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This article focuses on the link between the representation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in national legislatures and the existence of equality laws focused on sexual orientation. It addresses three interrelated questions: how many "out" LGBT legislators have served in national parliaments, what explains the cross-national variation in their legislative presence, and what is the relationship between the presence of gay legislators and the enactment of laws that treat gay and straight citizens equally? There is an established literature arguing that the representation of women and ethnic minorities "descriptively" in national legislatures improves the realization of their policy preferences and the position of the group within the society as a whole. This article draws on that literature and extends the analysis to LGBT communities. It finds that the presence of even a small number of openly gay legislators is associated significantly with the future passage of enhanced gay rights, even after including controls for social values, democracy, government ideology, and electoral system design. Once openly gay legislators are in office they have a transformative effect on the views and voting behavior of their straight colleagues. This "familiarity through presence" effect is echoed in studies of U.S. state legislatures and levels of social tolerance of homosexuality in the population at large.

Using videorecorded data from canvassing interviews between activists and voters in Los Angeles, this thesis examines the ideologies of sexuality that emerge in conversation through the interactive construction of argumentative reasoning and socio-semiotic processes of ideological representation. Analysis focuses on the discursive connections canvassers and voters draw between attitudes toward LGBT politics and beliefs about what causes a person to be gay or bisexual. In contrast to ideologies circulated by the mass media, the data demonstrate broad variation in how voters' stances on politics and morality are tied to their own presentations of self and whether they believe homosexuality is something people choose, are influenced toward, or are born with. Nonetheless, canvassers misrecognize this variation and generate restrictive ideological representations through processes of iconization, erasure, and dichotomic replication. In order to better promote LGBT political causes, I call on activists to rethink their persuasive strategies in light of these findings.

Storytelling serves as a vital resource for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans* (LGBT) refugees' access to asylum. It is through telling their personal stories to the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board that LGBT refugees' claims for asylum are accessed and granted. Storytelling also serves as a mechanism for LGBT refugees to speak about social injustice within and outside of Canada. In this article, I explore the challenges of storytelling and social justice as an activist and scholar. I focus on three contexts where justice and injustice interplay in LGBT refugee storytelling: the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board, public advocacy around anti-queer violence and refugee rights, and oral history research. I describe how in each arena storytelling can be a powerful tool of justice for LGBT refugees to validate their truths and bring their voices to the forefront in confronting state and public violence. I investigate how these areas can also inflict their own injustices on LGBT refugees by silencing their voices and reproducing power hierarchies.

Since the early 1970s, an important but under-examined subgenre of Made-for-Television Movies have foregrounded critical LGBT concerns, including coming out, parental custody, HIV/AIDS, gays in the military, and hate crimes or featured affirmative LGBT representations. These programs, often highly-rated and critically-acclaimed, were nonetheless sites of political contestation from social conservatives and LGBT activists. Through the lenses of critical media pedagogy, critical cultural studies, and critical media industries studies, this dissertation conducts a critical cultural history of LGBT TV movies. This history includes critical case studies of twenty seminal LGBT programs featuring original interviews with the producers, executives, and writers responsible for their pedagogical design. The evidence reflects how these programs helped frame these concerns, educate audiences, and advocate on behalf of the LGBT community. This research further suggests how progressive pedagogues and media producers might collaborate to help address other social issues through the use of critical entertainment.

This article explores the substantive representation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in party manifestos in general elections and regional elections in the United Kingdom, 1945–2011. The findings show that while there is some evidence of progress, there is also significant variation in the attention that parties afford to LGBT issues, and a general failure to fully apply international principles and mainstreaming theory in election programmes. It is argued that an 'asymmetrical electoral bargain' applies: parties increasingly court LGBT voters yet often do so in a reductive and limited manner. This suggests that elements of institutionally homophobic practice endure in contemporary electoral politics.

