad gay. Estos hallazgos replantean la migración como una herramienta que se usa para negociar una variedad de circunstancias de la vida y transiciones (e.g., estableciendo carreras, creando identidades comunitarias significativas) revestidas como retos por variados paisajes de estigmatización e inclusión en Norteamérica.

Key Words:

• gay
• identity
• life course
• migration
• queer

关键词:

• 同性恋
• 身份认同
• 生命历程
• 迁徙
• 酷儿

Palabras clave:

• gay
• identidad
• curso de la vida
• migración
• homosexual

Life course theory considers how individual subjectivities such as age, gender, and ethno-racial identity converge with particular place-embedded networks of relationships and institutions to shape the timing and nature of life events such as labor force entry, childbirth, marriage, and relocation (Elder 1985; Mulder and Hooimeijer 1999). The life trajectories of individuals who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or queer, however, are examined less frequently. ¹ The burgeoning literature on geographies of sexualities, perhaps in an effort to avoid the type of structuration and categorization critiqued by queer theory (Sullivan 2003), has also been hesitant to choreograph events in queer lives. This article consequently seeks to establish some of the patterns of one life event, migration, which has been described as central in the lives of queer people (Cant 1997; Knopp 2004).

The literature on queer migration focuses mainly on heteronormative national immigration policies (Mountz 2010), diasporic transformations of queer cultures across international borders (Manalansan 1995), HIV/AIDS diagnosis and care (Ellis and Muschkin 1996), and, to a lesser extent, early-in-life, within-country, usually rural-to-urban moves associated with coming out (Weston 1995; Cant 1997; M. Brown 2000). Less is known, however, about how migration might be employed by queer people throughout life and across a variety of historic and geographic contexts. This article addresses this gap by examining the migration narratives of forty-eight gay-identified men living in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and Washington, DC, and situating the narratives within the participants’ broader life histories. The narratives suggest that gay men migrate to both navigate specific life events (e.g., labor market entry, partnering) and to facilitate lifelong processes of identity development—not just processes of coming out. The findings reveal, on the one hand, that gay men's migrations are as diverse and everyday in nature as those observed elsewhere in life course research. On the other hand, they also demonstrate that migration is particularly central in gay men's lives because of the precarious social and institutional contours they must navigate.

Applying a Life Course Lens to Gay Men's Migrations

Social scientists have increasingly employed the life course as an alternative means of examining life events and changes frequently explained through pregiven, biologically driven, stage-sequential models of human development or life cycle (e.g., Levinson 1978). The life course acknowledges that differing social, institutional, and geographic contexts shape the progressions of individual lives. These contexts, coupled with the ways in which an individual's age, gender, or ethno-racial subjectivities affect their experience, create significant variations in the timing, patterning, and experience of the life course—both across groups (e.g., men vs. women) and within those groups (Bailey, Blake, and Cooke 2004; Hopkins and Pain 2007; Cooke 2008; Bailey 2009). Similarly, migration is now understood less as a universal response to economic or demographic pushes and pulls and more as an individualized process contingent, for example, on gender, class, age, and ethno-racial subjectivities and identities (Silvey 2004). Thus, researchers have begun to study migration as spatial tool through which individuals negotiate life events and individual identities by shifting or switching—at a given point in time—the social or institutional contexts in which they are located (Kobayashi and Preston 2007; Bailey 2009; Finney 2011).

Research on the timing and sequencing of life events such as childbirth and labor market entry (Elder 1985), as well the impact of migration on those events (Bailey, Blake, and Cooke 2004), has tended to focus on age and sex groups or on heterosexual couples and families. Increasingly, however, life course research has considered the gendered and ethnically differentiated social dynamics that inform the timing and impact of life events (Cooke 2008; Finney 2011). Sexual identity, which is not easily categorized and frequently absent from large-scale data sets, is only rarely considered in life course research (but see Hostetler and Cohler 1997; Kertzner 2001; Barker, Herdt, and de Vries 2006) and even less frequently with regard to migration specifically (but see Cooke and Rapino 2007).

