Abstract
Sociological research has documented the various strategies employed by members of stigmatized populations to mitigate the negative social effects of these identities in everyday life. Furthermore, social and political campaigns have called for efforts toward destigmatizing identities. However, we know much less about how these groups come to aim for destigmatization and how individuals navigate multiple stigmas simultaneously or intersectional stigmas. Drawing on four years of ethnographic data, I use the case of Black gay men to articulate a form of stigma response that prioritizes the “stigmatized” rather than attending to the smoothness of interactions with a potential stigmatizer. I illustrate how the confines of multiple forms of stigma can make existing stigma response techniques, like passing and covering, untenable. I offer the term, “unspoiling” to account for the ways that some members of stigmatized populations reject the Goffmanian notion that these identities would be perpetual marks of inferiority. In so doing, I articulate an intersectional understanding of (de)stigmatization processes by attending to groups that are overlooked in mainstream efforts to focus solely on either race or sexuality. These findings add to the growing literature of stigma management response techniques and challenge the conversation of larger group destigmatization processes. This work reveals the contested process of stigma negotiation as young Black gay men debate the appropriate strategies to combat stigma in their local communities. Ultimately, unspoiling is a strategy borne out of tense discussions about the (un)acceptability of passing or covering one’s sexual identity.
Stigma scholars contend that passing and covering—hiding or downplaying one’s identity, respectively—are the primary ways that individuals living with stigmatized identities seek to maintain the smoothness of interactions with “normals” (Goffman 1963). While scholarship documents the stigma management options that are available to socially stigmatized groups (see C.-S. Han 2007, 2017; C. W. Han 2015; Lamont et al. 2016; Saguy 2012; Yoshino 2006), few studies have adequately addressed how individuals negotiating multiple stigmas create a “coherent sense of self” (Deci and Ryan 2004). While Goffman notes that the severity of stigmas, whether visible or invisible, shift across spaces, few studies attempt to theorize how groups work toward rejecting stigma and formally destigmatizing their identities. By focusing on passing and covering as primary strategies, most scholarship obscures the micro-interactional work that stigmatized groups do toward destigmatizing identities when passing and covering are deemed unacceptable. Living at the intersection of multiple stigmatized identities, the case of Black gay 1 men provides an appropriate illustration for the expansion of stigma response categories. Specifically, some young Black gay men engage in processes of collective destigmatization that add new options to our knowledge about how stigma is negotiated. Drawing on four years of participant observation at a minority lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community organization in Los Angeles, this article uses the case of young Black gay men to address how individuals and communities negotiate two or more simultaneously stigmatized identities in everyday life. As Black gay men are often the focus for numerous public health policies and interventions, an insistence on stigma negotiation is of critical concern for scholars who aim to ameliorate their social standing within marginalized communities. This article advances a transitional step in the process of destigmatizing one’s social identity that goes beyond covering or passing to center the need for a positive self-concept; a process that I term unspoiling.
Unspoiling is the process that a stigmatized individual undertakes to learn and express an unstigmatized and self-accepted presentation of self. While coming out often involves the sharing of personal sexuality information with close networks (i.e., family, friends, etc.), unspoiling prioritizes the comfort and experience of the individual who is seeking an “authentic” public identity presentation in both intimate and non-intimate settings. While some psychologists and sociologists have used the term “unspoiled” (see Baumgardner, Lake, and Arkin 1985; Farrugia 2009), they tend to use the term to mean those lacking stigma, who Goffman called “normals.” Instead, unspoiling is a process that considers the removal of stigma rather than simply its absence. Thus, unspoiling addresses an adjusted presentation of self (Goffman 1959) with these three necessary components: (1) it requires the rejection of a sense of self-stigma, (2) it shifts the onus of stigma from the stigmatized to the stigmatizer, and (3) it leads to the creation of a public image that embraces a socially stigmatized identity through self-advocacy and group-activism. At these three levels, the emphasis of unspoiling one’s identity normalizes being gay and Black in the public sphere at both the individual and community levels. I illustrate how unspoiling emerges through a process of contested discussions surrounding the acceptability of covering and passing as strategies for stigma management. This article elucidates how those who are negotiating multiple stigmas reject the sense that their identities are sources of perpetual victimhood, and instead find alternative ways to respond to the imposition of stigma. Thus, this project details how those experiencing daily stigma work to accept themselves even in the face of challenges to their fundamental social existence.
