Conditions of Living: Queer Youth Suicide, Homonormative Tolerance, and Relative Misery

Abstract

Despite the increasing social tolerance accorded nonheterosexual persons in many Western countries, queer youth suicide rates remain high. This opens the need to question not only how broad social conditions continue to make lives unlivable for many queer youth but whether queer community formations and representations that emerge within a tolerance framework provide supportive environments for fostering youth resilience. This article presents a theoretical approach to understanding the continuity of youth suicide by considering how queer community formations built on tolerance create new exclusions for some queer youth that can make a life unlivable in relation to peers. The article articulates the tolerance framework through a return to Dennis Altman's 40-year-old Homosexual Oppression and Liberation and the more recent “homonormativity” critique of queer politics. It examines how tolerance and homonormativity are implicated in exclusions and suicidality through the “relative misery” suicide thesis and the concept of frustrated aspiration.

KEYWORDS:

• Community
• gay liberation
• homonormativity
• GLBT youth
• suicide
• tolerance

Notes

1. The popular reliance on statistics tends to disavow the more important question of asking why some queer youth are more resilient than others (Savin-Williams, 2005, p. 183), thus risking the unwitting pathologization of queer youth. It remains that young queer lives are often (but not always) more difficult than the lives of those living in sexual normativity due to a range of social factors such as persistent heteronormativity, bullying, forms of shame, and instances of marginalization or exclusion, and this does currently involve increased risks that may lead to suicide and self-harm. However, to avoid depicting queerness as the risk in itself, the way in which we attempt to understand the sociality of being queer must occur through a lens that focuses on youth resilience, agency, changing cultural forms, and new or alternative understandings of sexuality. That is, queer younger persons are not vulnerable because they are queer; rather, there are greater risks of vulnerability resulting from social, cultural, and psychological factors that may be a result of the heteronormative environmental context in which that person is having, feeling, or expressing nonnormative sexual desires or behaviors.

2. The metaphors of eating that emerge from Altman's (1971) critical use of the phrase “share of the cake” (p. 129), Epstein's (1990) politics of the “piece of the pie” (p. 290), and in the Log Cabin Republicans’ politics of ensuring conservative queer persons have a “seat at the table” (Wagley, 2011) are instructive in exploring how language used in minority politics claims establish different intelligibilities of those claims in the context of the distinction between tolerance and acceptance/hospitality. By using the metaphor of the meal, the distinction becomes one of asking whether the lobby politics formation is structured within the equitably shared feast or if it is about the receipt of “table scraps.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rob Cover

Rob Cover, PhD, is an Associate Professor in Communication and Media Studies at the School of Social Sciences, The University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. His most recent book is Queer Youth Suicide, Culture, and Identity: Unliveable Lives (Ashgate, 2012).