The positioning of “homosexual” as a deviant identity in the Anglo-American world (Halperin 2000) created distinct differences between the life courses of gay men and their heterosexual counterparts. Gay men have not historically had rights to marry or raise children, and the legal and social impact of anti-gay stigma has been and continues to be uneven across space and time (Hostetler and Cohler 1997; Kertzner 2001; Smith 2008). It follows, then, that gay men might relocate to shift, facilitate, or speed up events (e.g., coming out, partnering) that might be impossible or more difficult in a different location (Barker, Herdt, and de Vries 2006). The remainder of this article investigates how the variations in gay men's experiences of individual development, social support, and institutional infrastructure—both across places and as distinct from heterosexual men—inform their migration decisions across the life course.

Methods

This study includes the life narratives of forty-eight self-identified gay men living in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and Washington, DC (Cohler and Hostetler 2003). Using two participant-driven snowball samples (Frank and Snijders 1994) that began with personal contacts or service agency referrals, the author conducted twenty-four semistructured interviews in each city between October 2009 and May 2010. Participants were twenty-four to fifty-nine years old; had moved between six months and twenty-eight years prior to being interviewed; worked mostly in professional sectors such as education, health, and government; and identified as white, Anglo-Saxon, Hispanic, African-Canadian, Aboriginal, and other ethno-racial signifiers. Interviews lasted between forty-five and seventy-five minutes and were transcribed in full and coded by the author. In line with a constructivist grounded theory approach allowing for flexibility in the creation and ordering of codes and themes (Charmaz 2006), each transcript was analyzed once to establish broad themes, such as “coming out” and “employment,” and then recoded for subthemes. The life course emerged as a theoretical thread that connected all of the themes and explained differences in migration experiences and decision-making processes for men at different ages and life stages.

This study has two notable limitations. First, the focus on men who have moved excludes the experiences of those who have stayed relatively stationary during the life course. This is not to predetermine the importance of migration but to further understand the relationships among gay men's identities, life events, and migrations across the life course. Second, the study sites are not necessarily the most historically or culturally significant destinations for gay men in North America. At the same time, studying migrations to these midsized “government towns” offers a unique opportunity to examine how gay men's migrations are influenced by both urban hierarchies and the institutions of specific cities (see Lewis 2012a, 2012b).

Individual Development: Maturation and Mobility

Research in psychology and psychiatry has long positioned coming out, or disclosing one's sexual identity to others, as a central but singular transition marked by identity confusion and same-sex experimentation, identity assumption, and finally self-identification as gay (Troiden 1989). Much of the work on gay men's migrations within countries (Weston 1995; M. Brown 2000; Gorman-Murray 2007) has focused on coming out, perhaps contributing to an emergent discourse that “it gets better” once gay identities are disclosed and homophobic places are left behind (Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network 2012). From a social perspective, however, coming out—and the relocation that might be associated with it—is not a straightforward antidote to the long-term impact of social stigma on gay men's lives. Due to both legal prejudice in many jurisdictions and informal prejudice in family homes, workplaces, and social settings, gay men might continue to feel both “out of place” (Cresswell 1996) and “off-schedule” (Kertzner 2001) throughout the life course. Certain environments might force them to conceal their sexuality or to delay or forego relationships; in others they continue to experience significant stigma and discrimination.

