Abstract
Based on life history interviews with 45 LGBTQ+ Southerners, I explore how LGBTQ+ people partake in a process I call safety framing, which I define as the process of using emotions to define social spaces (such as the home, the workplace, school, church) as safe or unsafe. Using an interactionist approach, I conceptualize how LGBTQ+ individuals use four emotion-based subprocesses of situational recollection, assessing in the moment, relativizing spatial safety, and reassessing safety frames to create schemas of social spaces as safe or unsafe for LGBTQ+ individuals. This analysis makes empirical contributions to how LGBTQ+ people perceive social spaces as affirming or hostile, and theoretical contributions to how LGBTQ+ individuals create geographies of safety using emotion-based frames of space.
Keywords
Introduction
The experiences of LGBTQ+ people have been traditionally studied within the realms of social spaces such as home (Martin 2009), school (Pascoe 2005), church (Barton 2012), and in public (Barbee and Schrock 2019; Greensmith and King 2020; Steele 2013). Regional culture, politics, and culture shape these spaces (Johnson 2011; Inabinet and Moss 2021; Powell 2007; Stone 2018) and emerging research demonstrates that queer folks view the U.S. South as hostile for them (Abelson 2019; Baunach and Burgess 2013; Mims 2019). Over the past few decades, policies such as the legalization of same-sex sexual relations (Lawrence v. Texas), legalization of same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges), and discrimination protections (Bostock v. Clay County) have improved queer people’s lives. However, these advances have also come with tremendous setbacks on the state and federal level through the introduction of bills that seek to eliminate the presence of LGBTQ+ people in public life, at school, on the sports field, in bathrooms, and beyond with 88 anti-LGBTQ+ bills passed in 2023—up nearly 200 percent from the 29 bills passed in 2022 (ACLU 2023). Given the role region plays in these threats, it is important to understand how queer people in the South make sense of and navigate spaces that may or may not be safe for them. While previous research on queer people illuminates how LGBTQ+ people navigate hostile social spaces, there is scant research detailing the processes through which LGBTQ+ make perceptions of safety. Thus, I ask: how do Southern queer people come to define certain spaces as safe or unsafe?
In this article, I explore this question by analyzing in-depth interviews with 45 LGBTQ+ Southerners. In doing so, I develop the concept of safety framing, which I define as the process of using emotions to define social spaces as safe or unsafe. I find that LGBTQ+ Southerners drew on memories, perceived indicators of safety as situations unfolded in the moment, made active comparisons between spaces, and reassessed their existing frames for space as new information or experiences arose. Respondents used these distinct yet complementary strategies to frame social spaces as safe or unsafe for LGBTQ+ people and develop what Abelson (2014) calls “geographies of safety,” which describes the mental maps trans men used to index how their feelings of vulnerability and fear shifted based on what social space they inhabited. In Abelson’s analysis of context, the trans men in her study used different indicators specific to their positionality as trans men to shape their geographies, such as the presence of certain types of men in a space compared to others. Where Abelson explores the specific indicators used by trans men to inform their geographies of safety, I outline general psychological processes queer Southerners used to interpret such indicators and thus create their own geographies.
My analysis contributes to research on queer people and social space as well as more generally how oppressed groups define spaces as safe or not. While we already know that LGBTQ+ individuals assess space as safe or unsafe (Abelson 2019), create formal safe spaces within institutions (Poynter and Tubbs 2007), and navigate spaces based on perceptions of safety (Tyner 2012), I unravel the processes through which people define spaces as safe or unsafe. I answer Stone’s (2018) call for research on queer folks in understudied regions and “ordinary cities” by highlighting and analyzing the lived realities of LGBTQ+ folks across the South, the vast majority residing in places that are not considered queer meccas. This work has both psychological and legal implications. In describing the psychological processes and signifiers LGBTQ+ people used to assess safety, we can better understand the stressors and emotional burdens that contribute to worse health outcomes for LGBTQ+ individuals (Cyrus 2017; Mink, Lindley, and Weinstein 2014). Additionally, this work may be used to orient future research that evaluates the effects of regressive legislation on queer lived experiences, such as laws that bar LGBTQ+ people from certain spaces (like sports teams) or eliminates queer spaces completely (i.e., shutting down and defunding LGBTQ+ orgs).
Literature Review
The Social Construction of Space and Place
Sociological conceptions of space and place, while varied, focus on their social nature and distinctions. Logan’s (2012) review of spatial thinking demonstrated that spatiality is important for understanding how social networks form and how social meaning is mapped geographically. Definitions of space and place have been debated, but sociologists tend to use “space” to refer to various locations and “place” to refer to specific places, while emphasizing they are sites of meaning making (Abelson 2019). This approach resonates with Henri Lefebvre’s classic definition of space as “the outcome of past actions [that] permits fresh actions to occur while suggesting and prohibiting yet others” (Lefebvre 1991:73). Following Lefebvre, rather than viewing social space as a sum of people, things, and geography, I focus on how space is both socially constructed and socially influential.
