ABSTRACT
Against the backdrop of sociocultural and legal developments in the recognition of lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer (LGBQ) ‘rights’ in Britain, this chapter examines personal narratives of family and kinship as told by LGBQ people who were aged in the twenties and thirties in two studies, one of which was undertaken in the mid-1990s and the other in 2009/2010. These narratives formed part of the cultural context in which two separate cohorts of LGBQ young people entered their mid-teens and early twenties. They can be conceived as narratives of experience that provided study participants with a sense of the generationally distinctive possibilities that existed for LGBQ family and kin relations. While the later study generated culturally strong stories of family and intimate citizenship, it also generated weaker stories of compromised citizenship that resonated with those told in the earlier study.
