5
1
9780226072920
By Wayne Brekhus
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226072924
1 - Gay Suburbanites: A Case Study in the Grammar and Microecology of Social Identity
When I started my ethnographic research, I expected to tell a primarily descriptive story about people like Mark, who experience gay life in the suburbs rather than the city. From 1992 to 1998 I interviewed, hung out with, and interacted with a number of gay men in a suburban community located about one hour away from New York City (for more on methods, see the appendix). Since most studies of gay life and most popular images of gay culture come from the "gay ghettos" of large urban centers, I was interested in seeing how gay life in the suburbs might be different. It did differ, at least from the most visible facets of urban gay communities, in significant ways. Most gay life in the suburbs was mundane, uneventful, and at times indistinguishable from more general suburban living. One could see gay men mowing lawns, holding barbecues, attending church, driving their cars or SUVs to work early in the morning, coming home to their partners after work, supporting Republicans nearly as often as Democrats, watching baseball and football, and doing a host of other things that strike one as closer to public perceptions of what it means to be "suburban" than what it means to be "gay."
The ordinariness of their lives was not lost on the men I talked to, many of whom considered it odd that I wanted to study gay life in the suburbs when the more interesting setting of New York City was so close at hand. As one informant said with a laugh, "You're going to have a one-page thesis! There isn't anything to write about!" Expressing a sentiment shared by several other informants, he added, "You should go to New York City instead, then you'll have something to write about." For him, there was nothing especially definitively gay about the suburbs and thus nothing "interesting" for me to write about. In a similar story with an academic twist, a colleague of mine who proposed studying lesbian life in the Midwest had her funding proposal rejected by one reviewer who argued that the Midwest wasn't a good location for studying homosexuality; the reviewer suggested my colleague study lesbians on one of the coasts instead. Implicit in the reviewer's suggestion was the idea that the lives of Midwestern lesbians would be less interesting than those of coastal lesbians and even that Midwestern gay life was somehow less authentically gay. But the assumption that mundane, ordinary suburban gay men or Midwestern lesbians are somehow less authentically gay than visible urban coastal gays and lesbians is problematic.
By itself, the ordinariness of gay suburban living would have made an interesting enough story, but as I continued to spend time with these men an intriguing theory began to emerge along with the empirical story. I noticed that different "types" of gay men had conflicting ideas about how to organize their "gayness" in relation to their overall "presentation of self" and that this conflict seemed to have important implications for a more general theory of social identity. For some informants, being gay was a more important and salient facet of their lives than being suburban, while for others being suburban seemed to play a bigger role in their overall cultural tastes, politics, worldview, and lifestyle than being gay. I became especially aware of the role a suburban identity might play in their lives upon reading Baumgartner's (1988:1) ethnography of conflict management in a New Jersey suburb; I found that the initial comments of her suburban informants (who were not gay) sounded oddly familiar. They, too, suggested to their interlocutor that she shouldn't study the suburbs because "nothing ever happens" and it's "a boring place to look at conflict." Like my gay suburban informants, her nongay suburban informants also suggested that she should go to the city, as she "could find some good conflicts there." What I had initially assumed to be only a gay suburban reaction to studying gay life in the suburbs now appeared to be a more general suburban reaction toward selecting their communities for study when there were far more "interesting" things to study in the cities.
In one sense my informants' suggestions that New York would be more interesting were correct; the gay cultural milieu of New York's Greenwich Village provides an esoteric, colorful setting with a rich and inspiring cultural history. Gay men are visible, proud, and socially active in what is clearly one of the great centers of gay culture. But however interesting Village gay life is culturally, politically, and empirically, suburban gay life actually may have more to offer theoretically and analytically. By looking at gay men in the more socially mundane environment of suburbia rather than the gay-friendly enclaves of New York one can witness the multiple ways in which individuals manage a "marked" identity attribute like gayness in a culturally "unmarked" identity space like the suburbs. Gay suburbanites are an interesting case not only because they must manage a potentially stigmatizing gay identity but because they also balance it with a privileging suburban identity. As gay suburbanites have competing membership claims to both stigmatized gayness and privileging suburbanness, their identity strategies illustrate how one balances competing positions of stigma and privilege. Since most individuals have a combination of devalued and valued attributes with regard to the larger society, this has important implications beyond gay identity for how all individuals organize and balance competing ingredients of the self.
Despite the analytic advantages of studying the organization of the extraordinary where the ordinary is privileged, many studies of minority identities go to the spaces where the extraordinary is facilitated rather than negatively sanctioned, discouraged, or even oppressed. This is an analytic mistake because studying the most open environments selects against more covert and nuanced strategies of dealing with minority or extraordinary identities. Giving our theoretical attention to gay activists, leathermen, and drag queens in the city, for instance, misses the analytic importance of rank-and-file gays who may have the most to offer to our understanding of how identity is organized by the social averages rather than the social extremes (or outliers) in everyday social life. While it is certainly valid to study the most visible and dramatic tip of the iceberg, researchers should not ignore the rest of the iceberg just because it is less obvious and appears less dramatic when observed from the surface (see Brekhus, 2000).