Social Spaces and Fear for Safety
Interdisciplinary scholarship shows that social spaces can shape people’s perceptions (Abelson 2014, 2019; Tudor 2003; Tyner 2012). Tudor (2003) argued that the emotion of fear is intertwined with social spaces, interactions therein, and the wider culture that constructs certain people as dangerous. Such stigmatization shapes both how individuals feel toward the targeted and how those targeted feel about themselves. People also build expectations based on their perceptions of violence, perceiving sites such as the home to be a refuge from the violence of “the streets” and plan communities in ways to reduce anticipated violence (Tyner 2012). Thus, these expectations shape social behavior. Abelson’s (2014) work extends the concept of “geographies of fear” of men (Brownlow 2005) and women (Valentine 1989), which describes how fear of men’s violence inhibits women’s access to space, and how men perform acts of fearlessness despite chronic fear of victimization in public spaces. Her idea of “geographies of safety” uses a queer lens to describe how trans men’s feelings of vulnerability shifted across a variety of social spaces and audiences. Overall, these works show that people’s fear ties into mutable, socially constructed definitions of safety which is then acted upon.
There are many spaces in which LGBTQ+ people fear for their safety and self-worth. For example, one’s home is a place where queer folks encounter erasure through subtle and overt homophobic messages (Martin 2009) or experience stigma from family (Reczek and Bosley-Smith 2021). Religious sites are considered unsafe due to the association between religiosity and negative beliefs toward sexual and gender minorities (Barton 2012; Beagan and Hattie 2015; Goodman 2024). Schools are a site of homophobia (Pascoe 2005), which is associated with negative health outcomes in LGBTQ+ youth (Fish 2020; Johns et al. 2019). Queer people also face rampant harassment on the streets, particularly trans and nonbinary individuals who may not pass (Anderson 2020). These safety concerns and fears of violence reflect a systemic cisheteronormativity that necessitates queer people predict and plan for unsafe situations.
LGBTQ+ people often assess whether a social space will be safe for them. Barbee and Schrock’s (2019) work found that nonbinary trans people experienced the emotional burdens differently based on how they perceived situations and spaces as safe or unsafe, with binary spaces such as bathrooms being perceived as especially unsafe. Their performances of gender and navigation of social spaces also differed based on these perceptions, corroborating research on drag kings in the South who used drag to explore female masculinity and trans identity without fear of social taboo (Baker and Kelly 2016). Further, assessing safety informs whether LGBTQ+ people decide to come out (Ghabrial 2019). While these works suggest that queer people continually assess whether a space is safe, less is known about the ways in which people make such assessments.
Safe Spaces
In response to fears of violence in social spaces, the LGBTQ+ community has created LGBTQ+ Safe Spaces to interact with others without fear of homophobia (Poynter and Tubbs 2007; Croff, Hubach, Currin and Frederick, 2017). These measures have been taken primarily in schools to address homophobia and bullying (Madireddy and Madireddy 2020) and queer students at schools with designated “safe adults” felt like they belonged were more likely to be engaged in their education (Seelman 2015). Lesbian, gay, and ally members of gay-affirming churches have also worked to rectify people’s views of gay identity and Christian identity as oppositional and to make their congregations feel more accepting (McQueeny 2009). Vitally, Ghaziani’s (2024) work on queer nightlife argues that in the wake of closures of traditional queer nightlife spaces, like gay and lesbian bars, it is important to consider one-off events, apartment gatherings, etc. as forms of queer space. I build on these studies by focusing on how these spaces are constructed and labeled as (un)safe.
Intersectional queer experiences demonstrate that definitions of “safe” and unsafe” are not universal. Specifically, institutional queer Safe Spaces often privilege whiteness. Fox and Ore (2010) show that queer campus organizations do not acknowledge racism and sexism, and Dana’s (2024) ethnography of queer health shows that NGOs implicitly pressure queer folks of color to prescribe to surveillance and policing. Conversely, some racial and ethnic rights movements have used homophobic rhetoric as part of larger critiques of whiteness, framing queerness as both taboo and exclusive to white individuals (Minian 2013). On a larger scale, Eaves (2016) and Johnson’s (2018) work demonstrates that Black queer Southern women are left to the margins. Eaves argues that despite the Southern queer mecca of Asheville, North Carolina’s rhetoric emphasizing the progressiveness and LGBTQ+-friendliness of the city, Black lesbians in Asheville experience the opposite, struggling being Othered or outright ignored by the mainstream (white) queer scene. Overall, intersectional oppressions necessitate the need for differing indicators of safety. For this reason, my definition of safety for this paper comes directly from my participant’s views, as elaborated in my methods section.
Rural and Southern Queer Life
People’s conceptions of safety are influenced by larger cultural understandings of regions and locales. The culture, politics, and demographic diversity of the U.S. South contribute to lived experiences that are often poorly explained by theories that center Northern U.S. experiences (Stone 2018). Rogers (2022) demonstrates how aspects of southern culture and southern masculinity cannot be decoupled from how trans men in the South understand and present their identities. Beyond region, theorizing has also centered on urban queer experiences and pushed rural queer experiences to the periphery (Herring 2010; Schweighofer 2016; Thomsen 2016). Rurality is most often associated with lack of sexual freedom and intolerance of gender and sexual diversity (Boso 2013). Additionally, because of the economic history of each region, the South is often equated with rurality, while the North is equated with urbanity even though rural and urban spaces exist in each region (Reed 2008). These constructions of region and rurality feed into metronormative assumptions that the lives of queer folks in rural places (and by extension, Southern spaces) cannot be liberating, fulfilling, or positive (Gray, Johnson, and Gilley 2016). For instance, some participants in Abelson’s (2019) study believed the South was the least tolerant region of the United States despite never having lived there. Like other rural queer scholars, I do not essentialize a rural/urban binary as are definitions of urban/rural and North/South are nuanced (Boso 2013; Reed 2018; Stapel 2013). For sake of clarity, I draw on the OMB’s (2023) definition of rural, micropolitan, and metropolitan statistical areas to guide my descriptions of participant’s backgrounds but emphasize that participant’s experiences may not fit neatly into these definitions.