Participants’ narratives demonstrate that gay men's concerns about their individual development vary across the life course. For men earlier in life who were initiating a process of coming out, moving was a more urgent, singularly focused act motivated by frustrations over “treading water,” anxieties over “getting out,” and desires to galvanize or realign life courses that felt stunted (see also M. Brown 2000). Sebastian, forty-two, who moved to Ottawa from a town in Nova Scotia about twenty years earlier, said that relocating was a way to ensure that he was “doing things that [were] age-appropriate at an age-appropriate time.” ² Later in life, however, men were less concerned about forming a newly “gay” sexual identity or making contact with “the gay community.” Sam, forty-four, who moved to Ottawa from the known gay center of Montreal in his early thirties, said, “I think [my gay identity] is becoming less prominent … than my Montreal days, just because I wasn't in that coming out phase … I think it's sort of a natural life cycle, I guess, in sort of the coming out process that you, um, start to wean yourself away from the community.” As the next sections show, however, relocation does not cease after coming out; rather, it is used to navigate a variety of life events rendered challenging by the geographically and institutionally variable nature of both anti-gay stigma and gay and queer inclusivity in North America.

Social Support and the Gay Community

Social support plays a crucial role in gay men's lives, not only in terms of facilitating identity formation but also as a source of lifelong security for men who have broken ties with families or might not have the opportunity to create similar family structures of their own (Hostetler and Cohler 1997; Kertzner 2001; Barker, Herdt, and de Vries 2006). As the participants’ narratives of their own identity development suggest, younger men's concerns often center on making first contact with an imagined gay community and finding initial opportunities to date and socialize. As Gorman-Murray (2009) suggested, men engaging in “coming-out migration” are also seeking comfort in the ability to define themselves vis-à-vis an accessible group of imagined gay compatriots. Often, the urban gay “scenes” in cities such as San Francisco, New York, and Toronto, acting as beacons for young gay men moving from elsewhere (Cant 1997), have been positioned as the central spaces in gay lives (Knopp and Brown 2003; Valentine and Skelton 2003). Recent studies have suggested, however, that large cities and the established gay scenes within them become less desirable, or even restrictive and disenfranchising, to gay men beyond an initial coming-out process (Waitt and Gorman-Murray 2011a, 2011b; Annes and Redlin 2012).

The participants who had moved as part of a coming-out process referenced the established concept of gay migration as a form of starting over that involves exchanging one set of social networks for another and inserting themselves into an imagined urban gay community (Fortier 2001, 410). For these men, the goal of moving was to dislocate themselves from relationships that they feared would become irreparably altered or damaged by coming out as gay and to gravitate toward communities that they felt would provide a security net (Gorman-Murray 2009). Daniel, twenty-eight, who moved to Ottawa from rural eastern Ontario in the early 2000s, said, “There's definitely a transition when you cut off your established connections to a community and then move to a new one where you have to rebuild it.” Consequently, participants who had moved earlier in life perceived the critical mass of the gay community, alternately defined in terms of “density,” “options for meeting people,” or a “large enough base,” as a crucial factor in their decision to move.

Both relative location and absolute location were central to these earlier-in-life migration decisions. While coming out, many participants felt it necessary to move a significant distance from home to disentangle themselves from existing social and familial networks with sometimes far-reaching tendrils (see also Annes and Redlin 2012; Lewis 2012b). At the same time, many purposefully chose a specific urban center that would provide a critical mass of other gay men (e.g., for dating and friends) and a community within which they could define themselves. Among younger single men, the perceived size of the broader gay community was typically described as an important factor. Among the thirty-three men who moved to Ottawa or Washington, DC, under age thirty, twenty-five of them (75 percent) moved from a locale smaller than their destination city, sometimes substantially (see Figure 1). Rick, twenty-seven, suggested that whereas Ottawa, a midsized city, might be initially attractive for younger men moving from rural areas (i.e., as a coming-out stopover), their subsequent relocations—at least early in life—would continue to move up the urban hierarchy: “Ottawa's seen as a transition city for a lot of gay men,” he said.

Figure 1 Place moved from, forty-eight self-identified gay men, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and Washington, DC.