Expressive, difference-tolerant spaces such as the gay ghettos of San Francisco and New York are very specialized places that tell us little about how identity is organized in the mundane, difference-submerging spaces where most people live. In gay ghettos (see Levine, 1979), as in other ghettos or enclaves, the everyday, the leisure, the political, and the work worlds are heavily concentrated in such a way that it is difficult to separate them out spatially and temporally, as one must if one is trying to measure changes of identity across different domains of social and cultural space. Since many identity strategies make use of spatial boundaries and separations, such ghettos provide an analytically truncated site from which to look at one of the most important facets of social identity: how people incorporate spatial and temporal variables into their socially constructed identity. Most studies of gay life choose the most visibly gay environments such as gay neighborhoods, pride parades, and bars, and thus systematically exclude from their analysis instances where individuals, perhaps even the very same individuals, are highlighting a side of themselves other than "gayness" or playing up the unmarked facets of their self (such as being middle-class, suburban, masculine, or white). The suburbs, by contrast, with their spread-out spaces and their often rigidly segregated commercial and residential areas, provide an ideal site from which to observe identity changes across social space. Moreover, with their location between urban centers and rural areas, they provide a view into the middle rather than the ends of the urban/rural continuum. Finally, they provide an ideal site from which to observe individuals playing up their "averageness" and their unmarkedness rather than highlighting their most distinctive facets of self. The suburbs of New York City proved an especially instructive research site because some individuals used New York regularly as an environment to travel to in order to play out a dramatic part-time "satellite self," while others deliberately avoided the city and even defined much of their identity and worldview against what they saw as the excesses of the big city.
As a sociological theorist I have found it disappointing that mainstream social theory has often seemed to ghettoize queer theory, feminist theory, and multicultural theory into special enclaves of knowledge about specific groups rather than more broadly integral to general theory development. In much the same way as people often see gay life as belonging to the specialized spaces of New York and San Francisco, we too often see the study of gay life as belonging to the identity-specific analytic spaces of queer theory and gay studies. Yet just as the majority of gay men are integrated into the mundane fabric of ordinary social space and everyday life, it is high time that studies of gay life also be integrated into the routine non-group-specific dimensions of general social theory. This book provides a general theory of social identity based on my ethnographic fieldwork in a suburban gay community. I use the fieldwork to build a theory; I then employ a variety of secondary data from a broad range of sources to expand the scope of the theory to all arenas of social identity. In doing so I make the claim that gay life is not analytically unique and that the conclusions of this book apply to all social actors.
Theory-Based Ethnography: A Note on the Use of Ideal Types and Analytic Highlight Reels
The reader should be aware up front that my use of ethnographic data emphasizes highlighting theoretical possibilities and developing a broad general theoretical framework for analyzing social identity. The ethnographic approach I use borrows more from the tradition of Erving Goffman than from that of Elliot Liebow. Thus, it differs from the more standard "thick description" approach employed by many anthropologists and sociologists. In thick description the emphasis is on describing a community in full detail and on interpreting subcultural meanings only within the context of the local subculture from which the quotes or actions came (see Geertz, 1973); this approach tends to be descriptively detailed but at the cost of theoretical richness and analytic generalizability. My approach, by contrast, limits ethnographic thickness for the purposes of developing analytic richness, conceptual clarity, and theoretical generalizability. This is reflected in the way I present the ethnographic data. In contrast to the traditional ethnographic practice of carefully describing in naturalistic detail all relationships among the individuals in a study, I have chosen to present "analytic highlight reels" rather than full "play-by-play commentary" on the social lives and interactions of my informants. I have also chosen to leave out biographical details except in cases where they are directly relevant to the concepts they illuminate. This both maintains my emphasis on conceptual patterns that illuminate the general features of social identity grammar rather than on individual personalities and protects the anonymity of my informants.
Key to my "analytic highlight reels" approach is the use of ideal types (Weber, [1925] 1978) to construct a general typology of identity management strategies and to clarify the relationship among different identity strategies. Ideal types are examples that reflect a category in its most pure, prototypical, and analytically sharp form for the purposes of heuristic and conceptual clarity.
In studying leadership, Max Weber developed the ideal types of "traditional," "charismatic," and "legal-rational" authority to show the different ways in which authority can be manifested. While no individuals fit any of Weber's categories in their ideal form, the categories are useful for understanding the basic components of authority in society. In a similar vein, I provide examples from my informants' quotes that best represent when people treat an identity attribute more like a "noun," a "verb," or an "adjective" to show the different ways in which identity can be managed and organized. Although real life individuals do not always fit cleanly and rigidly into a single category of the typology, the categories I developed came from noticeable patterns in the behavior and the quotes of gay men, and these categories represent three distinct forms that help to conceptually illustrate the ways in which individuals organize an identity. I use these ideal types to formulate an array of concepts useful to the general study of identity in the social sciences and humanities. Just as Erving Goffman used his ethnographic study of Shetland Islanders (1959) to develop a general theory of social interaction rather than a Shetlander theory of social interaction, I have chosen to develop a general theory rather than a gay suburban male-specific theory of social identity.
The Empirical Case: Gay Identity in a Northeast Suburb
Although the main story driving this book is theoretical, I believe that the empirical story I have provided will still be of interest to readers who are interested in gay identity and gay male life in the suburbs. While some ethnographic detail was sacrificed, there is still a compelling empirical story that runs with the analytic story. In short, the reader will be able to follow along with two main branches of gay life in suburbia. On one branch are gay commuters, who work ordinary jobs and who live otherwise conventional suburban lives but who use the personal privacy of the suburbs to pursue segmented gay social and sexual lives apart from their "ordinary suburban selves." On the other branch are gay integrators, who combine regular jobs, suburban homes, and gay social and sexual activities into one comfortable hyphenated suburban-gay self that is neither discretely suburban nor uniquely gay. Both of these branches I contrast with gay lifestylers, who represent the vibrant and expressive core of New York's gay subculture. These gay lifestylers often served as the reference point and negative role model against which suburban gay men defined themselves.
The setting of the ethnographic study in Northgate, a mediumsized (population between forty and fifty thousand) outer suburb, and several surrounding suburbs approximately an hour from New York City provides a location between the urban and rural geographic extremes. Between the two ends of the continuum we are likely to see a range of identity management strategies that may not be captured well at the urban and rural poles. In the gay subcultures of New York and San Francisco strategies that minimize one's gay visibility or that adapt to a dominantly heterosexual society are underrepresented because of the gay-friendly nature of the space that gay people have worked so hard to carve out of the larger city. Similarly, in the most rural areas some strategies may be difficult to find because the space is too restrictive of individual agency in identity management for such strategies. The suburbs provide an analytic window between the most polar strategies of living openly as an enclave minority and living invisibly as an oppressed and silent minority.
