Mr Mark Winter-Dean

Research project: 'The Variability of the yellow brick road: from the Greek Gay closet to the London Gay imaginary.'

Abstract

Previous research has understood the migration patterns of Gay men and other queer people to be driven solely by identity development, with further binaries of rural to urban migrations and the process of ‘coming out'. To realise the motivations of queer migrations and their relocation decisions, the gay imaginary is the individual quest to find a place where they can fulfil their sexuality affirming path in a place, which is accepting of their sexuality and non-heteronormative lives. Discussions of international migration of sexual dissidents have focused on Western countries with developed LGBTQ+ legislations, with a strong suggestion of a teleological and ontological finality to those migrations. Queer migration studies have also focused on the construct of heteronormative nuclear families within non-heteronormative couples and their associated peripatetic migration patterns. The elicit narratives of single Greek Gay men, have been mainly overlooked whilst seeking to understand the connection between their sexuality affirming path through education and work. In this doctoral research, I suggest that the modern Greek Gay man uses education and work as a vehicle to realise the Gay imaginary in an urban community, where they will feel accepted and normalised and enable their own coming out story. Moreover, I will seek to contemplate the desire to move to London, not as a teleological move but as an investigative paradigm of what the London gay imaginary suggests to Greek Gay men in their search for a 'coming out' place. This Queer theoretical research will seek to empirically investigate the narratives of Greek Gay men to provide a platform for further research, that challenges normative social relations and labour migration patterns.