This project highlights responses to the external monitoring of racial and sexual identities, while displaying the dialectical processes of creating socially appropriate Black gay identities through stigma management rehearsals (O’Brien 2011) outside of the stigmatizer’s gaze. The lack of research on the rejection of stigma and the communal work that decenters the position of stigmatizers serves only to legitimate stigmatizing processes rather than highlight the ongoing efforts to destigmatize identities among multiply marginalized populations. While we know that individuals experience social stigma, we must investigate further how individuals and communities actively reject the shame associated with these identities in seeking to project an unspoiled identity and to achieve social destigmatization. As such, I emphasize an “asset-based orientation” to center how these young men are coping with the negotiation of multiple stigmatized identities (see Carter-Sowell and Zimmerman 2015). This article examines meetings among stigmatized groups, what Goffman called backstage rehearsals (Goffman 1959), that counter Black gay stigma to outline the intermediary step of unspoiling and provide a set of conditions under which these identities have the potential to become destigmatized within the larger society. Yet, where prior work on stigmatized populations has shown that organizational leaders often teach a locally accepted response to stigma (O’Brien 2011), my work reveals a more contested process of communal stigma negotiation as young Black gay men debate the appropriate strategies to combat stigma in their local communities. Thus, unspoiling is a strategy borne out of tense discussions about the acceptability of passing or covering one’s sexual identity.
Building on prior work that has examined the in-group practices among persons negotiating stigma (e.g., Miall 1986; O’Brien 2011; Schneider and Conrad 1980), this article illustrates how group members negotiate simultaneous sets of stigma and marginalization through explicit debate, dialogue, and teaching. Through the examination of the daily negotiation strategies deployed by men who are marginalized racially and sexually in society, we gain new insights into how the multiply marginalized make sense of the messages they have learned about their negative social markers. Building on the prior work of scholars studying “identity dilemmas” (see Dunn and Creek 2015), the findings of this work reveal the micro-interactional responses to stigma that aim to change conditions within the social world. In this sense, the collective destigmatization processes at work within this population advance insights into the impact of contemporary social pressures for identity management and how stigma comes to bear on daily life.
The ensuing sections of this article are organized into six parts. First, I discuss stigma, stigma management, and destigmatization theories. Next, I turn to the literature on racial and sexual identity development among the stigmatized with a particular focus on work that has sought to understand how these identities are formed, contested, and embodied. A detailed description of study participants, the research setting, and the primary analytical technique follows in the “Method” section. Subsequently, I explore how existing strategies for stigma management (i.e., covering and passing) operate within the organizational space and the group tensions around these strategies. Then, I turn to the emergence of unspoiling as an alternative to covering and passing. I couple the conditions under which unspoiling emerges with a discussion of how unspoiling allows the individual and collective to turn attention toward larger societal destigmatization. Last, in the conclusion, I offer an understanding of the broader implications of these findings for collaborative identity construction under the confines of multiple stigmas and how unspoiling may be understood as an emergent stepping stone to the process of destigmatization.
Coming Out: Stigma Management and Destigmatization Theory
Since Erving Goffman’s (1963) work on stigma, much has been said about how various stigmatized individuals come to manage their identities in everyday interactions with “normals.” By focusing on what John O’Brien (2011) and others call in-group rehearsals, we can glimpse how stigmatized groups prepare to face the difficult interactions anticipated ahead. Responding to Goffman’s terms of passing and covering as strategies employed by those managing stigmatizing identities, researchers have sought to understand how individuals prepare to face the non-stigmatized (Goffman 1963; O’Brien 2011; Rohleder and Gibson 2006). These two responses, “passing” or lessening the conspicuousness of a stigma, and “covering” or diminishing the imposition of a stigma on others, have been built upon by other scholars who posit new directions for the management of stigmatized identities (Orne 2011; Yoshino 2006). In addition, scholars have noted how flaunting one’s stigmatized identity can be used as a strategy for either inclusion or highlighting difference toward destigmatization (Saguy and Ward 2011; Yoshino 2006). Yet, as I will show, unspoiling, unlike flaunting, is not always an articulation of difference in the face of shame but a focus on the adjustment of the stigmatized identity as equally normal.
For sexuality scholars and those within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and others (LGBTQ+) community, “coming out” has been conceptualized as the process of openly identifying one’s sexuality (or gender-identity) and electing to share that identity publicly with others (de Monteflores and Schultz 1978). The overwhelming majority of discussions regarding “coming out” describe this as a linear process or set of stages that an individual undergoes when they reveal their stigmatized identity to other individuals in their lives (see Coleman 1982). While it is true that coming out can be a form of stigma resistance, before one can come out about an identity, they often must come to accept that identity for themselves. Unlike coming out which tends to prioritize the sharing of a stigmatized identity with an unstigmatized other, unspoiling is the reformulation of a positive social identity associated, in this case, equally with sexuality and race.
Given its many applications across topics, “coming out” is often used imprecisely in sociological literature conflating a common-sense understanding with an academic one. As argued by John I. Kitsuse (1980), and taken up by Abigail C. Saguy and Anna Ward (2011), coming out can be understood as a “master frame” to describe the outward social proclamations of many groups. With a theory of “strategic outness,” Jason Orne (2011) argues that LGBT persons must consistently “come out” to new social characters and under certain social conditions, may choose to not confirm or deny their true orientation. To add to the theoretical clarity of “coming out,” I distinguish the process or the decision to “come out” from an unspoiling identity as a position that is less concerned with stigma management and focused on articulating a stigma response that shifts onus of the stigma from the stigmatized to the stigmatizer. In this sense, unspoiling can occur either before an explicit coming out to intimate members of one’s social network when the individual is fully comfortable with the identity or following a coming out that left a stigmatizing effect with the individual.
