Who Gets to be the ‘Ideal Gay’?: Queer Men’s Conflict and Microaggressions as Identity and Community Development

Abstract

In this thesis, I investigate how ingroup negative interactions such as conflict, discrimination, and microaggressions impact how queer men in Halifax, Nova Scotia see themselves and their communities of queer men. To do this, I engage in qualitatively focused mixed methods analysis of 67 survey responses and 21 interviews with queer men currently living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I engage with the literature on queer men’s inequalities, intersectionality, masculinity, stigma, and deploy the concepts of imagined community, infighting, and microaggressions to illustrate how queer men’s interactions influence how they see themselves and their broader community. My findings illustrate that queer men’s negative interactions extend far beyond negative slights or interpersonal spats, and instead represent queer men’s efforts to defend, affirm, and contest what they carry as the internalized image of the ‘ideal queer man.’ I call this process microaggressive identity conflict, bridging the gap between interpersonal slights and collective identity construction. In this way, queer men, when engaging with one another, deploy scripts of queer culture and behaviour and respond to local and broad narratives of what it means to be a queer man. Rather than representing interpersonal pettiness, microaggressions among queer men are instead part of a process of constantly defining and contesting queer community and collective identity.