Abstract
In Understanding Narrative Identity through Lesbian and Gay Youth, Edmund Coleman-Fountain engages his readers with the broader understanding of how gender and sexual identities are constructed though a historical and cultural framework. The book is organized in five chapters as well as an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction explains the previous literature and how narrative identities of LGB youth have been formed. Chapters one through three outline categories of homosexuality and introduce frameworks of desire. Chapters four and five show the recent paradigm shift in LGB acceptance and how it reframes youth identity.
Coleman-Fountain uses coming-out stories of lesbian and gay youth in the northeast of England, which were carried out between 2006 and 2010, to provide a means to explore the broader social and historical conditions. These stories are based on in-depth, qualitative interviews with five lesbians and 14 young gay men aged 16-21. He inserts these stories throughout the text in order to further explain and defend the literature. Coleman-Fountain’s approach to describing identity draws on symbolic interactionist and feminist lenses. These approaches are used to locate lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals within a social structure. He understands identity to be adopted by a person strictly through social relations.
Coleman-Fountain starts his book by reviewing the prior work, which suggests that sexuality is fluid and changes throughout a person’s life. However, he has found that an individual’s sexuality is not the thing that is changing; it is the larger social context that is changing. He also shows that the way individuals describe themselves is not the entire story, but instead that there are many more social forces that play into the individual’s narrative.
Coleman-Fountain’s main claim is that individuals emerge as gay, lesbian, or bisexual in a process of becoming. The process of becoming is interpreted by society to individuals as a narrative, reaching its culmination in labeling oneself. In this way, people do not conform automatically at before or after puberty to a category. Instead, individuals are usually socially constructed as heterosexual—and then they either stay in this category, or deviate.
The driving force of an individual’s deviation is desire. Once desire is accepted by the individuals, or acted upon, they locate themselves within the category their behavior, desire, or feelings represent. The individual chooses from the labels available in the given society. Coleman-Fountain’s contribution is showing how these categories have shifted, molded, and changed to have different meanings over time. Categories and labels are not static. As society transforms, categories and labels take on new meanings that grow out of their previous meanings. What it means to be gay, lesbian, or bisexual is defined within society, and then people fit themselves into these categories as they see fit, based on whom they desire. In other words, society tells individuals what their feelings mean, how to interpret them, and what category they are acting out.
Coleman-Fountain’s literature review mirrors his interpretation of the lesbian and gay youth’s personal stories. However, I am concerned that the literature influenced the interpretations of the lesbian and gay youth’s personal stories. The youth’s experiences are used as a tool to defend the literature, rather than using the literature to supplement the youth’s experiences. In this way, he seems to be molding the youth’s personal stories to fit the research that has already been done, rather than adding anything significant to the literature. He interprets the youth’s personal stories to be in alignment with already held beliefs about gay, lesbian, and bisexual people.
Coleman-Fountain shows how a “coming-out” story is not just about the person but also about the society at large. Individuals do not start out as gay, lesbian, or bisexual—they emerge out of a heterosexual framework. Once they come in conflict with their heterosexual framework, and acknowledge a desire that does not fit into their heterosexual framework, they find another way to describe themselves. If another way is available, they adopt the new framework that most closely matches their desire. They then conform to that label and find themselves within a narrative of the framework. This narrative defends their label. As society changes, interpretations of labels change.
Overall, the language of the book is clear, concise, and accessible. Since the language of the book is accessible, it can be used in undergraduate and graduate classes as an example of a symbolic interactionist approach to sexuality. It can be used as a supplemental text in sociology of gender, sexuality, and youth classes. It can also be of interest to scholars studying gender, sexuality, and sociology of youth.