While much work in the social sciences has reinforced the enduring nature of negotiation strategies of stigmatized populations, theories of destigmatization are far less common in the literature. Recent sociological work that has taken up destigmatization often offer a set of strategies rather than theorizing a process or set of steps that gets a group from social stigmatization to destigmatization (Clair, Daniel, and Lamont 2016; C. W. Han 2015; Lamont 2009; Lamont et al. 2016). M. Clair et al. (2016) offer the beginnings of a theory of destigmatization stating there are three social conditions associated with the reduction of public and structural stigma: (1) the credibility of new constructions, which depends on their conclusiveness and the status of actors advocating for them; (2) the interaction of new constructions with existing ideologies; and (3) the perceived linked fate between the stigmatized group and the dominant group. (P. 228)
By articulating these three conditions as directly in response to B. G. Link and J. C. Phelan’s (2001) conceptualization of stigma, the authors articulate a set of steps that may lead to greater group destigmatization. This article adds to this conversation by calling in the micro-interactional work that happens solely among the stigmatized in backstage work and asks us to consider to what extent these conditions can be met under intersectional stigmas (Berger 2004; Logie et al. 2011).
Intersectionality and Black Gay Identity Development
Scholarly research on identity development and conceptualization of self has been conducted primarily in the social-psychological fields (see Jamil, Harper, and Fernandez 2009). Understanding the developing person as a continual author who is working to narrate a connected life story is important to young adults who are working to create cohesive conceptualizations of self that rationalize particular identity formations (McAdams and Olson 2010). Sociological studies that have examined Black gay male identity have highlighted how race, sexuality, religion, and social spaces inform the proclaimed identities of Black gay men (Crichlow 2004; Hawkeswood 1996; Hunter 2010a; Icard 1986; Winder 2015). Both Hawkeswood and Hunter emphasize the ways that Black gay men understand their gay identities and that while many works consider that either race or sexuality must dominate as a primary identifier, many Black gay men find these aspects of self as inextricable. Wesley Eddison Aylesworth Crichlow (2004) illustrates how Afro-Caribbean and African Canadian same-sex attracted men create lives of “safety and pleasure” (p. 4) while feeling tenuously positioned within Canadian Black communities. While these studies have articulated how Black gay men might identify, they do not tend to explicate the micro-interactional collective work that assists young Black gay men in the negotiation of their stigmatized identities.
Employing an intersectional framework allows the focus of this project to uncover the processes that influence the specific social location of these sexual and racial minority young men. Intersectionality, as articulated by Black feminist scholars, is a framework that seeks to recognize the inextricability of race, gender, class, sexuality, and age oppression (see Collins 1999, 2004; Crenshaw 1991; Hancock 2007; Moore 2012; Simien 2007; Zinn and Dill 1996). In addition, scholars have articulated how queer of color critique helps us to contend with the ways that race and sexuality (among other social categories) are mutually constituting and cannot be fully understood when analyzed separately (Robinson 2015). By understanding the strategies that young Black gay men employ in response to homophobic experiences and societal expectations of their identities, this project elucidates how young men are trained to respond to homophobic attitudes by their peers and how they engage with organizations that target their positive development into adulthood. Given that the social positions of young Black gay men inform their conceptions of self, the project sheds light on the ways that racism, heterosexism, and discrimination situate these young men in extremely tenuous social positions; specifically, we can identify the strategies they learn and co-create within organizations to respond to the negative social forces they have experienced. Uncovering these strategies is even more important as research has underscored how racial and sexual oppression can be obscured which can complicate social movements toward equality (Sumerau and Grollman 2018).
Living at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities, the young men in this study engage in backstage stigma management rehearsals (O’Brien 2011) to unspoil their identities internally for themselves and in the view of others. While the traditional stigma management techniques “passing” and “covering” are suggested and sometimes put forth as viable options within the space, unspoiling emerges to counter these strategies as acceptable. Sociologist Amin Ghaziani (2011) argued that in the post-gay movement, gay activists transitioned from an “’us’ versus ‘them’ to a logic of ‘us’ and ‘them’ to stress their commonalities with heterosexuals. As such, the use of unspoiling as a stigma response technique can be considered a post-gay effort to expand the category of ‘normal’ to include those who are both racial and sexual minorities. In what follows, I illustrate how young Black gay men may choose to deploy unspoiling to draw similarities not only with White Americans but also with Black heterosexuals as they negotiate both racial and sexual stigmas simultaneously.
Research Methods and Sample Characteristics
In this article, I draw from over four years of ethnographic fieldnotes at a Los Angeles–based HIV and social support center that I call UpLiftLA. I collected ethnographic fieldnotes at weekly meetings, offsite events (i.e., educational presentations, conferences, and balls), and informal social gatherings (i.e., clubs, birthday parties, brunch gatherings, and dinners). Over the course of my time at UpLiftLA, I observed 225 different bisexual and pansexual Black young men at their weekly leadership meetings. Seventy percent of the young men only attended between one and three meetings. The relatively small number of meetings attended by each person compared with the total number of young men seen over my time at the organization is reflective of the highly transitional nature of these young mens’ lives. While I did not collect systematic data on class status, many of these young men were dealing with new HIV diagnoses, homelessness, job precarity, or other socio-economic barriers as the organization’s services directly targeted these populations. At the time of observations, the young men in the group ranged in age from 18 to 31. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board and as such, all names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect participant confidentiality.