Northgate possessed a few moderately visible sources of gay life but no residential or commercial concentrations of gay men. There was a gay bar in a neighboring suburb, a college campus nearby, and a few scattered, small gay social organizations, but most of the suburban lives of most gay men were conducted in private homes and in predominantly heterosexual public space. The proximity to a college campus and relative closeness to New York meant that some predominantly heterosexual space was gay friendly as well as generally friendly to diversity. Gay men who did not care for the gay bar often interacted in these mixed spaces such as coffee shops, theaters, and non-gay specific restaurants and clubs. While the gay bar played an important community role for many of the area's gay men, especially single men in the 21- 30 age range, and the campus provided connections for college students, many gay social networks were established by informal friendship networks without a clear public center. Some of the gay men I met never attended gay bars or meetings of gay organizations. Others spent their publicly gay social lives entirely in the city and thus had no connection to the small number of gay institutions in their own suburbs. They used New York as a travel destination to manifest a gay identity that they kept submerged beneath an ensemble of suburbanness when outside of the city.
These gay men in the suburbs not only complicate our understanding of gay identity but illuminate challenges and modifications to the broader general concept of minority and marked identities as master statuses. Portrayers of marked and minority populations have often gone to concentrated urban subcultures and have thus captured those members of the community most likely to live their marked identity as a master status. In doing so they may have missed the strategies of category members who do not organize their lifestyle around that attribute. Master status is an important and well-established sociological concept, but treating a marked attribute as a master status may not be the only or even the main organizing principle for such an attribute as gayness. Contrary to the public perception of a unitary, easily identifiable, and coherent way to be gay (or to be any other identity), there are multiple ways to present and organize a marked identity. Moreover there is considerable conflict within identity categories about how to perform one's identity.
One thing the empirical case will show in later chapters, and that I will develop in conjunction with the theoretical argument, is that the assumption that visible urban gays are necessarily more representative of what it means to be gay than suburban ones, rather than just gay in a different way, is problematic. We as a culture in general, as well as social researchers in particular, have come to accept too readily that gay is necessarily a master status and that all gay individuals experience their gay identity as such. We have generally come to accept gay identity as something that can be measured from less to more and from closeted to out. In this model, one is more authentically gay if he is out, highly visible, and shares the many auxiliary characteristics expected to derive from a gay sexual identity. And one is "less authentically gay" or even a "self-denying gay" if he is closeted, invisible, or shows few auxiliary characteristics associated with gayness. The closeted-to-out and the less gay-to-more gay continua obscure the diverse ways in which gay identity is managed.
To be sure, some gay men do in fact carve out specialized enclaves to live their identity visibly and openly as a master status all of the time. They accept society's imposition of a master identity, but they invert its negative value into a positive value that entails pride and produces supportive and sustaining social networks. Like peacocks, they display their master colors with pride, making them available for all to see. Other men move in and out of gayness as a momentary master status and experience it as their primary status only in specifically gay environments. Elsewhere they effectively mask this identity and promote alternative selves that others may accept as their only or primary self. Like chameleons, they wear different master colors to match the varying social environments in which they move. Still others keep the power of their socially imposed master status in check by allowing multiple attributes to share control of the self. Like centaurs, they combine more than one attribute into a composite self that has no single master role. These same strategies extend beyond gay life to other areas of identity. It is these strategies employed by the identity peacock, the identity chameleon, and the identity centaur that I will examine first in the context of gay identity (chapters 2-6) and then in the context of general social identity (chapters 7-11). Before applying my analytic lens to the data it is necessary to introduce the orienting concepts of marked and unmarked identity attributes, to clarify my approach to identity, and to discuss what I mean by the grammar and microecology of social identity.
Orienting Concepts: Marked and Unmarked Identity Attributes
When I told people that I was writing a book on the sociology of identity, using suburban gays as a case study, I was often asked if I am gay. No one ever asked, however, if I was suburban. Yet, if matching the social location or standpoint of my informants is an issue, both questions should have been relevant. In theory, gay suburbanites are just as much members of the category "suburban" as they are of the category "gay." It is a social logic and not a natural logic that allows people to see "gay" as necessarily a central feature of one's standpoint while ignoring "suburban" as though it were irrelevant. This discrepancy between the attention paid to my relationship to a gay identity and my relationship to a suburban identity underlies an important distinction between socially marked and socially unmarked identity attributes.
All individuals possess a combination of identity attributes that define who they are. Some attributes are socially salient and perceived as highly relevant, while others are socially taken-for-granted, treated as generic and typically ignored as relevant to who one is. In the contemporary United States gay is a salient identity attribute while suburban is not. To refine the kind of salience I am referring to, I borrow the terms "marked" and "unmarked" from their original use in linguistics (see Trubetzkoy, 1975:162). In the orthographic representation of phonetic contrasts one item of a pair of values may be given a written mark such as an accent or cedilla while the other is passively defined by the absence of a mark. The linguistic contrast between the marked and the unmarked parallels visual psychology's distinction between figure and ground. Gestalt psychologists have demonstrated that we focus on the figure of visual contrasts without actively perceiving its background (see Koffka, 1935:184-86; Kohler, 1947:202-3). The same principles are also useful in analyzing the ways people perceive identity distinctions. Just as we visually highlight some physical contours and ignore others, we socially and psychologically foreground some identity attributes while ignoring others. The marked represents attributes that are actively defined as socially specialized, while the unmarked represents the vast expanse of social attributes that are passively defined as unremarkable, average, and socially generic (Brekhus, 1998:35; 1996:502).