In contrast, among gay men in midlife, identity might be defined more in relation to accumulated “families of choice” rooted in place and created at will, rather than the perceived size or social options of a pregiven urban gay community (Kertzner 2001; Weeks, Heaphy, and Donovan 2001; Waitt and Gorman-Murray 2011a; Annes and Redlin 2012). For two participants, this identity transition was analogous to moving away from an urban gay village. For Pete, forty-one, who left Montreal in his early thirties, the social life he had in Montreal's gay village had become restrictive: “Being in a big city like Montreal, you always like some people [but] you’re forced to hang out with [others] … [in Ottawa] you’re … not necessarily more exclusive, but [you have] more friends that are suitable to your lifestyle.” For Raymond, thirty-one, who had just recently chosen to relocate from Toronto to Ottawa rather than Montreal said, “I sort of was afraid that I’d get sucked back into that life that I had in Toronto where it was very sort of village-based … and I didn't necessarily want that again.”

Many of the participants in midlife also intended to stay in Ottawa or Washington, DC, because stable cultures of employment facilitated the types of long-term relationships that were crucial for social support and potentially for later-in-life networks of care provision (Barker, Herdt, and de Vries 2006). Their narratives show that migration triggers such as retirement, particularly for gay men whose accrued sources of social support extended well beyond the traditional family unit, were “necessary but not sufficient” conditions for movement (Bailey, Blake, and Cooke 2004, 1620; Mulder and Hooimeijer 1999). Ashton, forty-seven, described the logic accordingly:

We all have that discussion, so when you retire, are you going to stay in Ottawa or are you gonna move on? And a lot of people were like … I thought I’d be going somewhere else but I look around and I think, I have all my network of friends here … if I move away I've gotta build it all from scratch.

Declining preferences for large urban communities—and for moving in general—among men in midlife were also observed in the data for participants’ next anticipated migrations. Among the twenty-nine participants who were under forty at the time of the interview, twenty-one (72 percent) anticipated moving to a larger city and another six (21 percent) planned to stay (two were unsure). ³ Among the sixteen men over forty, only four (25 percent) anticipated moving to a larger city, six (35 percent) planned to stay, and the other six (35 percent) planned to move to somewhere smaller (see Figure 2). The mixed responses show that although migration continues throughout many gay men's lives, affinity for the liminal spaces of the scene or the repeated moves associated with “queer identity quests” (Knopp 2004) might erode as the life course progresses.

Figure 2 Destination of next anticipated migration at time of interview, forty-eight self-identified gay men, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, and Washington, DC. Note: Does not include two “not sure” responses.

A gradual weaning from the gay community was not necessarily a universal, seamless transition for all men in or approaching midlife. Some were reluctant to leave the safety of the gay villages they had come out in. For others, reaching midlife without having attained a coupled, stationary, “homonormative” lifestyle (Duggan 2002) rendered a midsized city like Ottawa a socially restrictive place where singlehood felt like failure (Hostetler and Cohler 1997). Sebastian, forty-two, observed: “Ottawa has a good infrastructure to support a long-term relationship lifestyle … but … after five years of being single in this city … the infrastructure to support going out isn't there.” Sebastian's comment suggests that a bricks-and-mortar gay scene—something Ottawa was observed to lack—continues to be important for men in midlife who have not “caught up” (or choose not to catch up) to a homonormative life course.

Participants’ narratives also showed that the perceived importance of locating oneself within a known urban gay community depends on historical context. For the few men who had moved fifteen or twenty years prior to being interviewed, their social supports were often gained from participating directly in gay rights and HIV/AIDS movements after arriving in Ottawa or Washington, DC. One participant who moved from Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the 1980s said, “What I sought [in moving to Ottawa], of course, was, you know, acceptance and a community … but at that time when I moved here … it was starting to grow. So I grew with it, and the things that I probably expected or sought were the things that I was creating or helping to create” (Adrian, fifty-six). His portrayal of HIV/AIDS activism as an early “point of entry” into urban gay communities provides a corollary to existing studies that focus on HIV/AIDS diagnosis as an impetus for return migration, sometimes from a large city to a smaller one (see Ellis and Muschkin 1996). Yet many men's narratives also suggest that points of entry into the gay community are now more diffuse than they were in the past. The Internet, for example, has not only made it easier for gay men to research potential destinations but has also perhaps decentered the role of the urban gay community in providing social support (Bryson et al. 2006). As James, forty, said, “As a general rule, we don't need to go to clubs as much to meet people; there's the Internet, there's those kinds of things.” Such narratives suggest that visible, geographically concentrated villages and scenes play a temporarily limited role in gay men's migration decisions and, possibly, a slowly declining role in the provision of social supports to gay men and other queer people (but see Lewis 2013).

