Conclusion

Abstract

Academic narratives of lesbian and gay identity have, of late, come to suggest a sense of an ending. Declarations like the ‘end of gay’ (Archer, 2002) speak to shifts in the production of lesbian and gay identities and the way they are theorized, with an over-riding assumption being that, in the words of Andrew Sullivan (2005), ‘“gayness” alone will cease to tell you very much about an individual’. What is important about these shifts is how lesbian and gay identities are seen to be reconfigured, such that they no longer indicate a uniform cultural identity based on a difference enacted in identifiably ‘gay’ ways and in traditional urban lesbian and gay enclaves (Kristiansen and Pedersen, 2004). For Seidman (2002), the conditions in which lesbians and gay men live, transformed by a politics of normalization, reshape what it is to be lesbian and gay, which shifts from a ‘core’ identity to an identity ‘thread’. It becomes a’personal dimension of the self’ (Appiah, 2005: 110). These shifts may only be intensified as ‘location-based social media’ displaces the role of the gay scene in facilitating lesbian and gay male sexual and social encounters (Usher and Morrison, 2010; Nash, 2013). Consequently, there has been a drift away from a ‘difference-affirming form of political organizing and community building’ (Ghaziani, 2011: 106), with scholars identifying emerging trends in self-labelling that eschew lesbian and gay labels (Savin-Williams, 2005a) and the narratives of difference associated with them (Cohler and Hammack, 2007).