Coming Out, Going Home

Abstract

Despite the historical centrality of Western cities as sites of queer cultural settlement, larger global economic and political forces have vociferously shaped, dispersed, and altered dreams of mobility for gay Taiwanese millennials in the age of globalization. While Taiwanese gay millennials follow a seemingly universal “rural-to-urban,” “East-to-West” movement trajectory, this study also explicates local nuanced ramifications running against the common trend. Drawn upon five-year ethnographic studies in Taiwan, this study examines how parents could to some extent conform to societal pressures by co-creating a life narrative to the society. Parents/family appear to contribute to how participants' decision on spatial movement but gay male millennials with supportive parents are eventually “going home.” However, the concept of home is configured by multiple economic and social forces involving (1) the optimal distance with the biological family and (2) the proper performances of consumption policed and imposed by the gay community in the neoliberal Taiwanese society.