It is important to note here the way that my own positionality granted access to this space as the young men engaged in a process of backstage work. As a self-identified Black gay man who fell into the race, gender, and age range of the population, backstage work continued relatively undisturbed. That is, to see backstage work, as an ethnographer, I prioritized engaging in a process that sought not to disrupt the performance of the young men in the space as they discussed stigma and discrimination based on their racial and sexual identities. On my first day of observation, the group facilitator introduced me to the group; I explained my project to them and specified that I would be observing and taking notes during the weekly meetings. Across the four years of observation, I periodically reminded the group that I was collecting data and often sent drafts of talks, papers, or presentations to group members to gain their insights. I recorded jottings on my phone throughout each meeting and expanded these jottings into full fieldnotes after leaving the fieldsite.
Fieldnotes collected were organized and analyzed through a process of abductive analysis, an iterative methodological approach involving close analysis of primary data considering relevant theoretical literatures (Tavory and Timmermans 2014). Ethnographic fieldnotes were grouped and coded for instances of covering, passing, and unspoiling and memos with relevant existing theories were constructed to help refine analysis. I specifically looked for instances where young men vocally resisted passing and covering as acceptable stigma responses during group conversations. In the analyses that follow, I lay out the conditions under which unspoiling is advanced as a viable stigma response strategy in contrast to covering and passing and how unspoiling works in the organizational space to push the discourse of larger social destigmatization of identities.
Living Under Stigma: Management Options
UpliftLA is a community space that is bounded and based on ties among young men in Los Angeles who seek to develop cohesive sexual and racial identities. It is a site where they can discuss views of the larger gay community, the Black community, and deal with personal and social issues (e.g., homelessness, incarceration, joblessness) that are frequently experienced by young Black gay men. Through the participation in conversations and interactions in the organizational space, these young men explore the transitional natures of their racial and sexual identities.
In the next section, I detail the ways that covering and passing are used by young men in the space in their discussions of navigating racialized spaces. I also explicate how the tensions around the unacceptability of covering and passing work to create the conditions under which unspoiling emerges. I then show how these young men work to unspoil their identities and how the process of unspoiling sets the stage for a social movement toward larger collective identity destigmatization.
Being Extra’d Out: Passing and Covering in the Hood
Weekly, a group of 5 to 26 young Black gay men come together to discuss the issues they face in their lives. Coming together, the young men sit in a semi-circle and engage in conversations that are facilitated by an organizational authority figure. These meetings function as “deep education” (O’Brien 2011) for the young men who are socializing one another into the appropriate ways to respond to stigmatizing experiences they have outside of the space. While the organization’s leader facilitates these meetings with his own topical agendas ranging from homelessness, job readiness, and intimate relationships, the group often engages in robust debates about their public social positions within Los Angeles. For example, during one meeting, the young men gathered and began to discuss their opinions about how the behavior of others reflected on their public image. In the following dialogue, two participants, Kyle and David, discuss the issues they have about gay men who are “extra’d out”:
Gays should not be extravagant or flamboyant when out in public.
There’s a time and place for [flamboyance].
Living in South Central Los Angeles, I’m bothered when I see flamboyant gays on the corner, voguing, playing house music, doing too much, or being “extra’d out” and drawing attention to themselves.
In this interaction, Kyle notes his discomfort with others who draw too much attention to themselves by being “extra’d out.” His distaste for flamboyance is situated alongside his noting of neighborhood. We can interpret being “extra’d out” as a manifestation of the stigma response technique flaunting (Saguy and Ward 2011; Yoshino 2006). Kyle shares his negative sentiments toward flaunting not just due to his own sexuality but also because of his living geographically within a well-known Black community where he feels too much attention being drawn to gay behaviors might cause him problems. This experience highlights how Kyle negotiates his existence within the racial meanings of a Black environment while negotiating the meanings of his gay sexuality. Kyle’s sentiments invite further discussion from the group. The facilitator, Henry, plays a key role in encouraging the continued probing of these ideas about public appearance and displays of sexuality within Black neighborhood contexts. Henry follows Kyle’s remarks by asking the group, “What is ‘too much’? Do we work to accommodate people and to appease others with our outward appearance?” Henry’s question evokes the idea of Goffman’s “normals” or the stigmatizer. It directly prompts the young men to consider how they modify their behavior in response to the absent (yet, ever present) “normal.” One young man, Tory, replies to Henry’s question immediately and qualifies his response:
You need to present yourself anyway you want to be comfortable with yourself. I want to be “undetectable” and not giving a glimpse of my sexuality when I’m in public.