Institutional Infrastructure and Community Identities

As previous life course research has suggested, the social and spatial trajectories of individuals’ lives are shaped not only by shifts in individual priorities and desires but also by the institutions they encounter across the life course (Hopkins and Pain 2007; Bailey 2009). For gay men, access to the institutions that might facilitate different life events (e.g., coming out or establishment of careers and community roles) is more historically and geographically uneven than those for the general population (Hostetler and Cohler 1997). Early in life, participants frequently distanced themselves physically and psychically from places where they felt marginalized or excluded, such as high schools, summer factory jobs, and communities centered on the heteronormative family and highly gendered work–home divisions. As previous narratives suggested, the institutions sought elsewhere were those that would provide safety and facilitate making first contact with the gay community. “One of the first things I did when I came to Ottawa was go to Pink Triangle Youth Meetings and just kind of met some people,” said Derek, thirty-one.

Later in life, however, as “the social and existential meaning of homosexual identity becomes less clear” (Kertzner 2001, 88), gay men's decisions about where to live might be based on career security and the desire to impact their communities in a meaningful way. Although both Ottawa and Washington, DC, have distinct histories of regulation and oppression among gay civil servants (e.g., through systematic expulsions), the civil service sectors in both cities now promote inclusion through clear antidiscrimination protocols, the addition of gay and lesbian professional groups to most key agencies, and (in some cases) the provision of same-sex partner benefits (Lewis 2012a). Many men therefore targeted the capital city as an environment that might help overcome the insecurities they experienced elsewhere. Mark, forty-nine, who moved from Newfoundland to Ottawa in the early 1990s, feared being outed and potentially fired while working as a Catholic school teacher. Randall, forty-five, who moved from Halifax, Nova Scotia, also in the early 1990s, said that his racialization had both affected his entry into the labor market and rendered coming out impossible because it would have been yet another identifier of difference: “The double whammy of being both Aboriginal and Black meant that no matter how clever I was, no matter how good my portfolio was, um, how well I presented myself.” Adam, thirty-four, who had only recently sought out a transfer from an Ohio branch of a U.S. government agency to the DC headquarters, said that the institutional (although not legal) embeddedness of gay inclusion in federal government offices made it “very comfortable to have [gay men] working without any issues in just about every federal agency … [he] didn't get a sense of that in Ohio.” These comments not only show the importance of institutional cultures for gay men in the labor force but also suggest that migration decisions among gay men are not about consumption (Duggan 2002). Rather, they concern economic production and security.

For other participants, moving was connected to opportunities to create identities through participating in advocacy, service, and community building (although not always gay-related). Some had left behind places where they felt unable to contribute meaningfully to their communities. Pete, forty-one, for example, had quit coaching youth baseball in his town in Quebec for fear of becoming the target for “easy assumptions” about his conduct with the players. Rick, twenty-seven, discussed the difficulty of doing gay advocacy work in London, Ontario, a city that he felt was suffused with “3M [corporation], London Life [insurance company] moneyed sort of blueblood conservatives … and a serious history with homophobia.” After moving to Ottawa or Washington, DC, participants had frequently joined gay and lesbian professional organizations and performed pro bono work for national and local gay media. Many had also attended local-cum-national events such as equal rights protests on Parliament Hill in Ottawa and fundraisers sponsored by DC's Human Rights Campaign (HRC)—the chief U.S. national gay rights organization. In this way, particularly among men in midlife, the institutions of the capital city provided opportunities to create a secure livelihood and make meaningful contributions to advocacy and community—what Shane, twenty-seven, called “an important part of [the gay] experience”—even as the allure of traditional gay homelands like Montreal and San Francisco had declined over historical time and across their individual life courses.