The basic properties of markedness can be translated from linguistics to identity as follows: (1) the marked is accented and socially highlighted (and often stigmatized) while the unmarked remains unarticulated and taken for granted; (2) the marked is treated as a specialized subset of the larger set while the unmarked is treated as a generic representative of the set; and (3) distinctions within the marked are neutralized making it appear more homogeneous, while distinctions among the unmarked are accented, thus reflecting heterogeneity (see also Brekhus, 1996:508, 1998:36; Greenberg, 1966:26-27; Waugh, 1982). Key to the marking process is a fundamental asymmetry between the ways in which social actors regard marked and unmarked items as "generalizable attributes" (see Brekhus, 1996:519). A marked item or trait is perceived as conveying more information than an unmarked one. Thus socially marked identities such as "gay," "woman," "black," and "immigrant" receive far more attention as coherent social categories than unmarked identities such as "heterosexual," "man," "white," and "native." For instance, the generalization that homosexuals are promiscuous receives currency in the popular culture because noteworthy individual homosexuals are often seen as representative of all homosexuals as a category. Few would generalize, however, that heterosexuals are prone to divorce and are inclined toward prostitution, since they would treat such things as characteristic of only some noteworthy heterosexuals and not characteristic of heterosexuals as a category. Heterosexuals, unlike homosexuals, are regarded as too heterogeneous to merit category-wide generalizations.
There is also an asymmetry in the way people present their marked and unmarked attributes. Since an unmarked identity is the default assumption, absent any clear signifiers of a marked status, one often does not have to actively do anything to be perceived as a member of the unmarked category. Most heterosexuals, for instance, need not exert any effort to get others to assume they are heterosexual. Similarly, most natives of a country need not highlight that they are natives to be treated as such. Their identity will be assumed and taken for granted and they will not need to consciously perform their identity. In fact, people who play up unmarked attributes such as heterosexuality or native status are sometimes regarded with suspicion, as though they are overcompensating for some insecurity with their identity or hiding a secret identity (one may ask, Why is he trying so hard to demonstrate what most people take for granted? What is he hiding?).
I should note, of course, that there are contexts where a culture's general marking patterns are reversed. Reversals of markedness occur where the dominant cultural patterns of markedness are inverted within a given subculture (see Waugh, 1982:310; Brekhus, 1998:37). For example, whereas the default human is usually assumed to be male, among nurses it is men who are marked and women who are the default assumption. Similarly, in a gay bar, homosexuality becomes the default value and heterosexuality is marked.
These reversals of markedness are important to keep in mind when one looks at the ecology of identity. Since some social spaces and time periods offer alternative default settings, many individuals alter their identity presentations across time and space. It is this contextual nature of default identities that makes suburban gays an interesting case study. Given that suburban unmarked space encourages very different presentations than the group-specific environments of gay ghettos, how do gay men in the suburbs manage their identities? Do they play up a gay self at all times, even when it amounts to high-risk activism?
Continues...
2 "Everything about Me Is Gay": Identity Peacocks
3 "You Have to Drive Somewhere Just to Be Gay": Identity Chameleons
4 "Gay Defines Only a Small Part of Me": Identity Centaurs
5 Contested Grammars: Gay Identity Disputes
6 Shifting Grammars: Lifecourse Changes in and Structural Constraints on Identity Management
7 Vegan Peacocks, Christian Chameleons, and Soccer Mom Centaurs: Identity Grammar beyond Gay Identity
8 Duration Disputes: Identity Stability vs. Identity Mobility
9 Density Disputes: Identity Purity vs. Identity Moderation
10 Dominance Disputes: Identity Singularity vs. Identity Balance
11 Conclusion
Appendix: Grounded Theory and Analytic Fieldwork
References
Index
Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs: Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity / Edition 1 available in Paperback
Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs: Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity / Edition 1
by Wayne Brekhus
Wayne Brekhus
- ISBN-10:
- 0226072924
- ISBN-13:
- 9780226072920
- Pub. Date:
- 10/01/2003
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0226072924
- ISBN-13:
- 9780226072920
- Pub. Date:
- 10/01/2003
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs: Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity / Edition 1
by Wayne Brekhus
Wayne Brekhus
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Overview
What does it mean to be a gay man living in the suburbs? Do you identify primarily as gay, or suburban, or some combination of the two? For that matter, how does anyone decide what his or her identity is? In this first-ever ethnography of American gay suburbanites, Wayne H. Brekhus demonstrates that who one is depends at least in part on where and when one is. For many urban gay men, being homosexual is key to their identity because they live, work, and socialize in almost exclusively gay circles. Brekhus calls such men "lifestylers" or peacocks. Chameleons or "commuters," on the other hand, live and work in conventional suburban settings, but lead intense gay social and sexual lives outside the suburbs. Centaurs, meanwhile, or "integrators," mix typical suburban jobs and homes with low-key gay social and sexual activities. In other words, lifestylers see homosexuality as something you are, commuters as something you do, and integrators as part of yourself. Ultimately, Brekhus shows that lifestyling, commuting, and integrating embody competing identity strategies that occur not only among gay men but across a broad range of social categories. What results, then, is an innovative work that will interest sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and students of gay culture.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226072920 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2003 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Wayne H. Brekhus is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Read an Excerpt
Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs: Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity
By Wayne Brekhus
University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2003 Wayne BrekhusAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0226072924
1 - Gay Suburbanites: A Case Study in the Grammar and Microecology of Social Identity
I hate the stereotypical flaming fag image because then people who I come out to say, "How could you be gay? You're not like them." I get so sick of that. No, I do not wear a dress. No, I don't like RuPaul. The last time I came out to a really conservative friend it took me an hour to convince him I was gay! "No, I really am gay." And then once I did convince him, he went through the whole thing again: "But you don't do this and you don't look like this." God, I'm so sick of that. I totally blame the media for that. I'm sick of them. I want them to make just an Average Joe Gay Guy Show, but they won't do it because it's not interesting.
