“It’s different for heterosexuals”: exploring cis-heteronormativity in COVID-19 public health directives and its impacts on Canadian gay, bisexual, and queer men

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2023.2226807

Language of the publication
English
Date
2023-06-28
Type
Article
Author(s)
  • Daroya, Emerich
  • Lessard, David
  • Klassen, Ben
  • Skakoon-Sparling, Shayna
  • Sinno, Jad
  • Adam, Barry
  • Perez-Brumer, Amaya
  • Lachowsky, Nathan J.
  • Sang, Jordan M.
  • Hart, Trevor A.
  • Cox, Joseph
  • Tan, Darrell H. S.
  • Grace, Daniel
  • Grey, Cornel
  • Gaspar, Mark
Publisher
Informa UK Limited

Abstract

Critical scholarship has illustrated how COVID-19 public health policies can enact racism, classism, and cis-heteronormativity, perpetuating harms among vulnerable communities. We sought to examine the accounts of gay, bisexual, and queer men (GBQM) in Canada on how normative ideologies played out in COVID-19 directives and what impacts these orders had on their lives. Two rounds of semi-structured interviews with GBQM in Montreal (n = 30), Toronto (n = 33), and Vancouver (n = 30) were conducted between November 2020-February 2021 and June-October 2021 (N = 93). Our reflexive thematic analysis drew on the frameworks of cis-heteronormativity and intersectionality to examine how normative assumptions about kinship, sociality, and privilege in COVID-19 public health directives were understood and experienced by GBQM. Our participants explicated how cis-heteronormativity was pervasive in COVID-19 public health messaging, noting that stay-at-home orders and limits on social gatherings reinforced heterosexual forms of kinship. The privileging of cis-heteronormative sociality had detrimental effects on the sense of belonging and identity formation of many participants due to restricted access to queer spaces during the pandemic. Others indicated that stay-at-home orders failed to account for the heterogeneity of queer people’s experiences of homelessness and structural racism. These findings provide valuable insights into how public health efforts to control COVID-19 infections have overlooked the complex forms of kinship among GBQM, the importance of queer spaces and community organizations, and the varying vulnerabilities of diverse lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) groups.

Subject

  • Health

Rights

Pagination

528-538

Peer review

Yes

Open access level

Gold

Identifiers

ISSN
1469-3682

Article

Journal title
Critical Public Health
Journal volume
33
Journal issue
5

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Collection(s)

Social determinants of health

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