Conclusion: Cohesion, Fragmentation and ‘Becoming’

Abstract

New storytelling for gay and lesbian identity concerns aspects of cohesion, fragmentation, and ‘becoming’. This book has revealed the coales-cent nature of narrative, and how stories may be connected through a progression of diverse opportunities within the media, leading to confidences in identity, and new political, community and identity actions. At the same time, individuals (often working in isolation) are not necessarily aware of the wider stories to be told, and their work may be considered as fragmented. Hence there is a tension between the themes of coalescence, isolation and agency. Stories of personal identification are inevitably intimate, however, their strength is not so much in how these ‘personal’ narratives comfortably fit together, but in how they reveal the diversity of individual experience, which appears to be connected. We are bonded not by the similitude of the stories that we tell, but by our performative potential as enablers of self-storytelling.