Situating Lesbian and Gay Cultures of Class Identification

‘Accepting’ Narratives: Given Class and Individualized Identity

Accepting narratives of class identity ranged across a continuum from ‘embracing acceptance’ through ‘straightforward definition’ to ‘ambivalent resignation’. They immediately challenge the notion that class is insignificant to lesbians’ and gay men’s identities. A small minority of interviewees embraced a class identity. Peter (32, public relations officer), for example, described himself as ‘class conscious’ and presented his politicized middle-class identity as central to his view of himself and his social and intimate interactions. John (37, part-time events organizer) also embraced class as an aspect of his identity and recounted: ‘everything I am today is kind of evolving from that working class, gay, bi-racial kind of mix’. Jayne (31, volunteer organizer) more straightforwardly described herself as middle class: ‘through and through … very middle class upbringing’, and Toni (32, unemployed) identified as working class in a matter-of-fact way: ‘Irish working class … my dad was a migrant worker’. Embracing and straightforward narratives of class identification posited class identity as ‘given’ by virtue of one’s hierarchical class position as determined by family background, education and/or occupation. Narratives of middle-class identity were much more likely than working-class ones to refer to class advantage and privilege. In a few cases, such as Josephine’s (38, social care trainer), such advantage and privilege underpinned ‘ambivalent resigned’ narratives of middle-class identity: ‘Much as I hate it, I think I am middle class and I feel I was forced into it … its values … I don’t think I can throw it away. I can just try to be aware of it’.

In discussing her ‘objective’ class, Josephine displayed considerable reflexivity about middle-class privilege and advantage. She discussed her middle-class identity in a way that resonates with Bourdieu’s notion of habitus: it was something that could be acknowledged but not simply be undone. At the same time, Josephine’s narrative, like Peter’s that was quoted earlier, was a claim about class self-consciousnesses as much as it was a story of middle-class identity itself. Through claims about class consciousness participants often differentiated themselves from their middle-class peers, as knowing individuals who were aware of the personal-political workings of class. Differentiated class identities were also articulated in other ways. Consider the following quotation from Niamh (42, therapist): ‘I’m middle class and there’s no way past that … it’s always upper middle-class people who say “Class really doesn’t matter” … because [they’re] in a position to say so’.

By accepting that she was middle class, Niamh displayed a consciousness about her privileged class location, but simultaneously downplayed this by accusing ‘other’ more privileged middle classes of class denial. Thus she distinguished her middle-class identity in hierarchical and lateral terms. For Bourdieu, Bottero notes (2005), lateral differentiations point to how groups within classes claim distinction. While the above quotation from Niamh illustrates this, Peter’s and Josephine’s narratives also suggest that hierarchical and individualized class differentiations could be bound up with claims to lateral class distinction: claims to being self-reflexively aware of hierarchical class position could involve claims about self-aware groups within a class. This was underscored by Mollie’s narrative (51, unemployed), which implied a distinction between middle class lesbians and gay men: ‘I’m more aware of class problems with gay men … very little awareness … a lack of political awareness’.

Overall, accepting narratives of class identity trouble arguments about lesbians’ and gay men’s classless identities. They suggest that theories about ‘traditional class’ and ‘reflexive individualized’ post-class identities (Giddens, 1991) centre on (and construct) false dichotomies that are not necessarily a feature of identities themselves. They also illuminate how class identities are relationally articulated via hierarchical, individualized and lateral distinctions. This suggests that we should be cautious about overemphasizing shifts towards individualized class identities in the late 20th century (cf. Savage, 2000, 2007; Savage et al., 2001). Although accepting narratives of class identity could configure class in individualized ways, these were not discrete modes of configuration but intrinsically related to hierarchical and lateral modes.