In Tory’s response, he notes that his own decision for self-presentation and the decisions of others should be based on individual comfort around one’s sexuality. He suggests through this that his hiding or being an “undetectable” gay is rooted in his own issues with his sexuality and not the effect of so-called “normals.” It is apparent from Tory’s reply that while he is not acknowledging the role that the stigmatizer’s gaze plays in his self-expression, there is an undeniable influence from this gaze in the desire to conceal one’s sexuality. Tory, then, can be understood to advocate for “passing” as a strategy to conceal his sexuality in public.
Passing is held up by other young men in this group for a variety of reasons, from personal to political. One repeated source of appreciation for the stigma response approach of passing is the threat of violence. As the conversation about self-presentation continues, David chimes-in to express why he elects to pass in certain areas of his life:
You don’t need to be all extra’d out . . . I’ve been jumped before . . . so when I go to certain ’hoods I throw on my “nigga outfit,” but I’d go out with a weave and makeup if I’m comfortable around people like the Revlons or Escadas. 2
Here, David’s narrative against being extra’d out is rooted in his fear of encountering violence. His coded language of wearing his “nigga outfit” when going to “certain hoods” suggests that he is notably orienting himself to Black spaces in Los Angeles by changing his clothing to avoid physical harm. In this retelling of his being “jumped” or in other words physically assaulted, David attributes this encountered violence to his outward expression of his sexuality and gender. Furthermore, the agreement of some of the young men in the space was clear as they nodded or uttered “yep” to endorse these ideas of changing one’s appearance as a way of protection. David’s account illustrates his attentiveness to switching appearances, behaviors, and expressions as he imagines he is viewed by others in public space. These comments further highlight how these young men often find themselves in what sociologist Jay Orne (2013) calls the “line of fire” for their sexualities.
While passing is clearly a viable option for some of the young men in the space, others find this to be a problematic way of dealing with stigma. These young men elect to create a distinction between hiding oneself and lessening the impact of their stigmatized identity on others by “covering.” Kyle returns to the conversation explaining that he was not advocating for passing, but for a form of covering. He is joined by Rodney and Dwayne who echo his sentiments about outward displays of sexuality:
There’s a difference between hiding who you are and toning it down.
I don’t need everyone to know I’m gay based on who I hang around.
I can tell a gay person from a mile away . . . We have to respect that people don’t want to have their children around “this” and then get upset when they say something.
Kyle’s attempt to distinguish between hiding one’s sexuality and toning down the public nature of that sexuality signals the importance of outwardly displaying one’s sexuality but not “too much”—what I consider as policing the boundaries of outness. He highlights a desire to create a distinction between passing and covering by heralding covering as the more socially appropriate choice. Furthermore, Rodney’s comments highlight the tension that many of the men in the space noted with the sexualities of others reflecting too strongly on them coupled with his desire for discretion. In his statement, Rodney signals a concern for what psychologist William E. Cross (1991) called “spotlight anxiety” or the fear that the behaviors of others would draw attention to one’s own. Dwayne’s comments expose concerns around child sexuality and the comfort of others. By evoking the protection of the children from being around “this,” which we might consider to mean a public display of sexuality, he sanctions the behavior of heterosexuals who express issues with the outness of the young men, thereby policing the emotional boundaries of those who may be bothered to be chastised for their outward expressions of sexuality.
The tension and discomfort among many of the young men who may be working to hide their identities created a space where hiding was shamed but adapting or toning one’s sexuality down was approved by select group members. During another meeting, one man, Anton, expressed how he was living on the down-low or “DL,”
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a lifestyle that was not celebrated by members of the group. One of the more respected and older men in the space offered his advice to Anton about his sexuality and why the DL was not the answer: Ricky begins to offer his opinion of Anton’s story and starts, “As for you being DL . . .” and continues to say that he can understand why he may try to present himself as the trade and may want to hide, but that it’s not the best idea for him to be ultimately comfortable with himself. Ricky then begins to share a story about his own experiences and remarks that he has never been bothered like others for his sexuality, because he knows how to adapt to different environments and situations. He adds that he’s “not hiding myself but being a chameleon.” Others nod in agreement to this statement.
Ricky uses his own experiences as a teaching point to suggest how Anton should approach his own sexual identity when among other people. By utilizing his personal story, Ricky shows that being able to blend-in among predominately Black spaces has made him like a “chameleon” which has shielded him from the antagonism from outsiders. Ricky offers this tip to Anton as a more experienced “out” gay male within the group setting and reinforces the idea of prioritizing one’s own identity and comfort levels. Ricky emphasizes that he is not hiding himself and that he is unbothered by the assumptions and reactions of others. This explicit desire to prioritize his own identity comfortability over the comfort of others and to remain unbothered by the perceptions of others elucidates how there exists a tension around the ideas of “covering” or “passing” among the men in the space. From this tension, some of the young men in the space come to reject these strategies altogether, and unspoiling is born.