Methods and Data
In this study I interviewed 45 LGBTQ+ people who had lived for at least 10 years in the Southern United States. Like Rogers (2022), I used Reed’s (2018) definition of the South which consists of the eleven confederate states plus Kentucky and Oklahoma. Participants in my sample had previously lived in or currently resided in Alabama (7), Arkansas (2), Florida (3), Georgia (5), Kentucky (3), Louisiana (2), Mississippi (3), North Carolina (5), Oklahoma (3), South Carolina (3), Tennessee (5), Texas (8), and Virginia (3). Most of the sample (n = 26) reported living in 1 Southern state, 13 participants had lived in two Southern states, and the remainder (n = 6) had lived in three or more Southern states. Fourteen participants had left the South as adults, typically for college or for work, and four of the fourteen who left the South moved back to the region. I also recruited people who were 22 or older to avoid oversampling undergraduates and to include people with broader experiences of adulthood. Upon IRB approval, I recruited participants via social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (now X). The vast majority (N = 32) of participants cited the twitter post as the reason they became aware of the project since my recruitment flyer was “liked” over 750 times and “retweeted” over 900 times. Some participants shared the flyer with others in their social circles. Because I posted my flyer on my academic twitter profile, people in higher educated networks were more likely to be made aware of the study, which could have contributed to the education status of my sample, since all but four participants had a four-year degree or higher.
In terms of sexual orientation, participants varied widely: 19 identified as bisexual or pansexual, 12 as lesbian, 7 as gay, 5 as queer, and 6 identified on the asexuality spectrum. There was also a variety in gender identity: 23 women, 11 nonbinary or genderqueer/genderfluid, and 11 men were included in the sample. Ten of the 34 men and women who participated were binary transgender folks. It is important to note that many participants used multiple labels to describe their orientation, and some terms (such as queer) were used interchangeably with other labels. Further, some nonbinary folks considered themselves trans while others did not. I classify the participants using the identity they identified as at the time of the interview. Participants were primarily white (n = 32), although three Black, two South Asian, two Native American, and six Hispanic/Latinx people participated. Most were in their 20s or 30s (n = 41) with an average age of 30 for the sample (Table 1).
Sample Demographics.
Interviews took place via Zoom, which gave flexibility to participants in terms of where they wanted to be interviewed and allowed me to reach a sample of folks across the South. Interviews lasted an hour and 30 minutes on average and were audio recorded. At the beginning of the interview, I asked each participant introductory questions about their demographic backgrounds as well as questions about the South (e.g., “Do you consider yourself a Southerner?,” “When you think about the South, what comes to mind?”). Postintroduction I asked participants questions about different periods in their lives (e.g., growing up, high school, college, work, relationships, what they are doing now).
To gather rich stories, I employed Weiss’s (1995) probing strategies by asking questions like “can you walk me through that situation?” and “what was that like for you” to garner participant’s thoughts and feelings. I also wove in questions about how they felt about their sexual orientation/gender identity to account for shifts in identity over time. I asked about the spaces they were in (i.e., at home, at school, at their university, and at work) and how they felt in those spaces over the course of their lives. In initial interviews, I noticed how people used emotional language to describe spaces and began to probe about how this related to sense of safety. I found probing about such spaces to be the most effective way of eliciting stories about how people constructed these spaces as safe or unsafe, as I did not want to lead participants’ responses by assuming their feelings and experiences. Interviews were initially autotranscribed using Zoom’s live transcript service and cleaned by myself after data collection ceased.
I identify as a bisexual cisgender woman and although I did not disclose my identity as a member of the LGBTQ+ community prior to interviews, my twitter handle mentions my interest in LGBTQ+ identity which may have led participants to view me as either queer or an ally. Only eight participants directly asked me how I identified during or after the interview. My perceived queerness may have allowed participants to feel comfortable disclosing their experiences of being both LGBTQ+ and in the South. However, my whiteness and cisgender identity may have also affected how comfortable non-white and trans/nonbinary participants may have felt talking to me. Because interviews were virtual, I also gave participants time to get situated and/or adjust their phones, computers, headphones, etc. before we began.
I employed flexible coding (Deterding and Waters 2021) in my analysis and let the data lead to what themes I found. As I reviewed my transcripts for emerging themes, I became interested in the indicators participants used to construct spaces as either safe or unsafe for them. I noted these themes as they arose and went back into my data to pinpoint and compare where participants had discussed “safety,” acceptance or disapproval, and their feelings in social spaces or situations which felt “safe” or “unsafe.” In this article, I define safety as a feeling of both support or acceptance and a lack of physical harm, and unsafety as a feeling of judgment or scorn, and/or the threat of physical harm. I draw these distinctions from implications from my interviewees, as I did not ask them to define safety. Some commonly used emotional language to describe or indicate safe spaces included words such as “comfortable,” “accepting,” “free,” and “relieving” while unsafe spaces were described and indicated using words such as “judgmental,” “hostile,” “homophobic,” and “scornful.” I closely examined the parts of the interviews in which participants most often discussed their processes of framing space and coded them based on what was occurring in the situation, and developed themes such as “witnessing homophobia in church,” “probing for other’s opinions of homosexuality”; “feeling affirmation at the Gay-Straight Alliance,” “comparing one space to another”. After I sorted through my initial codes, I began looking for the similarities and differences in framing processes and how temporality distinguished subprocesses from one another, which I expand on in my analysis.