‘Rejecting’ Narratives: Individuality, Ordinariness and the Power of Class

Perhaps surprisingly, narratives of class dis-identification also challenge assumptions about the insignificance of class to lesbian and gay identities. Class dis-identification was articulated in outright and tentative terms. Thomas (29, administrator) rejected class as the basis for identity by saying: ‘I don’t believe in the class system’. Aubrey (72, retired artist) self-defensively rejected a class identity on the basis that ‘I don’t have a class problem’. Carol’s (26, administration officer) response also suggested an element of defensiveness when she said: ‘I am who I am. I don’t belong to any particular structure or group, I’m just who I am’. Savage et al. (2001) suggest that defensiveness is a common feature of contemporary class dis-identifications. Skeggs (1997, 2004), Munt (2000) and others have linked this to shame that attributed working-class identities can imply in cultures that pathologize and denigrate working-class people; and where there are few or no traditions, representations or political endeavours through which working class can be (re-)claimed as a positive identity. Also, in an era of neo-liberal governance, where individuality and personal authenticity are conflated, the idea of being subject to working- and middle-class forms of existence can be ontologically undermining (Savage, 2000). In other words, class can be powerful in how it ‘spoils’ identity and/or undermines a sense of individual agency. Unlike the participants discussed so far, Ebony and Mo more tentatively rejected class identity:

I could say I was working class and I work very hard for my money, but I could say I was black middle class … my parents aren’t really rich, but they’re not poor … But I don’t really tend to identify myself in terms of class. (Ebony, 34, development worker)

I don’t think I am [working class] really … I’m certainly not the ruling class … I think I [could be seen] as middle class in terms of who my parents are, what kind of profession I am likely to hold, but that doesn’t [fit] either. (Mo, 22, student)

Both Ebony’s and Mo’s narratives point to what Savage et al. (2001) identify as another characteristic of late modern class dis-identifications: the claim to ordinariness. By situating themselves as neither rich nor poor, and neither working class nor ruling class, both participants located themselves as ‘in the middle’. They deployed the relational logics of class in denying class identity. For Savage et al., ordinariness itself is a class claim (even if it is not associated with a specific objective class) because it invokes hierarchically classed forms of differentiation of being above, below and in the middle. This returns us to the issue of class defensiveness, and raises the following question: Why did some participants refuse the language of class when they continued to deploy the logics of class in making sense of their identities? Some participants’ responses suggested that the answer to this question might lie in an awareness of the self-negating power of attributed class. In refusing a class identity, for example, Lilly stated: ‘I hate using labels like that … Because they can be a putdown’ (Lilly, 67, retired). Alain (27, waiter) also stated: ‘I don’t want to define myself being in any of these class things’. He rationalized this on the basis of the links that existed between class and a hierarchy of worth where ‘as a waiter I’m going to be in the worst [position]’. Class identities were therefore often rejected because they were associated with self-undermining attributed identities. Class dis-identifications did not therefore indicate the insignificance of class for identity. They were a mode through which the relational logics of class hierarchies and their personal salience could be affirmed.

Situating Narratives: ‘Ambiguous’ Class Identities

It depends who I’m talking to … Don’t take me the wrong way, because I strongly identify [with] a working class background. (Katrina, 29, volunteer co-ordinator)

Class ambiguity could be interpreted as evidence of the insignificance of class to late modern identities. However, personal narratives like Katrina’s above suggested that it might more accurately be viewed as evidence of something else: of an acute awareness of the interactional and emergent nature of class identities (Taylor, 2007). Ambiguous narratives of identification, like Katrina’s, pointed to how class identities were relationally situated in the way that one’s sense of class identity depended on who you were interacting with and in what context. Dee (41, unemployed) explicitly situated her ambiguous class identity relationally: ‘We’ve had many discussions about this. If you’re working class and you change your lifestyle and you don’t associate with the people you were brought up with … it’s difficult to explain and define’.

The most highly ambiguous narratives of class were told by those who identified their backgrounds as working class and their current occupations and lifestyles as middle class. These participants linked their experiences of class mobility to unsure class identities. Simon (35, chemist), for example, stated: ‘By default I’m middle class now, because of my education and [my] job. I don’t know how, really, to identify myself’. Mollie (51, unemployed) also recounted: ‘I’m in a muddle … I don’t think somebody with a university education can really be working class and yet … sometimes I feel completely working class’.

