Who am I in relation to them? Gay, lesbian, and queer people leave the city to attend rural family weddings

Nine gay, lesbian, and queer adults who were raised in rural areas but now live in the city returned to their families and communities of origin to artend family weddings. The shift from urban to rural, nonfamily to family, everyday to ritual, was a shift by which they renegotiated their sense of self as different from their families and communities of origin. What it meant to be gay, lesbian, or queer (GLQ) depended upon specific interaction contexts. The negotiation of being different as GLQ occurred within dialectics of visibility/invisibility, closeness/distance, and comfort/discomfort during weddings. Results presented here emerged as significant within a larger study of heterosexism and family ritual. Data were collected in focus group interviews and analyzed inductively using a combination of family discourse and grounded theory methods.