Rejecting Existing Strategies: Unspoiling in Spite of Stigma
While the previous section highlighted how passing and covering operated in the organizational space, there were instances where young men would reject these strategies as adequate for dealing with stigmatizing experiences. When the young men discussed their daily dealings with stigma, various social actors were mentioned as perpetrators of negative sentiments toward their sexualities. Particularly, family, church, and peers were cited as primary sources for imparting stigmatizing messages. For example, one young man, Aaron said, “I love my granny, but she says things that are hurtful—but I know I’m sickening . . . fuck you . . . I’m sickening.” Here Aaron’s use of sickening means that he is fabulous or flawless, and he vehemently opposes the negative messages imposed by his grandmother. Examples from church included Terry’s response, “I grew up in the church—they probably know I’m gay—I don’t give a fuck—I’m grown.” Terry’s response to the negativity he feels from church relies on his perceived adulthood. In so doing, Terry models a rejection of negativity from church members. Aaron and Terry both embody the first step in unspoiling by rejecting a sense of self-stigma.
Yet, these young men do not always consider the stigma from outside stigmatizers as the only issue. Often, they find themselves wrestling with other gay men to avoid stigma being cast on them through association or “spotlight anxiety” as seen in the previous section. In one instance, Niko discussed his own prior hatred of other gay men. To divert attention from his own sexuality, he would disparage other gay people for acceptance. He said, “When I was younger, I was harder on gay people . . . I hated gay people . . . like I’d see it and say something before my straight friend like ‘fucking faggots man.’” Niko uses this example as a symbol of his growth and acceptance for his own sexuality as a gay man. Noting his past allows him to teach others within the organizational space that personal acceptance may come with time. Peers also can share negative sentiments about gay sexualities. For instance, young gay men often hear words like “faggot” or “sissy” to emasculate them and to call into question the acceptability of their sexualities (Pascoe 2005, 2011). In re-casting their sexuality as something they are comfortable with, Aaron, Terry, and Niko are exemplars of unspoiling identities. That is, through the rejection of stigma and rejection of comforting those who may have qualms with their identities, these young men emphasize their desire to put their personal relationship with gay sexuality first and in so doing, they reject covering and passing for the comfort of others whether they be friends, family, or otherwise.
Other young men in the space use similar examples of self-acceptance to reject notions of passing or covering ones’ sexual identity. In so doing, these young men attempt to teach others to unspoil their identities for themselves through teaching and sharing of personal narrative. On one such occasion, the young men were discussing their daily jobs and came to debate one group member’s ability to wear long decorated fingernails that were a marker of his weekend work as a drag performer throughout the week as he taught at an elementary school: Caden, an elementary school teacher, tells the group that he’s credentialed and continues by saying, “When you get older and mature then you’ll see you can do what you want when you’re known and valued for what you offer . . . my classroom is the best.” Caden continues, “you’re Black first not gay.”
Caden’s final statement drives home the importance of time in the processes that underlie self-understanding. It is clear from his comments that a Black identity represents the whole individual and that being “gay” comes secondary as simply another layer. In this sense, Caden exhibits what sociologist Marcus Hunter (2010a) terms an “up-down” identity negotiation, where one identity is prioritized over the other; in this case, where Black identity is elevated over gay identity. By publicly prioritizing his racial identity as a result of being “older and mature,” Caden participates in an effort of collective destigmatization by teaching the group members how he believes they should understand their identities. In using “older and mature,” he elucidates further that age acts as a salient intersectional marker for how these young men come to navigate social stigma. In his remarks, Caden emphasizes the prioritization of his successful classroom to his identity and how his competence gives him the liberty to be known and valued for his work rather than judged for his sexual identity. This example also illustrates how notions of social class are subtly deployed within the group to reinforce an articulation of unspoiling racial and sexual identities. It is clear from this example that one reason to reject an existing stigma management response in favor of unspoiling is based in one’s professional credentials that lend social legitimacy. That is, being credentialed or degreed acts as a proxy for social class and indicates the desire to worry about others’ view of your identity as a mark of immaturity and youth. These weekly group conversations socialize group members to re-consider taking approaches to stigma such as passing or covering as unacceptable ways to negotiate experiences with stigmatizers and instead to consider a response that rejects the stigma put on them by “normals” and to encourage discomforting “normals.”
Malachi, another “older” member of the group, echoes Caden’s advice to the younger men within the group. He suggests another reason that one may reject covering or passing as a stigma response, as seen in the following: Malachi was very “pissed off” about what he had heard and wanted to thank Caden for what he shared with the group. Malachi then said to the group “you have internalized self-hate.” He continued, “who the fuck cares how you look, who the fuck cares how you talk . . . I’m so tired of hearing that its only okay to be gay after the sun goes down or at a ball.” He added, “Some people can hide their being gay, but I cannot. I’ve been jumped and stabbed for being gay, but I haven’t changed.”