Safety Framing
Queer Southerners framed the social spaces they were in as either “safe” and “unsafe” to predict the likelihood of whether they would experience homophobia. My analysis focuses on how they made such determinations, rather than how they experienced and navigated microaggressions and social stigma. Below I demonstrate how LGBTQ+ Southerners used four basic methods to construct definitions of social space: situational recollection, assessing in the moment, relativizing spatial safety, and reassessing safety frames. Key to all such processes involved using perception and emotional discourse to frame space as safe or unsafe.
Situational Recollection
By situational recollection, I refer to how LGBTQ+ Southerners used emotionally laden memories of previous events and conversations to frame certain social spaces. Participants in the sample had previously made mental notes of how others discussed LGBTQ+ individuals or treated LGBTQ+ people in various spaces and reflected on these notes to form present-day assessments of such spaces. Further, if such reflection revealed that people in a social space avoided any discussion surrounding LGBTQ+ topics or people, they interpreted such avoidance as an indicator of unsafety. Perhaps due to the South’s reputation as intolerant (Herring 2010), LGBTQ+ Southerners tended to assume public spaces were unsafe unless proven otherwise.
A common method of situational recollection involved recalling how their parents or loved ones discussed LGBTQ+ people to determine whether they would be accepting of queerness in the future. For instance, Jude, who grew up on a farm in rural Mississippi, described how he had been “living in fear” of being outed as a child after he took into account how his family described LGBTQ+ people, particularly a feminine presenting man in their community who wore a “big Dolly Parton style wig”:
They said to me “You don’t ever talk to that man, you never have anything to do with them, they’re very dangerous.” They never said it was because he was gay but that was the subtext that was communicated. . .and I internalized some of that.
Here we can see how Jude used his memory of how his family discussed LGBTQ+ people to frame his home as an unsafe space for expressing femininity and queerness. Remembering how they expressed disgust and described the man as “dangerous” led him to define his home as dangerous for himself. As a result, he tried to stay closeted once he understood his identity, hiding his internet search history on the home computer and any other “evidence” of being a Southern queer.
Taylor, who grew up in a small, touristy beach town in Alabama, similarly invoked recollections of how her family reacted to queerness to assess how safe she would be when she came out later in life. Unlike Jude’s family, her two grandparents had positive reactions to LGBTQ+ people:
My one set of grandparents have gay friends like Dave and Greg and then Jenny and Lisa who are both couples and I’ve grown up with them, so I’ve always been exposed to LGBTQ relationships. And even though I haven’t told my grandparents I’m a lesbian, I know they would accept me, but it’s just more of a hassle to come out.
Recalling how her grandparents positively interacted with and talked about their gay and lesbian friends enabled Taylor to assess their home as a safe place. However, she still felt it would be a “hassle” to come out, primarily because she believed the news could travel to less accepting others.
Further, most participants (n = 37) did not remember their parents explicitly talking about gay or queer identities. However, over half of these (20/37) recalled learning about homosexuality through a church or religious institution’s negative messaging. About eleven said that it was never discussed growing up at all but “we knew about it and knew we didn’t talk about it” (Alexander). Evan, from a rural town in southern Louisiana, remembered learning he should not discuss queer sexuality and gender at home because of the radio talk shows his mother listened to on their home sound system:
When I was eight or nine my mom was listening to the Christian radio stations a lot, specifically Dr. James Dobson on the “Family Talk” radio show. I heard a lot about the evils of homosexuality but didn’t have much of an understanding of what that was for sure. But it was mostly something that was kind of swept under the rug; when it was referenced it was referred to very bluntly with a lot of derision.
Later in the interview, Evan also recalled that in middle school when he was still presumed to be a girl, he wanted to cut his hair short but his mom “tried to warn him” that he would be teased by peers at school. Such recollecting led Evan to frame both his family and school as unsafe.
Overall, LGBTQ+ Southerners used memories of past events to frame the safety of a space in the present and future. They reminisced on both explicit and implicit indicators of homophobia or acceptance from others. These memories were often grounded in what not only others might frame as (cis)heteronormative socialization but also other social processes including media discourse, community stigmatization, and family gossiping. This demonstrates that heteronormativity can be self-reproducing across time and space—how families or community groups express homophobia not only shapes how queer people frame a social place but also if they choose to be out and confront such bigotry. If coming out in safe spaces felt like “more of a hassle” (Taylor), coming out in unsafe spaces would mean exposing oneself to an even bigger mental burden and potentially physical threat. For LGBTQ+ Southerners using these recollections is vital in helping them predict and plan for adverse situations.
Assessing in the Moment
When queer Southerners did not have memories to recall about the safety of a space, they had to make judgments by assessing safety in the moment. By assessing in the moment, they perceived indicators of safety as situations unfolded to inform their definitions of safety. This occurred intentionally or unintentionally based on the situation. Some participants were able to take control of the moment to assess safety by acting to elicit responses from others. However, participants were typically reacting to the actions or words of others as they occurred to define the situation and space as safe or unsafe.