--Mark (a suburban gay man)Mark defines himself as an Average Joe Gay Guy. From his point of view, "Average Joe" describes him just as much as "gay man." His frustration with both his conservative friend and the media results from their assumptions that "gay people" or "gays" necessarily have a set of easily identifiable auxiliary characteristics that emanate from their being "gay." (Auxiliary characteristics are the expectedcharacteristics that go along with a status role.) Mark objects to his gay identity being treated as a master status that shapes everything else about how he acts and lives his life, since he believes that other facets of his life are equally relevant to who he is. (See Hughes [1945] for further discussion of auxiliary characteristics and master status.) He is frustrated that others assume they know everything about him if they know he is gay. In an interesting reversal to the "closeted gay," who tries to pull off a convincing performance that he is not gay, Mark's problem was that he could not immediately make a convincing case that he was gay. Mark is in most ways typical of the men I met during the course of my research among gay male suburbanites. He is white, male, middle-class, socially and politically moderate, and in his twenties. All of these facets are important to his self-identity, and he rejects the idea that his many socially ordinary attributes make him any less authentically gay than the more visible urban gays that he refers to unfavorably as "gay subculture-oriented gays." Moreover, like almost all of the men I talked to, Mark used New York's visible gay subculture as a reference point to define himself against. In the typical view of my suburban informants New York was extraordinary and so were its gays, and suburban Northgate, New Jersey, was ordinary and so were its gay men. Whether suburban gay men gravitated to New York or avoided it, it served as an important referent point to what the "other gay America"--the one that is highly publicized in the media and the popular culture--was like.
When I started my ethnographic research, I expected to tell a primarily descriptive story about people like Mark, who experience gay life in the suburbs rather than the city. From 1992 to 1998 I interviewed, hung out with, and interacted with a number of gay men in a suburban community located about one hour away from New York City (for more on methods, see the appendix). Since most studies of gay life and most popular images of gay culture come from the "gay ghettos" of large urban centers, I was interested in seeing how gay life in the suburbs might be different. It did differ, at least from the most visible facets of urban gay communities, in significant ways. Most gay life in the suburbs was mundane, uneventful, and at times indistinguishable from more general suburban living. One could see gay men mowing lawns, holding barbecues, attending church, driving their cars or SUVs to work early in the morning, coming home to their partners after work, supporting Republicans nearly as often as Democrats, watching baseball and football, and doing a host of other things that strike one as closer to public perceptions of what it means to be "suburban" than what it means to be "gay."
The ordinariness of their lives was not lost on the men I talked to, many of whom considered it odd that I wanted to study gay life in the suburbs when the more interesting setting of New York City was so close at hand. As one informant said with a laugh, "You're going to have a one-page thesis! There isn't anything to write about!" Expressing a sentiment shared by several other informants, he added, "You should go to New York City instead, then you'll have something to write about." For him, there was nothing especially definitively gay about the suburbs and thus nothing "interesting" for me to write about. In a similar story with an academic twist, a colleague of mine who proposed studying lesbian life in the Midwest had her funding proposal rejected by one reviewer who argued that the Midwest wasn't a good location for studying homosexuality; the reviewer suggested my colleague study lesbians on one of the coasts instead. Implicit in the reviewer's suggestion was the idea that the lives of Midwestern lesbians would be less interesting than those of coastal lesbians and even that Midwestern gay life was somehow less authentically gay. But the assumption that mundane, ordinary suburban gay men or Midwestern lesbians are somehow less authentically gay than visible urban coastal gays and lesbians is problematic.
By itself, the ordinariness of gay suburban living would have made an interesting enough story, but as I continued to spend time with these men an intriguing theory began to emerge along with the empirical story. I noticed that different "types" of gay men had conflicting ideas about how to organize their "gayness" in relation to their overall "presentation of self" and that this conflict seemed to have important implications for a more general theory of social identity. For some informants, being gay was a more important and salient facet of their lives than being suburban, while for others being suburban seemed to play a bigger role in their overall cultural tastes, politics, worldview, and lifestyle than being gay. I became especially aware of the role a suburban identity might play in their lives upon reading Baumgartner's (1988:1) ethnography of conflict management in a New Jersey suburb; I found that the initial comments of her suburban informants (who were not gay) sounded oddly familiar. They, too, suggested to their interlocutor that she shouldn't study the suburbs because "nothing ever happens" and it's "a boring place to look at conflict." Like my gay suburban informants, her nongay suburban informants also suggested that she should go to the city, as she "could find some good conflicts there." What I had initially assumed to be only a gay suburban reaction to studying gay life in the suburbs now appeared to be a more general suburban reaction toward selecting their communities for study when there were far more "interesting" things to study in the cities.
In one sense my informants' suggestions that New York would be more interesting were correct; the gay cultural milieu of New York's Greenwich Village provides an esoteric, colorful setting with a rich and inspiring cultural history. Gay men are visible, proud, and socially active in what is clearly one of the great centers of gay culture. But however interesting Village gay life is culturally, politically, and empirically, suburban gay life actually may have more to offer theoretically and analytically. By looking at gay men in the more socially mundane environment of suburbia rather than the gay-friendly enclaves of New York one can witness the multiple ways in which individuals manage a "marked" identity attribute like gayness in a culturally "unmarked" identity space like the suburbs. Gay suburbanites are an interesting case not only because they must manage a potentially stigmatizing gay identity but because they also balance it with a privileging suburban identity. As gay suburbanites have competing membership claims to both stigmatized gayness and privileging suburbanness, their identity strategies illustrate how one balances competing positions of stigma and privilege. Since most individuals have a combination of devalued and valued attributes with regard to the larger society, this has important implications beyond gay identity for how all individuals organize and balance competing ingredients of the self.