LGBT/Q film festivals are an integral part of the social practice of queer film culture. They are places where social, political and economic discourses intersect and where LGBT/Q identities, representation through film, definitions of queer cinema, community and global queer politics are negotiated. The festivals themselves are constantly responding to the changing surroundings and demands from stakeholders such as their audience base, the communities they want to serve, and economic and political stakeholders. The versatile, ever evolving form of the festival speaks to its performative formation. Therefore, the concepts of performativity, the performative and performance lend themselves to the analysis of the mechanisms and processes at play there. This study, situated at the intersection of film and media studies, sociology and queer theory, builds its arguments on the interdisciplinary field of film festival studies, and sets out to argue for the value of applying the concepts of the performative, performativity and performance to the study of film festivals in general, and LGBT/Q film festivals in particular. As the discussion of the concepts in chapter 1 show, the performative as developed by Austin in language philosophy and its further transposition to performativity in the theorizations of philosophy and literature by Derrida, for gender/queer theory by Butler, and performance for ethnography by Turner, and in theater/performance studies by Fischer-Lichte and McKenzie provides a versatile analytical arsenal for the analysis of film festivals. At the same time it is highly compatible with other existing concepts and theorizations such as event, public sphere, and networks and flows that have already been canonically applied to festival studies. In chapter 2, I mobilize the historical dimension of the performative to discuss the formation of LGBT/Q film festivals and their circuit. There, I sketch out the historical development of the LGBT/Q film festival while paying attention also to the larger social, political, geographic, and economic contexts. The discursive historiography is accompanied by an empirical one, where I analyze the growth pattern and global spread of the LGBT/Q film festival circuit. Along with the global perspective, a discussion of US-American (Frameline, NewFest, MIX NYC), German (Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg, Verzaubert, Berlinale Teddy Award) and Austrian (identities) case studies provides further depth in understanding the evolution of the festivals and the circuit. Having drawn a broad picture of the circuit in chapter 3, I zoom in to look at a number of specific incidents of disruption and boycotts as case studies to unravel the different layers in which LGBT/Q film festivals as instances of queer film culture are performed (or failed). In this chapter I mobilize mainly perspectives of performativity and performance from ethnography and performance studies. These are put in synch with concepts such as public spheres, audience address, and event culture in three steps: selection, exhibition, and reception. Under the heading of selection, I discuss the performance of queer cinema as it becomes visible in the practices of selection of films and their programming at LGBT/Q film festivals. There I discuss various processes involved in programming, ranging from pre-selection, to screening committees, to programming strategies. Two historical incidents from the history of Frameline, the "Lesbian Riot" and the "Genderator" incident, serve as examples of how programming directly interrelates with identity negotiations. In the section on exhibition, I turn to the performative architecture of an LGBT/Q film festival by shedding light on the event itself, which follows specific scripts and rituals. In the last section on reception, I look at the corresponding side of these processes and look at the audience. Here, I discuss the formation of a counterpublic sphere, audience address, and the specific reception context of a festival. Two further festival boycotts are presented to analyze how LGBT/Q film festivals operate as queer counterpublic spheres that activists utilize for political intervention. The last section discusses the communal experience of collective viewing and the impact on the formation of a festival community. With this take on audiences, community and reception contexts, the chapter returns to the question of how LGBT/Q film festivals are an integral part of the practices of queer film culture, which was raised in the introduction. In the concluding outlook to the study I propose three further research trajectories. While the study mostly relied on conceptions of performativity and performance in the sense developed in ethnography, gender/queer theory and performance studies, another aspect of performance can be productively brought to bear on the subject of (LGBT/Q) film festivals: performance in the economic sense of efficiency and achievement.

Situational contexts vary substantially across the country. This variation provides conditionswhere a subset of the American public may be exposed to situations that others arenot. How do contexts affect the politics of minority groups? In this dissertation, I examinehow the politics of lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people are situated by differing contextsacross the United States. I examine how LGB presence aects and conditions the approvalof the mass public. I examine the mechanism this influence bears on representative behavior in Congress. I finally examine how varying contexts uniquely affects some LGBs over others. In total, I find that varying contexts situate the political positions of LGB peopledifferently. This results in unique conditions where LGB people are politically ininfluentialand cohesive.

This article looks at the "coming out" category in a broad political sense as the work of making the particular subject positions of LGBT minorities legible to those subjects themselves and to the public at large. Coming out thus understood includes, but is not limited to, the rhetorical act of announcing one's sexual identity; it likewise includes aesthetic representations such as memoirs and films. This broad definition of coming out, based on Jacques Rancière's political philosophy, enables a comparison between the political‑cum‑aesthetic work of sexual minorities in the US, especially after the Stonewall Inn riots and up to the AIDS epidemic and its aftermath, and some developments in post‑1989 Poland.

Human rights of LGBTTIQ persons in Western Balkans and regulating the broadcasters -- Media silence and the role of the state -- (Self) representation, media image and the policies of exclusion/inclusion -- Representations of the possible future: gender minority groups in new media and popular culture.

The "villainous homosexual" has long stalked America's cultural imagination, most explicitly in the figure of the queer murderer, a character in dozens of plays. But as society's understanding of homosexuality has changed, so has the significance of these controversial characters, especially when employed by LGBT theater artists themselves to explore darker fears and desires. Murder Most Queer examines the shifting meanings of murderous LGBT characters in American theater over a century, showing how these representations wrestle with and ultimately subvert notions of gay villainy.