Some queer Southerners used a direct strategy by probing others for their views of LGBTQ+ people for the purpose of defining spaces as safe or unsafe. While living at home closeted in the suburbs in Arkansas during the COVID-19 pandemic, Arianna attempted to find out her family’s opinions of LGBTQ+ people to see how they might respond to her dating another woman:
I would listen to a lot of queer artists and put on shows and movies with queer characters in them around my mom to feel out what they were thinking—the response wasn’t bad, she was asking questions and engaging. At one point she asked if Lucia [my girlfriend] and I were dating I denied it because she had a very passive aggressive way of asking and wasn’t making it very comfortable for me. . . but it came to the point where I had been home for three or four months and thought it’s too hard to live with them and not tell them.
Arianna received a mixed response in her process to figure out how her mother might react to her coming out. Importantly, the physical proximity to her family while living at home and her emotional closeness to them played a role in her decision to come out. Interestingly, Arianna used a two-sided approach to testing her mother’s opinion: the use of music, tv, and movies allowed Arianna to see how her mom would react to hypothetical and removed examples of queer relationships and her conversation with her mother about Lucia allowed her to feel out how her mother would react to a close, real-life example of a queer relationship—her own. Overall, Arianna’s testing allowed her to form a perception of her mother as accepting of hypothetical gay relationships but not one that personally affected her.
Others actively assessed spaces as safe or unsafe as situations played out. For instance, Cal, a transmasculine nonbinary person living in a mid-size city in Tennessee, recalled how he and his roommate, also transmasc, assessed a restaurant they had been eating in as unsafe:
I’m a touchy-feely person and there are no romantic feelings between me and my roommate, but we’re very close and we’ll even hold hands in public a lot. One night, we went to a restaurant, and we were kind of segregated away from everyone else in a very far back corner with tables that no one was looking at and had a waiter who wouldn’t take our orders. By the time we ate it, the food was cold. It was very obvious to us both that we were unwanted, and that wasn’t the first time we’d experienced something like that.
Cal and his roommate were able to regard the restaurant as unsafe as the situation unfolded. They discerned hostility through being placed in the back of the restaurant, not being able to place their orders, and being served food that was cold. Because they signaled their queerness, through gender expression, inability to pass, or through handholding, they received hostile and “obvious” signals from the restaurant that they were not wanted. This was one instance Cal recalled about how he had been treated negatively in public, and his other accounts reinforced the importance of interpreting signals from others to assess safety.
Tala, from the suburbs of Birmingham, AL, also assessed the safety of space by paying close attention to how her coworkers responded to queer conversation topics at work. Working as a paralegal, Tala noted how her workplace was a more conservative space for her and she tended not to talk about herself, but over time she found a few coworkers to be allies:
There was an intern who was nonbinary and had people call them by their first name, but they actually preferred “Wes.” I always used the proper they/them and their preferred name. They told me how much they appreciated that, and I told them I was sorry that people didn’t make space for them at work. So that was serendipitous, I still get those small queer moments. Even one of the attorneys at my job now knows I’m just really open. I never came out to her either, we just started making jokes and talking about liking women and she never questioned it.
While Tala perceived her workplace as a place to be more reserved about her identity, she was able to identify people in her workplace who she would be able to speak about LGBTQ+ identity or topics with through her conversations with her coworkers. Consequently, because Wes disclosed their identity, Tala learned that she was not the only LGBTQ+ person in the office and reciprocally was able to affirm and support Wes’s identity—making the space feel more comfortable for them both. Further, Tala observed how the woman attorney she worked with reacted to her jokes about women in order to regard whether or not she could mention that topic around her; because “she never questioned” Tala’s jokes, Tala was able to establish that her coworker was safe to have lighthearted banter about liking women with.
Tala’s description of work presents an interesting nuance in how people discussed space as safe or unsafe: participants sometimes used the term “safe space” to refer to individual people or the conversations they had within a larger setting or context. Like Tala, Marisol described how forming a friend group with other queer people at her packaging job in Austin, Texas allowed her “let out some degree of tension” that she had not been able to since she “had never been in that much community with that many queer people, and [being in that friend group] was the moment that I realized I had been holding my breath for you know, years.” Even if the workspaces themselves were neutral, the people in the spaces influenced how queer Southerners defined the space; they could discuss queer topics there because of the people there, not because of the space itself.
In summation, queer Southerners defined space as safe or unsafe in the moment as they perceived indicators, such as people’s words, body language, or actions as affirming or hostile. Participants like Arianna took advantage of conversations in her home to investigate the level of acceptance or hostility her parents had toward queerness. Others made assessments in response to how situations unfolded, like Cal and Tala. Interestingly, some described moments as a kind of space that was either safe or unsafe, which may prompt further exploration as to what defines a space.
Relativizing Spatial Safety
Literature on sexuality and gender acknowledges how sexuality and gender are experienced and influenced in different social contexts (Schrock, Sumerau, and Ueno 2014). Because different spaces play distinct roles in how one experiences sexual identity, participants often relativized the safety of one space based on the perceived safety of another. For instance, if someone could speak freely about their sexuality or gender at school but could not do the same at home, the experience of safety at school may be used to highlight the lack of affirmation at home. These distinctions could be dichotomous—meaning that one space was completely safe compared to another which was completely unsafe, or mixed—meaning that the spaces they compared could not be described as safe or unsafe. Importantly, six out of eleven non-white queer Southerners described having difficulties finding spaces where they felt safe being both queer and nonwhite.