As the above quotations indicate, ambiguous narratives of class identity did not deny objective class. Rather, the experience of class mobility was often linked to an acutely relational sense of class identity. This signals the limits of interpretative frames that emphasize shame and/or self-negation for understanding non-straightforward articulations of class identity. While such frames generate insights into defensive dis-identifications from class, they can encourage a less grounded view of how ambiguous class identities are rooted in dynamic life circumstances. However, ambiguous class identities also trouble classless or post-class analyses of lesbian and gay identities where the potential fragility of class identities is associated with the ‘fact’ of class transcendence. On the one hand, class-mobile participants’ identities could seem fragile because they were not fixed. On the other hand, they were strong in that they were not wholly transcended by objective class mobility. As we shall see in the next section, however, some participants seemed to believe that by virtue of being gay they had transcended their class.

Class ‘Disruption’

… my decision to be gay entirely changed my perspective on a lot of things. [Otherwise] I probably would be very much the same as my sister. Very middle class, very, because I’d never have had to stop and think … everything would just be as I was told it was going to be. Because of one decision everything was altered. (Mo, 22, student)

In the above quotation Mo links her gay identity to the disruption of middle-class identity. Her comments echo sociological narratives about the implications of coming out for lesbian and gay ‘experiments in living’, heightened self-reflexivity and increased personal agency. These narratives propose that coming out implies coming into distinctive lesbian and gay forms of existence or lifestyles that disrupt ‘traditional’ bases of identity such as class (Blasius, 1994; Dunne, 1997; Giddens, 1991; Weeks, 1995).

More male than female participants believed that non-heterosexual identities undermined class ones, and possible explanations for this are considered in the next section. In the meantime, Andrew, Roy and Richard explicitly linked being gay to the undermining of class identities. Andrew was from a working-class background, and Roy and Richard were from middle-class ones. All suggested that gay ways of living disrupted class identities in some way or other, and linked this to the disruption of heterosexual patterns of living. Andrew believed that being gay involved opting out of parenthood which, in turn, implied more disposable income. He commented: ‘I suppose being gay destroys the whole thing of class in some ways, because generally you don’t have children … I earn quite a good wage’ (Andrew, 28, social worker). Roy (57, civil servant) believed his gay sexuality enabled him to develop intimate associations that transcended class boundaries. He recounted: ‘I grew up in a middle-class family … the main grey area here is around sexuality. I have a lot of experience of other[s] because [of] the … lives I’m involved in.’ Richard (36, teacher) claimed that gay ways of living subverted middle-class lifestyles. He stated:

Once you’ve been to university … when you’re gay you subvert all that and you don’t become a part of it any more … to be middle class is two children and a semi-detached house and an estate car … gay people [don’t] actually fall into that

These personal accounts of how gay identities and lifestyles ‘destroy’, ‘disrupt’ or ‘subvert’ class indicate how in narrating the implications that their sexual identities had for their class identities some gay men drew on popular discourses about gay mixed-class associations and cosmopolitan queer lifestyles that have been in circulation since the 1990s (for critical discussions see Binnie, 2004; Gluckman and Reed, 1997; Seidman, 2011). Analysed as claims for recognition, however, narratives of disruption illuminate how class dis-identification could be deployed to articulate sexual distinctions, but also how class identities could be simultaneously confirmed.

In these personal narratives, class was deployed to distinguish non-heterosexual and heterosexual identities and lifestyles. The quotations above from Mo, Andrew, Roy and Richard all implied enduringly classed heterosexualities. Their narratives claimed that while non-heterosexuality undermined class, heterosexual family and relating practices reproduced it. Thus, class was deployed as a basis through which the distinctiveness of gay identities and lifestyles could be claimed and recognized. At the same time, however, claims about sexual distinctions were framed by ‘peer class’ comparisons: participants discussed their distinctive sexualities in relation to their ‘very middle-class’ kin (Mo); middle-class forms of association (Roy); educated middle-class lifestyles (Richard); and to class peers with children (Andrew). Framed as they were by comparisons to class peers, their narratives involved lateral claims to class distinction that were performative of ‘gay class’ identities. In summary, disrupting narratives illuminated how class dis-identifications could be articulated through sexual identity, but also how such dis-identifications did not fully ‘escape’ class.