Despite the analytic advantages of studying the organization of the extraordinary where the ordinary is privileged, many studies of minority identities go to the spaces where the extraordinary is facilitated rather than negatively sanctioned, discouraged, or even oppressed. This is an analytic mistake because studying the most open environments selects against more covert and nuanced strategies of dealing with minority or extraordinary identities. Giving our theoretical attention to gay activists, leathermen, and drag queens in the city, for instance, misses the analytic importance of rank-and-file gays who may have the most to offer to our understanding of how identity is organized by the social averages rather than the social extremes (or outliers) in everyday social life. While it is certainly valid to study the most visible and dramatic tip of the iceberg, researchers should not ignore the rest of the iceberg just because it is less obvious and appears less dramatic when observed from the surface (see Brekhus, 2000).
Expressive, difference-tolerant spaces such as the gay ghettos of San Francisco and New York are very specialized places that tell us little about how identity is organized in the mundane, difference-submerging spaces where most people live. In gay ghettos (see Levine, 1979), as in other ghettos or enclaves, the everyday, the leisure, the political, and the work worlds are heavily concentrated in such a way that it is difficult to separate them out spatially and temporally, as one must if one is trying to measure changes of identity across different domains of social and cultural space. Since many identity strategies make use of spatial boundaries and separations, such ghettos provide an analytically truncated site from which to look at one of the most important facets of social identity: how people incorporate spatial and temporal variables into their socially constructed identity. Most studies of gay life choose the most visibly gay environments such as gay neighborhoods, pride parades, and bars, and thus systematically exclude from their analysis instances where individuals, perhaps even the very same individuals, are highlighting a side of themselves other than "gayness" or playing up the unmarked facets of their self (such as being middle-class, suburban, masculine, or white). The suburbs, by contrast, with their spread-out spaces and their often rigidly segregated commercial and residential areas, provide an ideal site from which to observe identity changes across social space. Moreover, with their location between urban centers and rural areas, they provide a view into the middle rather than the ends of the urban/rural continuum. Finally, they provide an ideal site from which to observe individuals playing up their "averageness" and their unmarkedness rather than highlighting their most distinctive facets of self. The suburbs of New York City proved an especially instructive research site because some individuals used New York regularly as an environment to travel to in order to play out a dramatic part-time "satellite self," while others deliberately avoided the city and even defined much of their identity and worldview against what they saw as the excesses of the big city.
As a sociological theorist I have found it disappointing that mainstream social theory has often seemed to ghettoize queer theory, feminist theory, and multicultural theory into special enclaves of knowledge about specific groups rather than more broadly integral to general theory development. In much the same way as people often see gay life as belonging to the specialized spaces of New York and San Francisco, we too often see the study of gay life as belonging to the identity-specific analytic spaces of queer theory and gay studies. Yet just as the majority of gay men are integrated into the mundane fabric of ordinary social space and everyday life, it is high time that studies of gay life also be integrated into the routine non-group-specific dimensions of general social theory. This book provides a general theory of social identity based on my ethnographic fieldwork in a suburban gay community. I use the fieldwork to build a theory; I then employ a variety of secondary data from a broad range of sources to expand the scope of the theory to all arenas of social identity. In doing so I make the claim that gay life is not analytically unique and that the conclusions of this book apply to all social actors.
Theory-Based Ethnography: A Note on the Use of Ideal Types and Analytic Highlight Reels
The reader should be aware up front that my use of ethnographic data emphasizes highlighting theoretical possibilities and developing a broad general theoretical framework for analyzing social identity. The ethnographic approach I use borrows more from the tradition of Erving Goffman than from that of Elliot Liebow. Thus, it differs from the more standard "thick description" approach employed by many anthropologists and sociologists. In thick description the emphasis is on describing a community in full detail and on interpreting subcultural meanings only within the context of the local subculture from which the quotes or actions came (see Geertz, 1973); this approach tends to be descriptively detailed but at the cost of theoretical richness and analytic generalizability. My approach, by contrast, limits ethnographic thickness for the purposes of developing analytic richness, conceptual clarity, and theoretical generalizability. This is reflected in the way I present the ethnographic data. In contrast to the traditional ethnographic practice of carefully describing in naturalistic detail all relationships among the individuals in a study, I have chosen to present "analytic highlight reels" rather than full "play-by-play commentary" on the social lives and interactions of my informants. I have also chosen to leave out biographical details except in cases where they are directly relevant to the concepts they illuminate. This both maintains my emphasis on conceptual patterns that illuminate the general features of social identity grammar rather than on individual personalities and protects the anonymity of my informants.
Key to my "analytic highlight reels" approach is the use of ideal types (Weber, [1925] 1978) to construct a general typology of identity management strategies and to clarify the relationship among different identity strategies. Ideal types are examples that reflect a category in its most pure, prototypical, and analytically sharp form for the purposes of heuristic and conceptual clarity.
In studying leadership, Max Weber developed the ideal types of "traditional," "charismatic," and "legal-rational" authority to show the different ways in which authority can be manifested. While no individuals fit any of Weber's categories in their ideal form, the categories are useful for understanding the basic components of authority in society. In a similar vein, I provide examples from my informants' quotes that best represent when people treat an identity attribute more like a "noun," a "verb," or an "adjective" to show the different ways in which identity can be managed and organized. Although real life individuals do not always fit cleanly and rigidly into a single category of the typology, the categories I developed came from noticeable patterns in the behavior and the quotes of gay men, and these categories represent three distinct forms that help to conceptually illustrate the ways in which individuals organize an identity. I use these ideal types to formulate an array of concepts useful to the general study of identity in the social sciences and humanities. Just as Erving Goffman used his ethnographic study of Shetland Islanders (1959) to develop a general theory of social interaction rather than a Shetlander theory of social interaction, I have chosen to develop a general theory rather than a gay suburban male-specific theory of social identity.
