Research conducted since the early 1990s has suggested that elections designed to delimit the rights of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals carry the potential for significant negative ...psychological consequences. Research has also suggested that some LGB people use these elections as opportunities for positive individual and social change.Virtually all of the research on the psychological impact of anti-LGB elections has focused on the immediate aftermath of these political events.This article reports results from a qualitative study designed to explore community members' perceptions of the longer term impact of the full cycle of Colorado's Amendment 2, including the campaign, election, and judicial reversal.The results from interviews with a purposive sample of LGB and heterosexual informants offer commentaries on the enduring impact of Amendment 2 at the levels of individuals, the LGBT community, and the broader community.
This paper contributes to the debate following the British Psychoanalytic Council's 2012 conference, ‘Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis: Moving On’ and their Position Statement on Homosexuality. After ...two world wars psychoanalysts, concerned to establish the credentials of their discipline, sought a more settled definition of sexual ‘normality’ than that of Freud, which ‘naturalized’ a heterosexual view of gender difference. Extending one aspect of Freud's thinking, homosexuality became accepted as evidence of a developmental retreat, even as a fixation at the oral stage of relating. As an identity founded on rejection of the reproductive ‘reality’ of the body, it was seen as a borderline condition. An individual who did not regard it as a problem to be cured was understood to be maintaining a perverse denial of their pathology. Same sex object‐choice was narcissistic and led to the formation of unstable patterns of relating. In this paper I hope to show that psychoanalysis has in the past developed a theoretical bias that has distorted its view of the experience of lesbians and gay men and, in detecting and questioning this bias, we have an opportunity to make our discipline more open and responsive to the complex society we live in.
Bohemian Los Angeles brings to life a vibrant and all-but forgotten milieu of artists, leftists, and gay men and women whose story played out over the first half of the twentieth century and ...continues to shape the entire American landscape. It is the story of a hidden corner of Los Angeles, where the personal first became the political, where the nation’s first enduring gay rights movement emerged, and where the broad spectrum of what we now think of as identity politics was born. Portraying life over a period of more than forty years in the hilly enclave of Edendale, near downtown Los Angeles, Daniel Hurewitz considers the work of painters and printmakers, looks inside the Communist Party’s intimate cultural scene, and examines the social world of gay men. In this vividly written narrative, he discovers why and how these communities, inspiring both one another and the city as a whole, transformed American notions of political identity with their ideas about self-expression, political engagement, and race relations. Bohemian Los Angeles, incorporating fascinating oral histories, personal letters, police records, and rare photographs, shifts our focus from gay and bohemian New York to the west coast with significant implications for twentieth-century U.S. history and politics.
A positive attachment to one's residential community has been linked to better mental health (McLaren, 2009), stronger social support (Young, Russell, & Powers, 2004), and a higher quality of life ...(Mak, Cheung, & Law, 2009). Attachment to residential community has been understudied in research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) families. The current study attempts to fill this gap by using family and minority stress theories to examine the predictors of residential community attachment among 77 lesbian mothers living in nonmetropolitan communities. Our findings indicate that stronger residential community attachment is predicted by more frequent contact with family of origin, low religiosity, and an interaction between close LGBT friendships and the presence of at least one local LGBT organization. Contrary to expectations, anti-LGBT victimization perpetrated by community members did not have an effect on residential community attachment.
Previous research has indicated that individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual and or transgender experience discrimination (social, vocational during their lifetimes). The majority of the ...literature has focused on negative discrimination that is grounded in heterosexist norms and behavior. Very little research has been conducted on potential discrimination that could occur on the inside of the LGBT community. The following phenomenological study examined the experience of seven LGBT individuals and their experience of intra discrimination from other members of the LGBT community. The researcher used phenomenological interviews in order to explore this topic with the hope of developing a greater understanding of and furthering the public's knowledge of discrimination that occurs with LGBT individuals. The experiences shared by participants do indicate that LGBT individuals do experience discrimination from each other in both positive and negative forms. The experiences shared by participants indicated a much stronger presence of negative discrimination occurring in the LGBT community compared to positive discrimination.
As a mecca of diversity, New York City is one of the epicenters for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender LGBT community. As such, LGBT identified clients present in New York’s counseling and ...mental health agencies with a cross section of issues unique to the LGBT community. One of these issues is the deleterious effects LGBT-individuals face after an experience with conversion therapy. Conversion therapy aims to alter a person’s sexual orientation away from homosexuality and into heterosexuality or celibacy. Clients seeking counseling after an experience with conversion therapy present distinct practice challenges that require special consideration in treatment. These clients may experience both sexual and spiritual identity crises, symptoms of depression and anxiety, hopelessness, sexual dysfunction, and symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Integrative solution therapies, grief work, community-based interventions, and trauma work offer healing strategies for treating LGBT clients after conversion therapy.
This definitive biography gives a brilliant account of the life and art of Robert Duncan (1919–1988), one of America’s great postwar poets. Lisa Jarnot takes us from Duncan’s birth in Oakland, ...California, through his childhood in an eccentrically Theosophist household, to his life in San Francisco as an openly gay man who became an inspirational figure for the many poets and painters who gathered around him. Weaving together quotations from Duncan’s notebooks and interviews with those who knew him, Jarnot vividly describes his life on the West Coast and in New York City and his encounters with luminaries such as Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Tennessee Williams, James Baldwin, Paul Goodman, Michael McClure, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson.
This book is about community activism around HIV/AIDS in Australia. It looks at the role that the gay community played in the social, medical and political response to the virus. Drawing conclusions ...about the cultural impact of social movements, the author argues that AIDS activism contributed to improving social attitudes towards gay men and lesbians in Australia, while also challenging some entrenched cultural patterns of the Australian medical system, allowing greater scope for non-medical intervention into the domain of health and illness. The book documents an important chapter in the history of public health in Australia and explores how HIV/AIDS came to be a defining issue in the history of gay and lesbian rights in Australia.
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