Queer Southerners’ comparisons most frequently described one space as safe by painting another space as unsafe, or vice versa. For instance, Though Riley was an out and proud LGBTQ+ organizer at their university in a mid-size city in Tennessee, back in their hometown they and their other trans friends navigated space by creating a clear distinction between safe spaces in downtown Dallas and their hostile suburban homes:
We kind of coined the term, “Hannah Montana-ing” where we would like change clothes and hairstyles in the car and be wiping off makeup or putting makeup on, just working to meet people’s expectations so that we didn’t need to be in fear for our lives. Like, I became a pro at it. My friend would be driving and still have an earring in and one of us would just instinctively reach over and remove it for them.
Riley and their friends used each other as sources of support for changing their presentation of self back to heteronormative ones when they went back from safe places in downtown Dallas to their unsafe homes. For them, there was a clear divide between where they could be queer and where they could not. The implication of “Hannah Montanaing,” a reference to an early 2000’s show about a normal girl who lives a double life as a pop star, is the very salient reality of having to switch how they embodied their gender to maintain personal well-being and safety. Emotionally, having such a staunch divide between spaces one navigated could be taxing:
The clear distinction between places I felt safe and the places that I didn’t made my house and my church feel much worse. . .. I think I was very limited in what I could do in the safe spaces because I was constantly being put back in unsafe spaces. Everything I wore had to like be fine to wear in my house and at church, everything, every hairstyle. . .I was not painting my nails in high school, I was not doing anything that was like “suspicious” beyond skinny jeans and a slight sense of fashion but still l masculine.
Even though Riley experienced life as openly queer and nonbinary in spaces such as their college and with their friends in Dallas as they aged, home and church became barriers for how they felt like they could express themselves even in safer places. Interestingly, despite having access to spaces they could be openly queer in, their fear of unsafe spaces bled into how they acted in the safe spaces. Riley and their friends juxtaposed home and church as unsafe compared to school and downtown which affected how they chose to strategically conceal or reveal their queerness to avoid homophobia.
Some queer Southerners, particularly non-white queer Southerners, could not define some spaces as either safe or unsafe and described spaces as a mix of the two. Aria, a Black lesbian from a small metropolitan area in Mississippi, discussed how LGBTQ+ centered spaces such as clubs, bars, and organizations in her urban Alabama college town did not provide the same sense of safety that they might give to white LGBTQ+ folks:
In my experience, Black LGBT people tend to be just happy staying just in black spaces, even if they aren’t safe spaces because honestly it just feels safer there. You go into LGBT spaces and it’s like you still face racism, and you still have to deal with all the things that you have to deal with out in the regular cishet world. So, it’s almost like why bother, you know what I mean?
Aria’s account adds nuance to how LGBTQ+ Southerners think about space; though Black spaces may not be safe for Black queer folks, they may feel safer to them in comparison to white queer spaces. Importantly, Aria’s construction of spaces implies that because both Black spaces and white queer spaces are both not wholly comfortable places for Black queer folk, there is a lack of comprehensively safe space for Black and Queer individuals.
Tala, who is half-Filipino, similarly described conflict between racial and sexual identity, stating that her racial identity “made it harder to navigate [LGBTQ+] spaces.” Specifically, she explained how there was a sentiment of treating queerness as an open secret in the Asian American communities in her area and something that was expected to not be acted upon:
In witnessing some older Asian people who, as a community, and as close personal friends and family, we know they are not straight. We also know that they’ll never do anything about it because we’re Asian. It’s a really hard place to be. Especially when I’m in the Tuscaloosa and Birmingham area with those people and when I’m in the safe [queer] spaces there, I know they’re safe spaces for them and they’ve been in these spaces to be open people—they love it, but they can’t be as open. And so, when I was younger [those expectations] made me kind of want to cloister myself a little bit.
Tala’s example shows that in her experience in both safe queer spaces and within Asian spaces, the Asian Americans she knows feel the need to hold back a part of their queer identity in both spaces due to cultural norms. Interestingly, Tala believes her youthful age allowed her more freedom to openly express her identity in both spaces while still understanding that there could be some negative consequences for her reputation in the Asian community. Though Tala described feeling more comfortable in queer spaces, earlier in her interview she acknowledged how she worries about being fetishized for being Asian by people “of all ages and all genders” in the dating scene. Thus, although Tala feels more comfortable being queer in both Asian spaces and Queer spaces relative to her counterparts, she constructs both spaces as safe only to an extent.
Overall, LGBTQ+ Southerners used their experiences of different spaces to create their definitions of relative safety. While some spaces could easily be described using a binary of safe versus unsafe, other spaces could not be easily sorted. Because white LGBTQ+ Southerners usually only had to think about their safety in terms of their sexuality or gender, it was easier for them than non-white Southerners to sort spaces into a clear dichotomy of safe versus unsafe because they did not have the dual burden of determining safety based on sexuality or gender and race/ethnicity.