Malachi’s passionate response to corroborate Caden’s advice shows that he believes most of the people in the group who have expressed notions of “hiding” or covering have “internalized self-hate” and are in a sense doing a disservice to themselves. He conveys this message very forcefully to the other young men in the group as seen by his repetitive cursing and his evident exasperation with feeling punished for being gay. Furthermore, Malachi believes that he simply cannot hide his gay identity and therefore finds it a futile exercise to consider trying. Malachi is advocating for the other participants to be comfortable in being recognized as gay. This is very different from the perspectives of some of the other young men who work daily to depict themselves in particularly “less gay” ways for varying reasons (e.g., perceived safety, in consideration of children, not wanting their business known). Unlike David’s story from the preceding section, Malachi stands forcefully in the line of fire, both figuratively as he advocates for self-acceptance and literally as he endures the violence of being beaten or stabbed for his sexuality. Both Malachi and Caden display that their perspectives have come after maturing and becoming comfortable with themselves in other spaces. Their emphasis on teaching the young men in the group to be more confident and to reject self-hate, or what we might read as the acceptance of an identity label and the rejection of stigma, is another key form of how unspoiling processes appear in the interactional space. That is, in addition to explaining one’s own acceptance of a stigmatized identity, the young men also attempt to teach others to reject the stigma associated with their racial and sexual identities. In so doing, the young men who choose to navigate stigma by unspoiling shift the burden of stigma away from themselves by emphasizing that it does not matter what others (“normals”) think.
Unspoiling Black and Gay Identities toward Social Destigmatization
Moving from the individual-level work of unspoiling to a larger social destigmatization of Black gay identities was often a topic of discussion among the men. To understand the social environments where unspoiling may lead to destigmatization, it is crucial to understand the cultural milieu of the population at hand. The young men who frequent UpLiftLA tend to live in predominately Black neighborhoods of Los Angeles. This fact is extremely important in the context of Los Angeles where over 70 percent of same-gender loving people of color live in predominately Black and Latino areas even when there are well-known gay enclaves, such as West Hollywood, close-by (Moore 2010). These young Black gay men are acutely aware of their semi-belonging in West Hollywood and feel that while it is a geographically bounded gay community, it is not for them. These young men articulated frequently that certain aspects of the gay community were racially divided, and they based their participation in certain events around that fact. Take for example this excerpt from my fieldnotes concerning Los Angeles Pride in West Hollywood: Henry, the group facilitator, announces that LA gay pride will be happening soon and that there will be a float for AIDS Walk that people can be involved with. Gary asks if any Black gay people go to LA Pride Henry replies emphatically, “To be honest? No!” Donovan adds, “But, they be at The Abbey at night . . . ”
As seen in the preceding passage, one of the major pride events in Los Angeles had a reputation for not attracting the Black gay population. While sharing knowledge about the event, Donovan offered that Black men may not attend the pride events, but will convene informally at a popular gay nightclub in West Hollywood, The Abbey. Given that the young men do not feel that West Hollywood or larger gay community events, like pride, are intended for them, these young men go to UpLiftLA to create community among one another while discussing what is needed in their personal communities to rectify issues that are particular to their experiences as young Black gay men in Los Angeles.
For example, Tyrone describes the resources that are available to address the things important to those in the Black gay community: Tyrone starts by saying he wants an organization to turn to like the NAACP for gay issues. He acknowledged that GLAAD is around, but that they don’t understand the issues that Black gays face in particular. The majority of the room agrees. Lloyd adds that in addition to that, “We need a Black gay parade in every city; not just the major ones.” He argued that it was important to show up in all places and to “force people” to see that Black gays were in their midst.
Tyrone’s statement highlights the importance of the ties between sexuality and race for these young men and their desire to have their needs met by an organization that takes a stand for issues faced by the community. Lloyd reinforces these comments and adds the importance of having Pride events that are directly targeted to the Black gay community in areas that young Black gay men frequent. By “forcing people to see Black gays,” Lloyd not only shows how imbedded these young men are within Black communities, but also demonstrates how important it is for these young men to create change to remain in these spaces. Embodying the third component of unspoiling, Lloyd and Tyrone emphasize the importance of an outward acceptance of self and how social movements and public displays can begin to shift the social standing of the stigmatized. These comments both highlight the need for organizations and events within the community (see Loiacano 1989), and they underscore the importance of the weekly meetings between these young men that occur at UpLiftLA.
The need to “force” others to see Black gay people is important to note, because it highlights feelings of invisibility among two separate communities—the Black community and the predominately White, gay community. This sense of invisibility underscores how the young men feel their experiences with racial and sexual stigma are obscured (see Sumerau and Grollman 2018) and ignored. By attending these weekly meetings and participating in different events in Los Angeles, the young men practice unspoiling their identities toward greater destigmatization. In this example, Lloyd argues that the most important thing that they can do is to show up and be seen. Rather than using traditional stigma management techniques of covering or passing, Lloyd advocates for an outward expression of his racial and sexual identity to the discomfort of others. Unlike passing and covering which prioritize the experience of Goffman’s “normals,” unspoiling converts the prioritization to the comfort of the stigmatized. The expressions from these young men fit into what sociologist Veronica Terriquez (2015) called intersectional mobilization, where there is strong advocacy and activism “among a marginalized group of an already marginalized population.” In emphasizing the effort to make their presence known, the young men of this study put themselves first within both gay communities and Black communities as they aim to bring awareness and acceptance of their doubly marginalized social positions.