‘Strong’ Sexual Identities

Compared to their sexual identities, lesbians’ and gay men’s class identities seemed to be relatively weak ones. Participants almost universally presented their sexuality as central to their self and social identities, and embraced their sexual identities. Narratives of lesbian and gay sexual identity mostly followed an ‘institutionalized’ pattern and were well rehearsed: they were mostly structured as a journey that involved ‘coming out’ of heterosexuality; coming into contact with lesbian and/or gay cultures; and developing new ways of relating and living (cf. Plummer, 1995). They were mostly told spontaneously and with ease. Put another way, they seemed to have been rehearsed within a ‘community of sexual story tellers’ (Plummer, 1995). In contrast, while some participants did tell ‘embracing’ or straightforward narratives of class, class identities were more often narrated in hesitant, ‘ambiguous’ and ‘rejecting’ ways. They were less obviously institutionalized and often less easily told, and provided little evidence of a community of class story tellers. Compared in this way, participants’ identity narratives resonated with sociological accounts of marginalized sexualities as the basis for identities and ways of living that override or radically disrupt ‘traditional’ class-based ones (Bech, 1997; Blasius, 1994; Dunne, 1997; Weeks, 1995). However, the issue is more complex than this.

Sociological arguments about distinctive lesbian and gay experience have some merit when applied to late 20th-century experience. They suggest that lesbian and gay sexual identities are especially valued because they are forged though personal-political struggles for legitimacy. All of the participants had grown up in heteronormative contexts and coming out was mostly experienced as a critical life event. It is unsurprising therefore that participants’ viewed their sexual identities and lifestyles as highly prized personal achievements. This raises the ways in which their identity narratives were historically located. The personal narratives analysed here were generated at the cusp of the moment of lesbian and gay ‘equality’ (Blasius, 1994) or ‘citizenship’ (Weeks, 1995). First, they were told at a time when lesbian and gay identities and lifestyles were still relatively marginalized, and when personal-political responses to AIDS, New Right ‘anti-gay’ agendas and the political denigration of same-sex relationships as ‘pretended families’ in the UK demanded a strategic alliance across lesbian and gay (and other queer) identities (cf. Herman and Stychin, 1995; Gatter, 1999; Weeks, 1995). Second, these narratives were generated at a time when lesbian and gay equality and citizenship was being claimed on the basis of the legal recognition of same-sex relationships, parenting, ‘chosen families’ and a range of other legal protections and ‘rights’ (Donovan et al., 1999). Participants’ commitments to articulating strong sexual identities could therefore also be viewed as historically situated personal-political claims for recognition in the face of sexual inequalities and marginalization.

‘Weak’ Class Identities

Class is also, of course, linked to inequality and marginalization. However, a number of factors worked against class being prized as an identity. Participants were narrating their class identities in the context of successive political projects, associated with Thatcherism and Blairism, that sought to assert Britain as a classless society (Munt, 2000: 2). This went hand-in-hand with the pathologization and denigration of working-class ways of living in political and cultural discourse (Skeggs, 1997; Munt, 2000). Discussing the late 20th-century cultural politics of representations, Munt (2000: 8) argued that: ‘Whereas there has been public debate for the last twenty years on positive images of women, people of colour, and gay and lesbians, there has been no such equivalent clamour for working-class representation.’

The broad ways in which identity narratives were historically located with respect to the cultural politics of sexuality and of class may partly explain the relative strength of personal narratives of sexual identities over class ones. Amongst the participants there were very few examples of working-class pride. As was discussed earlier, working-class identified participants rarely mentioned class (dis)advantage. It was also noted earlier that a greater proportion of gay men refused a class identity than women, and male participants more often linked their sexual identities to the disruption of class ones. As the study was not based on a statistically representative sample, the extent to which gender differences are significant can only be discussed in a speculative way. I have discussed elsewhere how ‘working class’ is a devalued identity amongst many gay men (Heaphy, 2009). While it is a valued identity in some masculine cultures, access to the positive content of working-class identities is premised on being heterosexually male. This, combined with shame and stigma associated with being at the bottom of classed hierarchies, could generate especially strong incentives for gay male distancing from working-class identification.