Reassessing Safety Frames
In certain situations, LGBTQ+ Southerners reassessed their spatial frames based on new information or experiences, altering their preexisting definition of the safety of a space. Below I discuss a few of the circumstances that led LGBTQ+ Southerners to engage in a process of reassessing their perceptions of space, such as reassurance from others, experiencing homophobia, changing political opinions, and finding safety elsewhere. Most often, Southerners felt they had to re-evaluate their perception of the church, a historically polarizing institution for queer folks (Johnson 2018, McQueeney 2009), as safe or unsafe for them.
Southerners such as Camden used other people’s assessments of space to re-evaluate their definitions of said space. Despite her anxiety and previous negative experiences, Camden recalled how she decided to attend a church service in her small Virginia city based on her girlfriend’s accounts of good experiences in that space:
I typically worked on Sundays. This was by design because I had a lot of religious trauma and didn’t want to be asked to go to church, so I took the Sunday shift at the coffee shop that we worked at. One Sunday, I didn’t have that shift and she asked me to go with her. I was thinking “Okay, you don’t have an excuse, you can’t avoid this and surely it’ll be fine. She goes to this church every Sunday with her mom and they don’t have a problem.”
By this point, Camden had established that church was a space where she did not want to be to the extent that she strategically scheduled herself to be busy during church time to evade the social expectation for attending church. Because her girlfriend perceived the church to be an accepting environment and had never had any negative experiences, Camden was reassured that this church would be different from ones she had attended prior. However, Camden and her partner’s experience once they entered the space countered her girlfriend’s assurance of safety when they were spotted holding hands on their way to volunteer at Sunday school:
She reassured me that they’re super accepting and we don’t have to worry about it. I thought it was incredible—I’d never seen that before in my entire life. We walked in but we didn’t hold hands through the duration of Sunday school or anything like that. . .we weren’t on top of each other, right? I know the rules for church, I grew up in the church. Then, in the space between Sunday school and the church service somebody came up to us and told us we had to leave. And so I was thinking “wow, this is really happening.”
Camden was still uncomfortable in the situation, despite her girlfriend’s reassurance, but her astonishment at the idea of a church where she could be open with a partner reflected her desire and willingness to challenge her previous evaluation of church. Interestingly, though both Camden and her partner thought of this church as safe, Camden indicated that she still needed to “know the rules” and abide by them to insure their acceptance in the space. When they were asked to leave, both her and her partner felt disappointed that the church did not live up to her girlfriend’s notion that this church would be accepting. Thus, both Camden and her girlfriend redefined their definition of this church from “safe” to “unsafe.” Through her reassessment, Camden reconfirmed her understanding of church as an unsafe space for her.
Some participants reassessed spaces after becoming more politically aware. Before they identified as LGBTQ+, both Tala and Jennette ended up leaving their respective churches over newfound knowledge of homophobia in the church. Jennette, who had lived in six Southern states, described how she left her church in small town Alabama as she became more aware of the LGBTQ+ community and as her church became more overtly homophobic:
Around the 2000 election, our church started getting way more political than they had before. They were even saying if you didn’t vote for Bush, you weren’t a Christian. And the church started tying morality to how you should vote including you know, condemning gay marriage and all that. So, I started having kind of a break with the church over the fact that they were being extremely violent in their homophobic rhetoric. And I remember thinking that’s not what I signed up for. I was here for peace and love and kindness, and I don’t know what y’all are doing.
Even before Jennette started questioning her own identity, she became displeased with the political rhetoric she was hearing in her church after Bush’s first election. A Republican herself at the time, such hostile language made her rethink her perception of the church itself. Further, Jennette used emotion to juxtapose what she wanted from her church—peace, and love and kindness indicating safety—to what her church was being: hostile, homophobic, and unsafe.
Some reassessments occurred after having new experiences in nontraditional spaces. For instance, Alexander, a trans man, ended up reassessing his perception of church due to his positive experiences working and living on a farm in the Appalachian Mountains of Eastern Kentucky:
Volunteering blew my mind a little bit as far as the fact that I was living off the grid, growing vegetables, and starting to meet people who weren’t churchgoing—they were like-minded people who I could connect with. That’s when I started to feel that the church people did not have my best interest in mind and I stopped going. Being around the other people on the farm is when I eventually ended up—I wouldn’t even call myself closeted, but unevolved in terms of gender and sexuality—and I became more open to playing around with the ways I dressed and things like that.
Once he started working on the farm, Alexander realized that he was much freer to discuss politics and explore his gender and sexuality than with his congregation, leading him to reassess his relationship with the church. Compared to other participants, Alexander had a less tumultuous relationship with the church and stayed involved in his denomination throughout college. Nevertheless, meeting people with different perspectives at the farm fostered his reassessment of the church and his place in it as he became more aware of his own politics and gender identity. Overall, this shows that new experiences in one space may lead to reassessment of another.
Overall, LGBTQ+ Southerners reassessed the spaces that they had previously defined as safe or unsafe for a variety of reasons. While ten Southerners reassessed their opinions of church over time, seven defined and maintained a definition of church as unsafe. While I expected reassessment of church to be important to the Southerners’ life histories due to the long history of homophobia in the institution (Barton 2012, McQueeney 2009), I was surprised that reassessment of the home was not more common among the sample. Specifically, I anticipated that Southerners that came out during adolescence would have to reassess and redefine the home as an unsafe space due to negative stigma from parents. However, all but three of the Southerners who faced negative reactions to coming out had already predicted that kind of reaction from their parents.
