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“I Don’t Like to Say That I’m Anything”: Sexuality Politics and Cultural Critique Among Sexual-Minority Latino Youth

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Abstract

This article offers an initial exploration of forms of cultural and political agency of Latino youth who experience sexual attraction to both men and women. The authors focus on young people’s perspectives about bisexuality, their views and critical responses regarding social categories of sexual identity, and their reflections about the relationships between sexual and gender identities. Following a social constructionist approach, the authors explore sexual identity not as an essence to be discovered in a coming-out process but as a dynamic, interactive process in which the subjects construct their sexual identities in dialogue with existing cultural possibilities and within the context of their social relations. Based on in-depth interviews with 11 boys and five girls from 15 to 19 years old who had Latin American or Caribbean ancestors, the findings show different ways in which these sexual-minority Latino youth participated in struggles over meanings, labels, forms of discrimination, and normalization.

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Notes

  1. The inclusion of bisexual Latino men in HIV-related studies responds to the hypothesis that they can be what is called a bridge population, a term that refers to the fact that HIV infections among Latinas are frequently attributed to the bisexual behavior of their male partners.

  2. We use the term sexual minority to refer to people who are not members of the heterosexual majority, including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and unlabeled individuals.

  3. Social constructionism is a broad theoretical approach proposing that social reality, including social identities, is a product of social and historical practices, as well as everyday human interactions (Berger and Luckman 1966).

  4. Practice theory is a sociological analytical framework addressing the complex relations among agents’ strategies, their cultural logics, and the distribution of power in society (Karp 1986; also see Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Ortner 1996).

  5. We defined the term sexually active as applying to a person who has had any type of sexual encounter, nonpenetrative to penetrative, with both female and male partners, more than once over the past 12 months.

  6. The down low (DL) refers to an identity based on ethnic affinity and sexuality observed among circles of African American and Latino men in urban settings such as New York City (Mays et al. 2004). Men who say that they are “on the DL” have sex with other men without self-identifying as gay or homosexual, and strive to maintain a low profile of their sexual activities or attraction to both sexes. Implicit in the notion of the DL is the idea of avoiding the cultural stigma attached to nonheterosexual identities and, for this reason, keeping nonheterosexual sexual matters private (Muñoz-Laboy 2008).

  7. Developmental models of sexual identity (e.g., Cass 1979; Coleman 1982; McDonald 1982; Troiden 1989) have proposed that homosexual individuals progress through a series of developmental stages that begin with questioning their heterosexuality (Floyd and Stein 2002). As Rust (1993) has noted, these models assume the existence of a homosexual self, an essence to be discovered and self-accepted in a heteronormative context. Likewise, these models tend to assume a stable, core sexual orientation expressed in a bivariate sexual taxonomy: homosexual-heterosexual (or straight-gay). Furthermore, developmental models assume that sexual identity formation follows a linear and universal process disregarding individual, social, cultural, or historic differences among subjects (Rust; Savin-Williams 2005). These developmental models, albeit reformulated and questioned, continue to provide a core reference framing discussions about sexual identity of sexual-minority youth in the USA.

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Acknowledgments

We want to especially thank our research participants and the research assistants for this project: Ernesto Vásquez del Aguila, Hannah Weinstein, and Veena Sriram. We also express our gratitude to the anonymous reviewers of this article; their suggestions and comments have enriched our text.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University, Mello Franco 680, Lima, 11, Perú

    Carmen Yon-Leau

  2. Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University, 722 West 168th Street, 5th floor, New York, NY, 10032, USA

    Miguel Muñoz-Laboy

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  1. Carmen Yon-Leau
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  2. Miguel Muñoz-Laboy
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Correspondence to Carmen Yon-Leau.

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Yon-Leau, C., Muñoz-Laboy, M. “I Don’t Like to Say That I’m Anything”: Sexuality Politics and Cultural Critique Among Sexual-Minority Latino Youth. Sex Res Soc Policy 7, 105–117 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13178-010-0009-y

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