UC Irvine

This dissertation examines the process of parental acceptance for gay men in India and the US. In academic literature and public discourse, parental acceptance of gay men is often seen as a linear, albeit often gradual, process. However, interviews with gay men conducted for this study show that this acceptance waxes and wanes in patterned ways. It is found that gay men often experience *contextual* parental acceptance. Acceptance becomes weaker or stronger at different points and stages in the life course and in different interactional settings. Parental acceptance becomes stronger or diminished in these contexts depending on how gay men’s parents respond to the forces of heteronormativity and homonormativity, and whether gay men align with the racial normativity while experiencing their sexuality, in these time and spatial contexts. This study also explicates the role of parents’ agency, and the idiosyncrasies in how spatial contexts unfold, to explain how the forces of heteronormativity in spatial contexts produce behavioral outcomes on acceptance differently from different parents. Finally, this study incorporates the experiences of queer gay men from India to show that the understanding of parental acceptance through the lenses of homonormativity is more exclusive to American national culture. Parental acceptance in the Indian national culture is better understood through how queerness, in addition to homonormativity, shapes gay men’s perceptions of parental acceptance.