Discussion and Conclusion
Understanding how stigmatized groups come to reject a sense of stigma around their identities gives insight into the beginnings of social movements that aim to destigmatize groups. From social campaigns like We Are > AIDS to SlutWalk, efforts to reject stigma are borne out of individual and collective efforts to rework personal relationships with stigmatized identities through unspoiling. Through the theorization of intersectional identities, scholars can begin to glean the extant pressures that stigmatized populations attempt to navigate and challenge through their everyday actions. By exploring the messages that are sent and received during interactions within the organizational space, I highlight the crucial intermediary step of unspoiling toward a process of destigmatization. I detail how the, sometimes, violent social conditions that these young men face can elicit passing and covering as acceptable stigma response techniques; yet, I illustrate how passing and covering become untenable responses for some who are negotiating multiple simultaneous stigmas and aim to normalize those identities. Specifically, I highlight how young men who are older or have more socio-economic security (e.g., stable jobs) use this “maturity” as an example for why other Black young men should unspoil rather than cover or pass their identities. The micro-interactional backstage conversations that occur in these meetings reveal how the young men navigating stigma educate and persuade others to employ what they view as an appropriate, “mature” response to stigma (i.e., unspoiling). Furthermore, examining these conversations elucidates how unspoiling emerges from the tensions around covering and passing and how discomfort with hiding (passing) or downplaying (covering) one’s identity inspires some of these men to aim for larger group social movements toward destigmatization.
This project adds to the literature about the diversity of identity expressions among young Black gay men and increases our awareness of the roles that these organizational spaces may play in the development of unspoiling identities. Specifically, I rework Goffman’s original set of stigma responses to illustrate how some individuals and groups choose to prioritize their own perception of social acceptability rather than the comfort of stigmatizers. This work highlights the role of peer-mediated stigma response as opposed to organization leader–promoted normative response in contrast to work on other stigmatized groups (O’Brien 2011). Unspoiling emerges through the tensions around covering and passing as insufficient ways to address stigma. Thus, understanding unspoiling as a midway between simply accepting a stigma attached to one’s identity and working toward socially destigmatizing an identity adds to our understanding of how individuals reject the social stains associated with their identities and re-conceptualize their identities as both acceptable and normal.
Unspoiling, then, represents another tool in the toolkit for individuals negotiating simultaneous intersectional stigmas. It is comprised of the process by which the young men at UpLiftLA come to accept a normalized sense of their racial and sexual identities and through the continual teaching and sharing of this normalized identity with one another. In learning to unspoil a stigmatized identity, the individual is centered on a public display of self and a self-reconciliation with a stigmatized identity. As outlined in the findings above, unspoiling can be a part of one’s coming out process or entirely unrelated to coming out to family and friends. Therefore, I do not attempt to count “unspoiled identities,” but rather aim to illustrate the emergence of this response pattern as a process growing from the interactional tensions with covering and passing. In addition, as the young men demonstrate, unspoiling is not inherently an activist or social movement position at its onset. Rather, the process of unspoiling can set the stage for moving within a shared collective identity toward larger destigmatization through the support of social organization and advocacy.
Previous research has cited the need for further research into spaces that socially isolated Black people use to leverage social support and development (Hunter 2010b; Silva 2012). My ethnographic data unveil the interactions within the organizational space of UpLiftLA that offers a location for young Black gay men to debate, contest, and explore various responses to social stigma. Spaces such as UpLiftLA become safe havens for young men to negotiate the difficulties they face with assuming a public identity that embraces a stigmatized race and sexuality. These findings suggest the importance of this space to offset unfavorable reactions to their identities within other community spaces (e.g., gayborhoods, ethnic neighborhoods, churches) that have shaped their life course by letting these young men try out expressions and arguments that they will use to justify their identities. While my research has illuminated the internal dialogues between in-group members of the community space, these data do not allow me to address the extent to which these conversations and debates directly affect interactions with stigmatizers outside of the space. Yet, as we see in the examples of young men like Malachi and Caden, their decision to reject the imposition of stigma from others and their advocacy for other young Black gay men to do the same suggests that they are unspoiling their identities for themselves, regardless of its position with stigmatizing onlookers.
Future research should turn attention to examining the role of other social institutions that shape the developmental processes of populations negotiating multiple stigmas. In exploring these relationships further, scholars will deepen knowledge about the role of social institutions and policies that affect the life trajectories of stigmatized populations like sexual and racial minority young men. In addition, these studies should continue to add to the compendium of research on asset-based strategies to navigate social stigma, inequality, and discrimination rather than focus on deficits among stigmatized groups. Other research may also explicitly consider how social class affects the negotiation of stigma. This work raises further research questions for scholars studying multiply marginalized populations. How are other populations engaged in similar or dissimilar processes of stigma management and response? What are other expressions of unspoiling? What are the various geographies of unspoiling across spaces? In addition, in a time when individuals are heralded for coming out and living openly with stigmatized identities, more research should focus on the large-scale processes of social destigmatization.