Conclusion
Given the ever-changing political and cultural landscape of the U.S. South, how do LGBTQ+ Southerners decide which social spaces are safe or unsafe for themselves and others? Queer Southerners made assessments of the social spaces they inhabited as safe or unsafe for themselves and other LGBTQ+ individuals through a process I call safety framing. They accomplished this process in four basic ways: They recollected previous memories to assess the safety of space in the present. They also assessed social situations in the moment to determine safety of space. When creating these definitions, they also framed the safety of one space relative to that of another. Finally, they reassessed their definitions of space as they received new information or had new experiences.
Empirically, this article adds to academic conversations about what safe space is and what they mean to LGBTQ+ individuals (see Madireddy and Madireddy 2020; McQueeney 2009; Schweighofer 2016). Whereas previous work has explored formal, institutionalized Safe Spaces on college campuses, in libraries, or organizations like Gay-Straight Alliances, my work reveals how LGBTQ+ individuals make sense of their experiences in everyday social spaces including but not limited to the home, the workplace, schools, universities, churches, farms, etc. My findings are also linked to larger political processes that shape who is allowed to inhabit social spaces symbolically and/or physically. Namely, queer Southerners in my study felt an overarching “culture of silence” around queer identities growing up, concurrent with Pascoe’s (2005) and Martin’s (2009) findings on sexuality in socializing institutions. This work shows the complex mental processes involved in determining the safety of spaces where queerness is seemingly absent, which could be stressful and taxing.
My study also contributes to research examining how LGBTQ+ people assess safety by developing a theory of how they frame spaces as safe or unsafe. Abelson’s previous research on trans men’s geographies of safety highlighted the mutable nature of perceptions of safety which affected how trans men perform masculinity (Abelson 2014) and how their fears of violence shaped their actions (Abelson 2019). This analysis responds to the concept of geographies of safety through the theoretical contribution of safety framing. Where Abelson’s work focuses on how people navigate space based on their schematic geographies of safety, by explaining how people emotionally frame space as safe or unsafe, I seek to explain how they cognitively create these geographies in the first place. Further, I demonstrate how LGBTQ+ Southerners partake in framing through a variety of subprocesses. Outlining these strategies helps further our understanding of how frames of safety are created by expanding past current literature on assessment of space, which tends to focus only on assessments of safety made in the moment.
This study shows how sense of region and Southern politics and culture present itself in LGBTQ+ Southerners’ assessments of space. Most participants noted how Southern religious culture was a part of the everyday spaces they were in, even if the spaces were not exclusively religious. The presence of religion was typically viewed as an indicator of unsafety (see also Barton 2012; McQueeney 2009) since many had heard about or experienced homophobia in a religious context. My findings also support existing research that suggests LGBTQ+ people perceive safety as differing by both region and urban/rural divides (Abelson 2019; Herring 2010) and that LGBTQ+ people in the South face elevated stressors related to threat of discrimination (Baunach and Burgess 2013; Rogers 2018). Future research on LGBTQ+ people’s perception of region may tell us more about how inequality differs geographically.
Research suggests that safety framing might be a generic social process that is applicable to other marginalized groups. For example, Feagin’s (1991) found that Black middle-class people in public spaces often carefully assess whether situations are discriminatory before responding. Deeb-Sossa and Mendez (2008) explored how immigrant women in Virginia and North Carolina chose to be in certain occupations, housing situations, public spaces, and unsafe home situations based on fear of deportation. Sochting, Fairbrother, and Koch et al. (2004) analyzed how women often anticipate risk of sexual assault both in public and in private spaces like the home. These studies suggest that other marginalized groups use emotional processes to assess risk and negotiate fear to navigate social spaces. Evidence from my study supports the need for further research into how whiteness creates (un)safety for those who can access racial privilege, and how their conceptions of safety and space may differ based on intersecting axes of marginalization. Whereas white participants framed LGBTQ+ groups, events, and organizations as safe spaces, Black Indiginous People of Color (BIPOC) participants felt marginalized in such spaces and instead emphasized that informal conversations with or collectives of people they felt affirmed by constituted safe spaces. Some BIPOC queer folk felt like formal social spaces may only be accommodating to either their racial identity or their queer identity, but not both (see also Fox and Ore 2010). This is congruent with Eaves (2016) work on how locales with seemingly “progressive” agendas neglect to include or acknowledge racial histories and experiences. Therefore, it is important to analyze how people define spaces as safe instead of assuming spaces are safe because an organization labels them as such.
In summation, this article contributes empirically and theoretically to the literature on LGBTQ+ people’s experiences in social spaces and how they define these spaces as safe or unsafe. My concept of safety framing extends Abelson’s (2014) idea of geographies of safety by identifying four distinct ways in which Southerners defined a social space as safe or unsafe. By understanding how queer Southerners make the distinctions between safe and unsafe, we can better understand the rationales queer Southerners make geographies of safety to navigate their social environs, as Abelson (2014, 2019) and Rogers (2018) so expertly demonstrate. By engaging in safety framing, LGBTQ+ Southerners were able to inform how they engage within social spaces they were in. The psychological implications of this research are that the process of making these distinctions between spaces require constant effort and can be mentally taxing. In understanding these processes of perception, we can better understand the causes of LGBTQ+ minority stress. Lastly, given the recent increases in anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) bills, these findings may be used to orient future research that evaluates the effects of these bills on LGBTQ+ folks across the country.