The Empirical Case: Gay Identity in a Northeast Suburb
Although the main story driving this book is theoretical, I believe that the empirical story I have provided will still be of interest to readers who are interested in gay identity and gay male life in the suburbs. While some ethnographic detail was sacrificed, there is still a compelling empirical story that runs with the analytic story. In short, the reader will be able to follow along with two main branches of gay life in suburbia. On one branch are gay commuters, who work ordinary jobs and who live otherwise conventional suburban lives but who use the personal privacy of the suburbs to pursue segmented gay social and sexual lives apart from their "ordinary suburban selves." On the other branch are gay integrators, who combine regular jobs, suburban homes, and gay social and sexual activities into one comfortable hyphenated suburban-gay self that is neither discretely suburban nor uniquely gay. Both of these branches I contrast with gay lifestylers, who represent the vibrant and expressive core of New York's gay subculture. These gay lifestylers often served as the reference point and negative role model against which suburban gay men defined themselves.
The setting of the ethnographic study in Northgate, a mediumsized (population between forty and fifty thousand) outer suburb, and several surrounding suburbs approximately an hour from New York City provides a location between the urban and rural geographic extremes. Between the two ends of the continuum we are likely to see a range of identity management strategies that may not be captured well at the urban and rural poles. In the gay subcultures of New York and San Francisco strategies that minimize one's gay visibility or that adapt to a dominantly heterosexual society are underrepresented because of the gay-friendly nature of the space that gay people have worked so hard to carve out of the larger city. Similarly, in the most rural areas some strategies may be difficult to find because the space is too restrictive of individual agency in identity management for such strategies. The suburbs provide an analytic window between the most polar strategies of living openly as an enclave minority and living invisibly as an oppressed and silent minority.
Northgate possessed a few moderately visible sources of gay life but no residential or commercial concentrations of gay men. There was a gay bar in a neighboring suburb, a college campus nearby, and a few scattered, small gay social organizations, but most of the suburban lives of most gay men were conducted in private homes and in predominantly heterosexual public space. The proximity to a college campus and relative closeness to New York meant that some predominantly heterosexual space was gay friendly as well as generally friendly to diversity. Gay men who did not care for the gay bar often interacted in these mixed spaces such as coffee shops, theaters, and non-gay specific restaurants and clubs. While the gay bar played an important community role for many of the area's gay men, especially single men in the 21- 30 age range, and the campus provided connections for college students, many gay social networks were established by informal friendship networks without a clear public center. Some of the gay men I met never attended gay bars or meetings of gay organizations. Others spent their publicly gay social lives entirely in the city and thus had no connection to the small number of gay institutions in their own suburbs. They used New York as a travel destination to manifest a gay identity that they kept submerged beneath an ensemble of suburbanness when outside of the city.
These gay men in the suburbs not only complicate our understanding of gay identity but illuminate challenges and modifications to the broader general concept of minority and marked identities as master statuses. Portrayers of marked and minority populations have often gone to concentrated urban subcultures and have thus captured those members of the community most likely to live their marked identity as a master status. In doing so they may have missed the strategies of category members who do not organize their lifestyle around that attribute. Master status is an important and well-established sociological concept, but treating a marked attribute as a master status may not be the only or even the main organizing principle for such an attribute as gayness. Contrary to the public perception of a unitary, easily identifiable, and coherent way to be gay (or to be any other identity), there are multiple ways to present and organize a marked identity. Moreover there is considerable conflict within identity categories about how to perform one's identity.
One thing the empirical case will show in later chapters, and that I will develop in conjunction with the theoretical argument, is that the assumption that visible urban gays are necessarily more representative of what it means to be gay than suburban ones, rather than just gay in a different way, is problematic. We as a culture in general, as well as social researchers in particular, have come to accept too readily that gay is necessarily a master status and that all gay individuals experience their gay identity as such. We have generally come to accept gay identity as something that can be measured from less to more and from closeted to out. In this model, one is more authentically gay if he is out, highly visible, and shares the many auxiliary characteristics expected to derive from a gay sexual identity. And one is "less authentically gay" or even a "self-denying gay" if he is closeted, invisible, or shows few auxiliary characteristics associated with gayness. The closeted-to-out and the less gay-to-more gay continua obscure the diverse ways in which gay identity is managed.
To be sure, some gay men do in fact carve out specialized enclaves to live their identity visibly and openly as a master status all of the time. They accept society's imposition of a master identity, but they invert its negative value into a positive value that entails pride and produces supportive and sustaining social networks. Like peacocks, they display their master colors with pride, making them available for all to see. Other men move in and out of gayness as a momentary master status and experience it as their primary status only in specifically gay environments. Elsewhere they effectively mask this identity and promote alternative selves that others may accept as their only or primary self. Like chameleons, they wear different master colors to match the varying social environments in which they move. Still others keep the power of their socially imposed master status in check by allowing multiple attributes to share control of the self. Like centaurs, they combine more than one attribute into a composite self that has no single master role. These same strategies extend beyond gay life to other areas of identity. It is these strategies employed by the identity peacock, the identity chameleon, and the identity centaur that I will examine first in the context of gay identity (chapters 2-6) and then in the context of general social identity (chapters 7-11). Before applying my analytic lens to the data it is necessary to introduce the orienting concepts of marked and unmarked identity attributes, to clarify my approach to identity, and to discuss what I mean by the grammar and microecology of social identity.
