ABSTRACT
This chapter considers my experience of doing research as a gay man with other gay men for my Doctoral study: Dissenting Fictions: A study of the formative literacy practices of gay men. My thesis investigated the influence that childhood and adolescent reading practices had on identity formation and I sought to map a relatively uncharted terrain of the socio-sexual contexts in which literacy behaviour is embedded. Throughout my research journey, I struggled to discipline and disentangle my voice from the communities of practice in which I have sought belonging and my positioning in the field as a man, as a friend, as a person aligned with a university doing a Ph.D. troubled the notion of a unified, authoritative stance from which to speak and write.
