Explaining Homosexuality

Abstract

Alongside his work on the self, Mead (1932) also established a social model of time, shaped by the passage of events in which the ‘narrated and narratable self is temporally and socially located’ (Jackson, 2010: 123). One aspect of that model is the way that current events and the structure of the self-process allow for a particular relation-ship to, and understanding of, the passage of time. The ‘symbolically reconstructed past’, as David Maines (2001: 44) calls it, is the past we reconstruct in light of our present circumstances; past events are reinterpreted ‘in such a way that they have meaning in and for the present’. Identity links us to the past by shaping how we make sense of it. This is particularly meaningful for lesbian and gay people who have often been required, or have long desired, to understand what has ‘made’ them the way they are.