Orienting Concepts: Marked and Unmarked Identity Attributes
When I told people that I was writing a book on the sociology of identity, using suburban gays as a case study, I was often asked if I am gay. No one ever asked, however, if I was suburban. Yet, if matching the social location or standpoint of my informants is an issue, both questions should have been relevant. In theory, gay suburbanites are just as much members of the category "suburban" as they are of the category "gay." It is a social logic and not a natural logic that allows people to see "gay" as necessarily a central feature of one's standpoint while ignoring "suburban" as though it were irrelevant. This discrepancy between the attention paid to my relationship to a gay identity and my relationship to a suburban identity underlies an important distinction between socially marked and socially unmarked identity attributes.
All individuals possess a combination of identity attributes that define who they are. Some attributes are socially salient and perceived as highly relevant, while others are socially taken-for-granted, treated as generic and typically ignored as relevant to who one is. In the contemporary United States gay is a salient identity attribute while suburban is not. To refine the kind of salience I am referring to, I borrow the terms "marked" and "unmarked" from their original use in linguistics (see Trubetzkoy, 1975:162). In the orthographic representation of phonetic contrasts one item of a pair of values may be given a written mark such as an accent or cedilla while the other is passively defined by the absence of a mark. The linguistic contrast between the marked and the unmarked parallels visual psychology's distinction between figure and ground. Gestalt psychologists have demonstrated that we focus on the figure of visual contrasts without actively perceiving its background (see Koffka, 1935:184-86; Kohler, 1947:202-3). The same principles are also useful in analyzing the ways people perceive identity distinctions. Just as we visually highlight some physical contours and ignore others, we socially and psychologically foreground some identity attributes while ignoring others. The marked represents attributes that are actively defined as socially specialized, while the unmarked represents the vast expanse of social attributes that are passively defined as unremarkable, average, and socially generic (Brekhus, 1998:35; 1996:502).
The basic properties of markedness can be translated from linguistics to identity as follows: (1) the marked is accented and socially highlighted (and often stigmatized) while the unmarked remains unarticulated and taken for granted; (2) the marked is treated as a specialized subset of the larger set while the unmarked is treated as a generic representative of the set; and (3) distinctions within the marked are neutralized making it appear more homogeneous, while distinctions among the unmarked are accented, thus reflecting heterogeneity (see also Brekhus, 1996:508, 1998:36; Greenberg, 1966:26-27; Waugh, 1982). Key to the marking process is a fundamental asymmetry between the ways in which social actors regard marked and unmarked items as "generalizable attributes" (see Brekhus, 1996:519). A marked item or trait is perceived as conveying more information than an unmarked one. Thus socially marked identities such as "gay," "woman," "black," and "immigrant" receive far more attention as coherent social categories than unmarked identities such as "heterosexual," "man," "white," and "native." For instance, the generalization that homosexuals are promiscuous receives currency in the popular culture because noteworthy individual homosexuals are often seen as representative of all homosexuals as a category. Few would generalize, however, that heterosexuals are prone to divorce and are inclined toward prostitution, since they would treat such things as characteristic of only some noteworthy heterosexuals and not characteristic of heterosexuals as a category. Heterosexuals, unlike homosexuals, are regarded as too heterogeneous to merit category-wide generalizations.
There is also an asymmetry in the way people present their marked and unmarked attributes. Since an unmarked identity is the default assumption, absent any clear signifiers of a marked status, one often does not have to actively do anything to be perceived as a member of the unmarked category. Most heterosexuals, for instance, need not exert any effort to get others to assume they are heterosexual. Similarly, most natives of a country need not highlight that they are natives to be treated as such. Their identity will be assumed and taken for granted and they will not need to consciously perform their identity. In fact, people who play up unmarked attributes such as heterosexuality or native status are sometimes regarded with suspicion, as though they are overcompensating for some insecurity with their identity or hiding a secret identity (one may ask, Why is he trying so hard to demonstrate what most people take for granted? What is he hiding?).
I should note, of course, that there are contexts where a culture's general marking patterns are reversed. Reversals of markedness occur where the dominant cultural patterns of markedness are inverted within a given subculture (see Waugh, 1982:310; Brekhus, 1998:37). For example, whereas the default human is usually assumed to be male, among nurses it is men who are marked and women who are the default assumption. Similarly, in a gay bar, homosexuality becomes the default value and heterosexuality is marked.
These reversals of markedness are important to keep in mind when one looks at the ecology of identity. Since some social spaces and time periods offer alternative default settings, many individuals alter their identity presentations across time and space. It is this contextual nature of default identities that makes suburban gays an interesting case study. Given that suburban unmarked space encourages very different presentations than the group-specific environments of gay ghettos, how do gay men in the suburbs manage their identities? Do they play up a gay self at all times, even when it amounts to high-risk activism?
Continues...
Excerpted from Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs: Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity by Wayne Brekhus Copyright © 2003 by Wayne Brekhus. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
1 Gay Suburbanites: A Case Study in the Grammar and Microecology of Social Identity2 "Everything about Me Is Gay": Identity Peacocks
3 "You Have to Drive Somewhere Just to Be Gay": Identity Chameleons
4 "Gay Defines Only a Small Part of Me": Identity Centaurs
5 Contested Grammars: Gay Identity Disputes
6 Shifting Grammars: Lifecourse Changes in and Structural Constraints on Identity Management
7 Vegan Peacocks, Christian Chameleons, and Soccer Mom Centaurs: Identity Grammar beyond Gay Identity
8 Duration Disputes: Identity Stability vs. Identity Mobility
9 Density Disputes: Identity Purity vs. Identity Moderation
10 Dominance Disputes: Identity Singularity vs. Identity Balance
11 Conclusion
Appendix: Grounded Theory and Analytic Fieldwork
References
Index
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