In contrast to the lesbian participants in Taylor’s (2007) study who did often value their working-class identities, many female participants in this study were more ambivalent about them. This suggests that shame and stigma could also be relevant to lesbian working-class dis-identifications. This difference between Taylor’s and our own findings may be related to the fact that she recruited women on the basis of their working-class identities. Taylor’s study was conducted a decade after ours. Her findings might signify the re-emergence of class as significant after the socio-legal recognitions afforded lesbians and gay men in the 2000s (see Harding, 2011). This is an issue that warrants further investigation. In the meantime, while middle-class-identified female and male participants could acknowledge class (dis-)advantage, it was rare for ‘middle class’ to be explicitly valued as an identity. Like Savage et al.’s (2001) participants, lesbians and gay men were generally in favour of equality, and prizing middle-class identity might be interpreted as taking pride in being better off than others.

Situated as they were, participants seemed to value their sexual identities over their class ones, and seemed more concerned about sexual inequalities and marginalization than class ones. In broad terms, sexual identities seemed to be especially valued because they were viewed as a marker of individuality in a way that ‘given’ or attributed class identities were not. As Mark (22, care worker) put it: ‘[I had] to invent myself [as gay] because there was nothing there’.

Distinctive (Dis-)Identifications?

It would be unjustified to leap from observing the relative ‘weakness’ of lesbian and gay class identities in the 1990s to claiming that non-heterosexual identities erased or radically disrupted class ones. While ‘accepting’ class identities could be hesitant, the fact that 66 of 86 participants eventually identified in class terms troubles the notion that class was insignificant to lesbians and gay men in the 1990s. Also, while 13 participants ‘rejected’ a class identity, their claims to ordinariness were often made via the logics of class and indicated a heightened cognisance of the power of class. Further, while many participants narrated ‘ambiguous’ class identities, these narratives often displayed an awareness of the interactional and emergent nature of class identities that was grounded in experiences of class mobility. Narratives of class ambiguity illuminated class identities as situationally emergent but strong. Finally, even narratives of gay class ‘disruption’ did not erase class distinctions but were performative of lateral ‘gay class’ identities. Lesbian and gay identities were not therefore ‘post-class’ ones, even if class identities seemed weaker than sexual ones.

While participants’ narratives illuminate how class identities were configured amongst lesbians and gay men specifically, they were also indicative of more general configurations of class identities in Britain in the late 20th century. When compared to mainstream narratives of class (dis-)identification, and explored for their general qualities, they were unexceptional in their apparent weakness. In this respect they support the findings of modified class analyses of more mainstream class dis-identifications that have focused on how class identities are narrated in implicit ways. As noted earlier, Savage et al.’s (2001) study of class identities in the north-west of England in the 1990s found them to be articulated in ambivalent and defensive terms, often via claims to ordinariness. Savage et al. view ordinariness as a strategy to avoid social fixing and a defensive response to how class potentially undermines individuality. Their participants acknowledged the objective ‘facts’ of class, but were reluctant to translate this into subjective class. They simultaneously rejected and articulated class identities on the basis of their ordinariness. In these respects, the similarities between lesbian and gay narratives of class and mainstream ones are striking. Compared to contemporaneous mainstream findings about class identities, lesbian and gay class identities in the 1990s seem unexceptional. Despite the very specific ways in which lesbian and gay class identities might be situated as discussed earlier, they were also clearly configured along fairly mainstream lines. Viewed in this way, lesbian and gay class (dis-)identification did not evidence exceptionally classless or post-class identities, but very ordinary configurations of class at a particular historical time. Overall, while lesbian and gay class identities could be ‘distinctive’ in some ways, they were also intrinsically mainstream. Personal narratives of class identities – be they lesbian, gay or mainstream – appear to be ‘weak’ when they are explored for straightforward class identifications. However, the important point is that class can be enduringly salient to identities even in the absence of straightforward identifications.