Conclusions

This exploration of gay men's migration decisions through the life course, although not exhaustive, reveals complex motivations and considerations for migration contingent on age, life stage, and other subjectivities. In particular, the narratives reveal important patterns in the motivators for migration, the relationships between identity and migration, and the changing landscape of potential migration destinations for gay men. For men who had moved at younger ages, relocating was bound up with plans to explore their sexual identity or disclose it to others and to exchange (at least temporarily) a previous home for a new, usually larger one. For them, “the big city” had provided evidence of potential social and romantic contacts (e.g., high numbers of local profiles on gay dating sites) and institutions that might facilitate coming out or meeting others (e.g., support organizations). For men in midlife, moving—or the decision to not move—was more related to desires for secure economic livelihoods and meaningful community identities. Over time, however, these divisions have perhaps become less stark. With the advent of the Internet, younger men are perhaps less likely to make a “leap of faith” coming-out journey to the nearest gay homeland than they are to carefully research the sexual as well as community and professional potentials of a variety of places or to come out entirely in an online context before moving. By the same token, some men might feel that they should wean themselves from the “scene” at a certain age, yet yearn for it after they have moved to a smaller city with a more limited social infrastructure or when their relationship status changes from partnered to single.

Migration and identity formation are still strongly interlinked for gay men beyond the coming-out process, particularly because the channels of social and institutional support and, alternately, exclusion, remain particularly variegated for this population. The aspects of identity developed through relocation also tend to change over the life course. Early-in-life migrations often entail establishing a sexual identity itself by finding romantic partners or friends to go out with. Later-in-life moves might involve seeking out places where inclusive workplaces and organizations are dense enough to foster meaningful professional and community identities, particularly because gay men might not have the opportunity to raise children or participate in the child-related activities that often ground heterosexual men's identities later in life (Kertzner 2001). Consequently, a secure and meaningful gay identity is not something attained in a singular journey of moving out and coming out but through lifelong (and multijourney) process of “becoming” (Worth 2009).

Finally, the narratives suggest a landscape of potential destinations for gay men altered radically from the homeland–hinterland binary suggested by Weston (1995). Amidst an improved but still uneven landscape of gay rights and protections (Smith 2008) and more geographically diffuse, politically institutionalized modes of advocacy (Smith 2005), the declining profile of homelands such as San Francisco might create preferences for more “ordinary” cities (G. Brown 2008). These cities might lack historically significant and geographically concentrated “scenes” and “villages” but offer institutional configurations that promote secure and meaningful livelihoods.

These three observations suggest that gay migration, like all migration, is highly interdependent with and contingent on life course events (Cooke 2008, 262) and not always foregrounded in gay-specific events (e.g., coming out, HIV/AIDS, gay neighborhood formation) that have long dominated research in this area. New research on gay and queer migration could perhaps focus on the ongoing relationships between sexuality and more mundane processes (e.g., job-seeking and economic security) that—because of the long-term stigmatization of gay identity—can be more challenging than, or at least geographically distinct from, those of the general population. Continued use of a life course approach in both sexuality and space studies and migration can thus promote more fulsome understandings of gay and other queer identities and how individual places—and movement between those places—might facilitate the health, well-being, and inclusion of queer people in a range of life stages and locational contexts.

Notes

1. In this article, queer is used to denote individuals who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered. Although queer has also been framed as a political position that rejects categorizing sexual identity, it is used here to refer to identification with any sexual subjectivities different from or outside of heterosexual norms. Gay, in contrast, refers to gay-identified men and the self-ascribed identity of the forty-eight men considered in this study.

2. Pseudonyms are used to protect the identities of the participants.

3. Participants in the thirty-to-forty and over-forty categories demonstrated similar patterns of preference. Percentages do not add up to 100 due to “not sure” responses.