Moving beyond homophobia, harassment and intolerance: gay male university students’ alternative narratives

Abstract

This paper draws on a small-scale qualitative study of the lived experiences of gay male students in their final year of undergraduate study at a UK university. In contrast to the narratives almost universally reported in academic literature, anti-gay victimisation and harassment were not experienced or framed as dominant discourses in the stories of the six participants. I discuss how despite heterosexuality being the assumed, expected and compulsory discourse at university, the participants made positive sense of their experiences, and how through careful negotiation they were able to address, explore and engage with their (homo)sexual identities and orientation. I challenge the common and (mostly) unquestioned practices of defining gay students solely on the basis of their negative accounts of their experiences, labelling them all as victims, and locating the entire population within a pathologised framework. Instead I advocate a nuanced and balanced perspective which acknowledges the alternate and non-victimised accounts of gay students to provide a more inclusive, comprehensive, fuller and richer understanding of their lived experiences at university.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Debbie Epstein, Katy Greenland and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper.