Young Gay Men Research Articles

A Web-Based Human Papillomavirus Vaccination Intervention for Young Gay, Bisexual, and Other Men Who Have Sex With Men: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial.

BackgroundGay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men experience several disparities related to human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, including high incidence rates of anal cancer. Although the HPV vaccine is currently recommended for young adults, HPV vaccine coverage is modest among young gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (YGBMSM).ObjectiveWe describe the design and methods for a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to rigorously evaluate Outsmart HPV, a population-targeted, individually tailored, Web-based HPV vaccination intervention for YGBMSM. The RCT is designed to determine the efficacy of the intervention, the mechanism by which the intervention has an effect (ie, mediation), and whether efficacy varies by participant characteristics (ie, moderation).MethodsOutsmart HPV was previously developed and pilot-tested. This study is a 3-arm prospective RCT that will enroll a projected 1995 YGBMSM who are aged 18 to 25 years, live in the United States, and have not received any doses of the HPV vaccine. Participants will be recruited by means of paid advertisements on social media sites and randomized to receive (1) standard information on the Web about HPV vaccine (control group), (2) Outsmart HPV content on the Web with monthly unidirectional vaccination reminders sent via text messages, or (3) Outsmart HPV content on the Web with monthly interactive vaccination reminders sent via text messages. Participants will complete Web-based surveys at 4 time points during the study: baseline, immediately after engaging with Web-based content, 3 months after randomization, and 9 months after randomization. Primary outcomes will include both HPV vaccine initiation (ie, receipt of 1 or more doses of the HPV vaccine) and completion (receipt of all 3 doses recommended for this age range). We will examine constructs from the intervention’s theoretical framework as potential mediators and demographic and health-related characteristics as potential moderators of intervention effects.ResultsThe institutional review board at The Ohio State University has approved the study. Materials have been developed and finalized for all study groups. Recruitment for the RCT began in fall 2019.ConclusionsIf shown to be efficacious, Outsmart HPV has the potential to fill an important gap by promoting HPV vaccination among a population at increased risk of HPV infection and HPV-related disease.Trial RegistrationClinicalTrials.gov NCT04032106; http://clinicaltrials.gov/show/NCT04032106International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID)PRR1-10.2196/16294

Assessing the HIV Prevention Needs of Young Gay and Bisexual Men in the PrEP Era: An Analysis of Trends in Australian Behavioural Surveillance, 2014-2018.

Data from repeated, national behavioural HIV surveillance was used to identify similarities and differences between young gay and bisexual men (YGBM) aged 16-24 (n = 1608) and older GBM aged 25-49 (n = 6266), in order to quantify risks and identify gaps in HIV prevention. Trend analyses from 2014 to 2018 are also reported. While there were similar rates of condomless anal intercourse with casual partners in both age groups, YGBM had lower rates of HIV testing and PrEP use but also fewer male partners. Our results suggest most YGBM have lower HIV risk than older GBM but a minority merit enhanced testing and prevention efforts.

“It’s all outward appearance-based attractions”: A qualitative study of body image among a sample of young gay and bisexual men

This study explores the body image ideals among a racially/ethnically diverse sample of gay and bisexual men in the United States. Furthermore, it examines the role body image ideals play on mobile dating applications (“dating apps”) for gay and bisexual men. Guided by Objectification Theory and Minority Stress Theory, 30 semi-structured interviews were conducted with young gay and bisexual men (ages 18-30 years) in Massachusetts. Using thematic analysis, three central themes emerged: 1) the ideal male body: muscular, thin, and light-skin toned; 2) discrimination; 3) navigating deviations from the ideal body: appearance comparison, retaliation, and body regulation and weight control behaviors. Our results suggest the dominant ideal male body is muscular and thin. Racial/ethnic minority participants added this ideal is further characterized as white/light-skin toned. Further, participants reported a wide variety of discriminatory experiences on dating apps, especially men deviating from the dominant body ideal. Over half of the men in our sample who reported use of dating apps recounted at least one experience of racial/ethnic discrimination or body weight and shape discrimination on dating apps. While some dating apps have modified their policies to promote inclusivity, further research into the impact of dating app-mediated discrimination are warranted.

An Obscure Form of Protest: Politicized Pleasure, Gay Liberation and Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical

An Obscure Form of Protest:Politicized Pleasure, Gay Liberation and Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical Mary Rizzo (bio) When Esquire magazine vocal and visible young urban gay men of the era and an older generationsteeped in homophile respectability. Cultural touchstones defined each as much as politics—and were, in fact, signs of political affiliation. As he found in his interviews, while the older generation identified with the doyennes of musical theater like Ethel Merman or Judy Garland, "Today, gay kids identify with males—with Peter Fonda, or Dustin Hoffman." Overall, theater was of little interest, especially Broadway—"Except, of course Hair."1 Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, a colorful, experimental, raucous musical revue about the lives of a group of countercultural youth written by Gerome Ragni and James Rado, premiered Off-Broadway at the Public Theater in 1967 and then moved to Broadway in April 1968. The first show to move from Off-Broadway to Broadway, it blazed the path followed by A Chorus Line and Hamilton. Hair became an immediate smash hit, with numerous touring companies playing the show around the world. By the end of its original run in 1972, approximately 20 million people worldwide, including innumerable gay men, had seen it.2 Hair drew gay fans, in part, because of its frank discussions of homosexuality. While theater became more experimental in the 1950s and 60s, Broadway musicals (with a few exceptions such as West Side Story and Cabaret) remained bastions of Americana with gentle, comedic narratives focused on heterosexual romance, offering ideology in the guise of heartfelt harmonies.3 Hair was different. Its loose plot revolved around hippie Claude's dilemma of whether to evade [End Page 5] the draft. But through its rock music score and scenes in a coffeehouse, at a party and during an LSD trip, the show depicted characters shamelessly engaging in homosexuality, bisexuality, and polyamory. Woof, one of the hippie "tribe," sings "Sodomy," in the first act in an angelic-voice, celebrating sodomy, pederasty, and fellatio, sexual acts that were banned by anti-gay laws on the books in many states. Even with this explicit embrace of gay sexuality, Hair has never been placed in the pantheon of musicals, like Gypsy or Rent, beloved by gay men. It remains unacknowledged in recent scholarly articles, monographs like D.A. Miller's lyrical meditation on gay men and musicals Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical, and in popular, grassroots historical efforts like the website Queer Music Heritage, the 2012 winner of the Allan Bérubé Prize for outstanding work in public or community-based LGBTQ history from the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender History.4 More general histories of 1960s counterculture often ignore it or mention it fleetingly, with no acknowledgement of its importance within gay liberation.5 Musicologist Elizabeth Wollman offers a welcome corrective in her work on adult musicals arguing that, "like Hair, many adult musicals were ultimately used as much to educate mainstream audiences about contemporary sociosexual mores as to entertain."6 By not taking Hair seriously, critics have ignored an important source through which gay men constructed their identities and also missed how that cultural text shaped the gay liberation movement. There are several reasons for the forgetting of Hair's gay past. No character in Hair overtly proclaims a gay identity. With the gay liberation and LGBTQ rights movements from the 1970s onward, homosexuality became a politicized identity that defined a person, rather than a set of behaviors. Hair's proto-queerness meant that it was eclipsed by other musicals and plays with explicitly gay characters, like The Boys in the Band and Falsettos. Materially, after its initial run it became difficult to see. It was revived in 1977 in a disastrous production that closed within a month. Milos Forman's 1979 film Hair focused on Claude, now an Oklahoma farm boy in New York City for induction into the army, and his infatuation with rich-girl Sheila. Most references to homosexuality were eliminated. The song "Sodomy" is sung to shock Sheila and her uptight friends rather than to revel in sexual pleasure. While cast albums from the original run still circulate...

How It All Blew Up by Arvin Ahmadi

Reviewed by: How It All Blew Up by Arvin Ahmadi Alaine Martaus Ahmadi, Arvin How It All Blew Up. Viking, 2020 [288p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780593202876 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780593202883 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 8-12 When school bullies threaten to out eighteen-year-old Amir Azadi to his conservative Iranian Muslim parents, the usually responsible Amir does the unexpected: he runs away to Rome. Suddenly on his own in a strange city, he quickly falls in with a group of supportive young gay men, who jovially teach him about gay icons and Italian culture. Yet even as Amir slowly builds self-confidence and embraces life out of the closet, even finding an adorable Italian boy to date, he can't forget the drama he left behind. Largely focused on Amir's sweet, angst-filled narration, this novel offers readers a heartfelt coming-out story infused with a thoroughly enjoyable travelogue. While the characterization of Amir's new friends sometimes dips into cliché, readers will appreciate the comfort he finds with the memorable, outrageous band. A narrative frame involving airport security, meanwhile, gives Amir's family a chance to voice their stories, rounding out Amir's narrow perspective. It's those details that give the story its power and will lure readers to embrace Amir while daydreaming about far-off lands. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

AIDS Was Our Earthquake: American Jewish Responses to the AIDS Crisis, 1985–92

AIDS Was Our Earthquake:American Jewish Responses to the AIDS Crisis, 1985–92 Gregg Drinkwater (bio) On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported on an unusual cluster of Pneumocystis Pneumonia among five previously healthy young gay men in Los Angeles. That report is generally understood as the first official documentation of the epidemic that was briefly called "gay cancer" and then "Gay Related Immune-Deficiency" (GRID) before being labelled "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome" (AIDS) in the summer of 1982. By 1985, 15,000 Americans had been diagnosed with the disease. Nearly 13,000 of them had died.1 The majority were gay and bisexual men and intravenous (IV) drug users—all populations that were widely stigmatized at the time. From the beginning of the AIDS crisis in 1981 through 1985, American Jewish leaders were largely silent. We do not see evidence of widespread Jewish communal engagement with AIDS in the United States until September 24, 1985, when two young and charismatic rabbis in San Francisco delivered Yom Kippur sermons on AIDS in their respective Reform synagogues: Congregation Sha'ar Zahav (serving primarily LGBTQ members) and Congregation Emanu-El (with primarily straight members). Both sermons, and the rabbis who delivered them, profoundly shaped liberal American Judaism's responses to AIDS. [End Page 122] The Sha'ar Zahav sermon, delivered by Yoel Kahn, a 26-year-old gay man newly ordained as a Reform rabbi, suggested a Jewish path forward on HIV/AIDS grounded in the insights of the Gay Liberation Movement and an approach that centered gay and lesbian lives. The Emanu-El sermon, in contrast, delivered by Robert Kirschner, a 34-year-old straight man newly promoted as his congregation's senior rabbi, called upon Jewish compassion in the face of a public health crisis affecting stigmatized populations. Yet both shared common ground. Rather than framing the religious and moral issue at the heart of HIV/AIDS as a need to proscribe sexual behavior coded as dangerous and aberrant, as was common among evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox Jewish leaders, the rabbis who delivered both of these sermons reflected the emergence of a new moral calculus in which acceptance and tolerance of gay and lesbian people became a Jewish moral litmus test among liberal Jews. The Jewish AIDS initiatives that followed in the wake of the conversations these sermons helped spark were rarely about policing the sexual and intimate behavior of gay and lesbian people. Instead, most of the Jewish AIDS programs that emerged in the US in the late 1980s focused on providing support and social services to people with AIDS (hereafter PWAs) and their families; raising awareness about the risks of AIDS; making AIDS more visible in Jewish communities; and modifying the behaviors of non-gay Jews toward gay and lesbian people.2 In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, conservative American Christian religious leaders, such as Jerry Falwell, had insisted that AIDS was God's punishment for sinful "homosexual" behavior. A 1986 Gallup poll, five years after the AIDS crisis emerged, indicated that 42 percent of Americans agreed with him.3 Such religious bigotry in the early 1980s was one factor that gave political and cultural leaders license to minimize the threat of the disease and to openly mock those suffering from AIDS.4 Few Jewish leaders outside the ultra-Orthodox community, however, made claims about AIDS that explicitly invoked God's wrath as the cause of AIDS. One exception was the Modern Orthodox Rabbi Barry Freundel—the same rabbi who was arrested in 2014 for voyeurism at a Washington DC mikvah (ritual bath)—who wrote in a 1986 essay that—although one can cite Jewish proof texts arguing both for and against divine punishment—"[b]y far, the greater evidence indicates that God's retribution plays a role in epidemics such as AIDS." Yet even Freundel quickly dismissed the question as irrelevant to the Jewish obligation to "heal and prevent death wherever possible."5 More often, Orthodox Jewish leaders joined conservative Christians in describing AIDS as the consequence of what they saw [End Page 123] as abhorrent or even pathological behavior, although the vast majority still held that regardless of...

Applying an intersectional framework to understand syndemic conditions among young Black gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men

Syndemic theory has been useful in illuminating the co-existence and reinforcing nature of multiple health and social conditions that contribute to HIV risk. However, little research has examined syndemics among young Black gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (GBM) or situated syndemics within the context of racism, homonegativity, and other intersecting social inequities. Applying an intersectional framework to syndemics can help demonstrate how social and structural inequities and oppression facing young Black GBM contribute to and reinforce syndemic health conditions. In 2018, we conducted 45 in-depth qualitative interviews with young Black GBM in Milwaukee and Cleveland. Our analyses examined how intersectional stigma contributes to syndemics and HIV disparities facing young Black GBM. Our findings demonstrate that broader systems of oppression and disadvantage facing young Black GBM contribute to syndemic conditions. Future conceptualizations and measurements of syndemics must capture these experiences to strengthen our understanding of syndemics among young Black GBM.

Young black MSM’s exposures to and discussions about PrEP while navigating geosocial networking apps

Young Black gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (YBMSM) carry a disproportionate HIV burden perpetuated by exposure to sexual networks with higher untreated HIV prevalence and incidence. In Baltimore, these sexual networks include high utilization of geosocial networking apps (GSN-apps). Our prior work suggests these apps can be important access points for targeted interventions like PrEP. To inform online PrEP outreach we explored YBMSM GSN-app users’ exposure to and discussions about PrEP while navigating apps. We actively recruited YBMSM (n = 17) age 18–24 from the GSN-app most frequently reported by MSM newly diagnosed with HIV in Baltimore. Participants were recruited through direct messaging within the GSN-app while logged-on in high HIV transmission areas. Participants completed 60–90 minute semi-structured interviews, which were analyzed using a 3-stage analytic coding strategy. While some participants had not heard of PrEP, the majority described mentions or conversations about PrEP on GSN-apps. Three themes emerged: (1) Mistrust of PrEP, (2) Association with sexual promiscuity, and (3) Concerns about lack of protection from other STIs. Proper messaging, accurate information, and education are needed to account for the negative perceptions that surround PrEP; otherwise, continued underuse among YBMSM will expand rather than reduce HIV disparities.

ORAL LESION SECONDARY TO ORAL SEX

Fellatio is modality of oral sex in which the penis is placed into the mouth of another person contacting the soft palate, and, sometimes, oral lesions in the contact area can be observed. Usually these lesions appear in the context of sexual abuse, but they are also seen after consensual sex, frequently in young women or homosexual men. A 24-year-old woman came to our clinic complaining of asymptomatic red petechiae on the palate. There was cervical lymphadenopathy. Oral examination revealed small red spots on the soft palate, and patient confirmed the practice of fellatio. The differential diagnosis included syphilis and blood dyscrasias. The anamnesis was noncontributory. Seven days after cessation of fellatio the oral lesions resolved. The laboratory tests were within normal values. It is important that dentists know the oral manifestations of oral sex to include this clinical hypothesis in the diagnosis of palatal lesions.

A Review of Mental Health Interventions for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youth and Adults

Objective: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, particularly LGBT youth, are at higher risk for developing a mental illness compared to their straight and cis-gender peers. As such, the purpose of this review is to identify evaluated mental health interventions tailored for LGBT youth and adults. Method: A systematic review of peer reviewed articles related to mental health interventions in LGBT youth and adults was conducted for articles published before March 2018 via Ovid MEDLINE. In addition, a key word search of PubMed was conducted. In this review, four studies are examined, and two ongoing studies are noted. Articles were selected if they described an evaluated mental health intervention tailored for LGBT youth or adults. Results: Four interventions were identified that met inclusion criteria: one study on a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) intervention for gender and sexual-minority youth, one attachment-based family therapy study adapted for suicidal lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) youth and their parents, one CBT intervention for young gay and bisexual men, and one expressive writing intervention for gay, male college students. In addition, two ongoing studies on interventions for LGB young adults were identified. Conclusion: There is a clear and concerning dearth of clinically evaluated mental health interventions for LGBT youth and adults, particularly of studies including transgender people, which should be viewed by researchers and clinicians as a call to action to address the mental health needs of LGBT youth and adults.

Chong-ro

For young men navigating a sexual identity that lies on the periphery of culturally understood and politically acceptable discourses, places where one expresses such identities becomes necessary to foster a sense of belonging. Gay districts have existed as bastions of open self-expression, providing a sense of belonging in restrictive societal contexts. This is particularly true in South Korea. Through direct ethnographic engagement, this article analyzes the ways in which Chong-ro, one of Seoul’s gay districts, reinforces identity to create a sense of belonging. Through methods of participant observations and semi-structured interviews with self-identified gay men, qualitative data was collected and analyzed. This article attempts to show how these places help formulate relationships that affirm young gay men’s understanding of self, community, and belonging.

The Unanticipated Benefits of PrEP for Young Black Gay, Bisexual, and Other Men Who Have Sex with Men.

Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is effective at reducing new HIV infections among adherent users. However, there are potential benefits of PrEP beyond HIV prevention that remain understudied, particularly among young Black gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (MSM). In 2018, we conducted six focus groups (n = 36) in four midwestern cities: Milwaukee, WI; Minneapolis, MN; Detroit, MI; and Kansas City, MO with current and former PrEP users who identified as Black MSM. The focus groups covered medical care and provider experiences, patterns of PrEP use and adherence, relationships while on PrEP, and PrEP stigma. Results revealed four unanticipated benefits of PrEP for young Black MSM: (1) improved engagement in medical care, (2) reduced sexual and HIV anxiety, (3) increased sexual comfort and freedom, and (4) positive sexual relationships with people living with HIV. Findings from this study fill a gap in our understanding of the potential benefits of PrEP beyond HIV prevention. Public health campaigns and messaging around PrEP should incorporate such benefits to reach young Black MSM who may be motivated by benefits beyond HIV prevention.

Singing Your Way out of the Closet: Young Gay Men in the Operatic World

Little has been written about the reasons gay men choose opera as a venue for professional achievement and social acceptance. Espousing an ethnographic approach, the current article sets out to question their motives. Applying Bourdieu’s concepts of field, cultural capital and habitus, I suggest looking at the opera as a cultural setting, which provides young gay men with a venue for coming out of the closet and, should they be talented and meticulous, achieving professional and social positions. In constituting a safe zone for expressing closeted emotions, engagement in operatic activities enables the development and application of gay capital, as well as cultural capital, such that gayness is interpreted as an invaluable resource, granting them professional and social acceptance.

성인기 초기 남성 동성애자의 성적 지향성 인지와 커밍아웃 경험

This study aims to analyze the recognition of sexual orientations and to find out the coming out experience of sexual minorities who are at the center of social issues and controversies today. With the participation from six young adult gay men, three in-depth interview sessions were conducted from November 2015 until May 2017. The hermeneutical grounded theory methodology, as one of the qualitative research methods, was employed to analyze the gathered interview data and to select the 31 meanings, 8 categories and 4 topics. The results indicated that as time progressed, the recognition of sexual orientations, denials, and acceptances were precedent before the coming of the closet by the gay men. In addition, during the experiences of coming out of the closet, the family of the participants tended to deny the homosexual orientation of the participants while abusive language and violence from the family often existed. These negative responses from the family triggered low self-esteem, depression and helplessness of the gay men. Findings also indicated that more attention from the family science field, academia and field practices is required to be addressed on homosexuals and their families, while a brisk discussion on introducing institutional frameworks is critical for the protection of the human rights of sexual minorities.

Project ESTEEM protocol: a randomized controlled trial of an LGBTQ-affirmative treatment for young adult sexual minority men\u2019s mental and sexual health

BackgroundYoung gay and bisexual men disproportionately experience depression, anxiety, and substance use problems and are among the highest risk group for HIV infection in the U.S. Diverse methods locate the source of these health disparities in young gay and bisexual men’s exposure to minority stress. In fact, minority stress, psychiatric morbidity, substance use, and HIV risk fuel each other, forming a synergistic threat to young gay and bisexual men’s health. Yet no known intervention addresses minority stress to improve mental health, substance use problems, or their joint impact on HIV risk in this population. This paper describes the design of a study to test the efficacy of such an intervention, called ESTEEM (Effective Skills to Empower Effective Men), a 10-session skills-building intervention designed to reduce young gay and bisexual men’s co-occurring health risks by addressing the underlying cognitive, affective, and behavioral pathways through which minority stress impairs health.MethodsThis study, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, is a three-arm randomized controlled trial to examine (1) the efficacy of ESTEEM compared to community mental health treatment and HIV counseling and testing and (2) whether ESTEEM works through its hypothesized cognitive, affective, and behavioral minority stress processes. Our primary outcome, measured 8 months after baseline, is condomless anal sex in the absence of PrEP or known undetectable viral load of HIV+ primary partners. Secondary outcomes include depression, anxiety, substance use, sexual compulsivity, and PrEP uptake, also measured 8 months after baseline.DiscussionDelivering specific stand-alone treatments for specific mental, behavioral, and sexual health problems represents the current state of evidence-based practice. However, dissemination and implementation of this one treatment-one problem approach has not been ideal. A single intervention that reduces young gay and bisexual men’s depression, anxiety, substance use, and HIV risk by reducing the common minority stress pathways across these problems would represent an efficient, cost-effective alternative to currently isolated approaches, and holds great promise for reducing sexual orientation health disparities among young men.Trial registrationRegistered October 10, 2016 to ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT02929069.

Forty Years From Despair to Hope

From 1979 to 1981, the first 2 years of my practice as a women’s health nurse practitioner (NP), rare types of cancer and infections began to be reported by clinicians in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, mainly among young gay men. The conditions, Kaposi sarcoma (a type of cancer), and Pneumocystis carinii, cryptococcus, and other infectious diseases, were referred to as “opportunistic” because they were not found in persons with healthy immune systems. Department Editor Denise G. Link, PhD, WHNP-BC, FAAN, FAANP, is a clinical professor at the Arizona State University Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation, Phoenix, who would like to hear your ideas for future columns. She can be reached at [email protected]

The pursuit of masculinity by young gay men in neoliberal Hong Kong and Shanghai

ABSTRACT Recent debates in critical studies of men and masculinities center around the intricate relationship between neoliberalism and male identity formation. Drawing on narratives from in-depth interviews with young gay men aged 18–28 conducted in Hong Kong (n = 25) and Shanghai (n = 20) between 2017 and 2018, this article argues that young Chinese gay men negotiate neoliberal heteronormative values and accomplish masculine ideals in the spheres of education, work, and sexuality. They conform to and protest heterosexual masculinity to create a more reflexive gender and sexual script of ‘being a man’. The family and sexual communities, both embedded with neoliberal values, serve as important social institutions that enable and limit development of the entrepreneur of the self. Using Chinese young gay men's narratives, the article argues that they are embarking on a journey to create their own scripts of masculinity under neoliberal hetero/homo-normative constraints. The article contributes to understanding of the gendered nature of neoliberalism and its impact on the self-making process of the post-90s generation of gay men.

The impact of age on gay consumers’ reaction to the physical and social servicescape in gay bars

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to examine the effects of physical servicescape, social servicescape and age on gay consumers’ evaluations of a LGBT advertisement of a gay bar of a gay bar.Design/methodology/approachA 2 × 2 × 2 experimental design was used to test the effects with a sample of gay males in the USA. Data were analyzed using ANCOVA and bootstrapping mediation.FindingsResults of this study indicate a statistically significant three-way interaction effect of the two independent variables and age on the gay bar’s perceived LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender)-friendliness. Perceived friendliness mediated the effects of the independent variables on behavioral intentions. Furthermore, the mediation effect was moderated by the age cohort.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings indicate a changing perception of gay servicescape between the older and younger gay men. Implications for hospitality managers are provided.Originality/valueThis research contributes to the servicescape literature by expanding the realm of research to gay servicescape and gay consumers, an emergent and more visible hospitality segment.

The voice of Indonesian gay men who want to have heterosexual orientation

Some homosexuals have a strong desire to change their sexual orientation to a heterosexual one. This study attempted to understand the Indonesian gay men's motivations to change their sexual orientation. Using a qualitative study desain and a snowball sampling approach, we carried out in-depth interviews with six young adult gay men living in two main cities in Indonesia. We identified three major themes: (1) motivations to change sexual orientation, (2) strategies to change sexual orientation, and (3) internal and external factors related to sexual orientation change. This study recommends a comprehensive support from mental health services to help individuals address the sexual orientation matters.

Be a Responsible and Respectable Man: Two Generations of Chinese Gay Men Accomplishing Masculinity in Hong Kong

This article seeks a dialogue between masculinity studies and generational sexuality studies by comparing two generations of gay men in Hong Kong through in-depth interviews with 15 older gay men born before the 1950s and 25 young gay men born after 1990 using a life course approach. The article highlights the sociohistorical and political changes shaping male identity, practice, and culture in colonial and postcolonial Hong Kong, and identifies responsibility and respectability as two key dimensions in the construction of Chinese masculinity. It argues that the two generations under study accomplish gay masculinities against changing Chinese masculine ideals and hetero/homonormativities sensitive to different social relations and institutions, as well as engage in constant negotiation with the dominant heteronormative life course and need to manage stigma. Drawing on the narratives of the participants from the two generations, the article examines continuity and change in the idealized and practiced forms of masculinity embedded in different institutions, thereby providing a nuanced understanding of the transformations of Chinese generational masculinities under broad social–historical changes.