Professionally Queer: Queer Men and the World of Work

Abstract

In the past decade, scholars and the public have increasingly paid attention to queer populations and their experiences in the workforce. Yet, little work has been done to understand the meaning that queer men attribute to their sexuality in shaping their career decisions and experiences, leaving unanswered how and under what conditions sexuality consequentially influences queer men’s career decisions and experiences. Using data from 67 in-depth interviews with college-educated queer men living and working in the New York City Metropolitan Area, this dissertation examines how queer men make sense of their career-related decisions, attempts at securing employment, and their experiences once in the workforce as well as what role they believe their sexuality played in shaping these decisions and experiences. The central argument of this project is that the role that respondents believe their sexuality played in influencing career decisions and continues to play in shaping their experiences in the workforce is largely dependent on the perceived boundary brightness, or symbolic significance, surrounding or attributed to their sexuality; additionally, an individual’s boundary brightness is subject to change across stages in one’s career narrative. This boundary brightness was shaped by both how meaningful and consequential respondents believed their sexuality to be during a given career stage and how central their sexuality was to their self-conception. I break respondents into 4 groups based on boundary brightness across the three stages in their career narratives (career-related decisions, the labor market, and the workforce). The first is the Consistently Bright group—for whom sexuality meaningfully influenced their career decisions, experiences on the labor market, and how they navigated the workforce. The second group, the Dimmed Boundaries group, believed that their sexuality shaped their career decisions but not as something that they had to manage on the labor market or in the workforce. The third group, the Brightened Boundaries group, did not see their sexuality as something that shaped their career-related decisions but as something that shaped their experiences either on the labor market or in the workforce. Lastly, those in the Never Bright group did not perceive their sexuality as meaningfully shaping their decisions or experiences at any stage of their career narratives. Further, these findings highlight both the centrality of masculinity in queer men’s career narratives and the inadequacy of a categorical approach in examinations of sexuality and the sphere of work. I conclude by discussing what these findings can contribute to scholarly and public understandings of (sexual) identity and work and highlight potential avenues for future research.