Labels of love: How migrants negotiate (or not) the culture of sexual identity
Résumé
Drawing on in-depth interviews with 10 French lesbians, gays and bisex-uals (LGBs) living in the United States and 13 American LGBs living in France, this article examines how national cultural context shapes the way LGBs understand and frame their sexual identity. The meaning these mostly White middle-class migrants attributed to their sexual identity was revealed-and in some cases changed-through cultural mechanisms provoked by crossing borders. Their journey gave them a unique perspective on the dominant national understandings of sexual identity in both countries. Through interaction, they discovered on the one hand, the French cultural expectations that individuals downplay their differences in the public sphere, and on the other, American cultural expectations that individuals align themselves with a minority category in the public sphere. As theories on the relationship between sexual identity and culture would predict, some respondents expressed feeling more comfortable with the sexual identity model of the country in which they came to embrace their sexuality. Half, however, preferred the model of the new context. These findings suggest that further theorization is necessary to understand why sexual identity appears to be highly contingent on culture for some people but seemingly independent of it for others.
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