Scared straight: LGBTQIA+ trauma as worldmaking and breaking

It has been said that “all things recur eternally” (Nietzsche, 1899, p. 329), and the presence of increasingly nocuous anti-LGBTQIA+ discourses globally (Vicars and Milenkovic, 2024) has returned us to the monstrous imaginations of our youths. Mark grew up in the United Kingdom, entering adolescence in the mid-1980s: a decade in the HIV/AIDS zeitgeist that fomented intense homophobia. James grew up in Australia in the late 1990s, and although both authors lived in different climates, different times and spaces, the psychic Dis-ease we experienced had much to do with maintaining vigilance of how we presented and passed.

Marchi et al. (2023) have claimed “traumatic potential consists in the systematic repetition of experience” (p. 1) and Pelias has noted how “[s]ometimes, memory's tales … just won't settle … They are like scabs itching to be picked. They are wounds always ready to bleed again” (Pelias, 2004, p. 54). The re-emergence of neo-fascist narratives has re-ignited an uncanny feeling of unbelonging that we hoped had long since been evacuated, activated by what Savage (2007) has called membership of an outgroup. The abjection of the Other has increased again as diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are being scaled back or withdrawn entirely, with political and cultural assault advancing binarist identity narratives to promulgate exclusionary discourses of (un)belonging. The contemporaneous rise of political and social repression against LGBTQIA+ bodies can, we propose, mean re-facing the spectral presence of past (dis)connectedness, discomfort and schisms. In exploring LGBTQIA+ trauma, Ahmed (2006) has reminded us how the uncomfortable plurality of the (dis)oriented Other is about living the day-to-day realities of being divorced from the grand récit (Lyotard, 1984) of gender and sexuality. Davis and Vicars (2014) have described minoritarian experiences of deviation from expected enactments of hegemonic forms of gender and sexuality and the master narrative of heterosexuality that affords universality and legitimacy. McConnell et al. (2018) have claimed that as discrimination, isolation and hate crimes are a causal factor in many common forms of minority stress, and in this article – via the ambiguity of the amphiboly scared straight – we reconsider the mental health implications of the forming, norming and storming of anti-LGBTQIA+ discourses within and across public consciousness.

To be scared straight implies fear being utilised as a disciplinary device, either as a method of delivery (threat, physical harm, surveillance) or confiscation (removal or denial). We mobilise the signifiers straight/straightness not as exclusive and exhaustive referents to heterosexuality, but in line with Ahmed (2006), as terms designating the normative orientation and trajectory of subjects, desires and behaviours. Highly efficacious, fear can put one back on an appropriate – The appropriate – path. To be reinstalled on the proper path is to have this direction redefined and recast as desirable, as necessitous (Ahmed, 2019). But scared straight also speaks to a more insidious pedagogy of being scared into straightness. In this formulation, fear is ontologised: subjectivising queers by producing “closeted” subjects who suppress and repress their LGBTQIA+ identities. Concurrently, the politicisation of fear works in the service of imposing and regulating closet dynamics (Smith et al., 1998), establishing “a structural order of gender binarism, heterosexual-homosexual division, male dominance, and heterosexual privilege” (Seidman, 2009, p. 17). When non-normative sexual or gendered identities become made invalid and foreclosed as subject positions, recognising and associating with the good homosexual (Smith, 1994), the good queer, is a binary with the “closeted” homosexual/queer in a perpetual state of being scared straight.

Legislation negating the rights and freedoms of LGBTQIA+ people is increasingly ratifying displacement and feelings of marginalisation. The affective dimension of the imposition of cis-hetero-normativity can be located in the harbouring of proximal stressors, which leads to the internalisation of self-doubt, isolation and poor self-esteem. Hatzenbuehler and Pachankis (2016), for example, have noted how legislation and policies are regularly the driving force behind their construction. In 2020, the Education Legislation Amendment (Parental Rights) (NSW) was introduced to the Australian parliament, which sought to prohibit teaching about gender fluidity in schools across the state of New South Wales. In 2024, Australian One Nation Senator, Pauline Hanson, introduced a bill to “acknowledg[e] [biological] reality” (Hanson, 2024), which sought to remove gender identity from Australia's Sex Discrimination Act – a protected characteristic – and add the definition of man as “a member of the male biological sex irrespective of age” and woman as “a member of the female biological sex irrespective of age” (Sex Discrimination Amendment (Acknowledging Biological Reality, 2024, p. 3). The bill was defeated. In July 2025, recurrence took the form of senators Alex Antic and Matt Canavan in Australia introducing the Sex Discrimination Amendment Restoring Biological Definitions Bill. This bill was strikingly similar to Hanson's, both in its socio-political objectives and linguistic construction. The bill set out to modify the Australian Sex Discrimination 1984 Act by omitting gender identity and installing biological definitions of male and female (Sex Discrimination Amendment (Restoring Biological Definitions), 2025). This bill was also defeated. Despite comprising 0.3% of Australia's population – approximately 63,000 people (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2024) – intersex individuals remained unaccounted for in Hanson's and Antic's and Canavan's bills. From this omission, we might surmise that either this population does not warrant qualification in the bills, or more disturbingly, that intersex subjects are subsumable within dimorphic categories male and female.

In the United States in 2025, 604 anti-LGBTQIA+ legislative state bills were proposed with 70 being ratified into law (American Civil Liberties Union [Aclu], 2026). In 2025 in the United Kingdom, the Supreme Court ruled that the only acceptable legal definition of “sex” is the biological sex assigned to a person at birth, and that no adjustments to that legal designation should be recognised by law – even if the person has a gender recognition certificate. Moreover, despite pledges to ban conversion therapy in 2018 and inclusion as a legislative priority in the King's speech in 2025, conversion therapy remains a legal practice.

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), LGBTQIA+ adults are more than twice as likely as heterosexual adults to experience a mental health condition (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2024), and in the leading suicide prevention and crisis intervention, the Trevor Project's survey 86% of LGBTQIA+ youth reported that recent politics had negatively impacted their well-being (The Trevor Project, 2020). The liminality of belonging is always, we suggest, in a dialectical relationship to exclusion. LeMaster (2011) has proposed: “[l]iminality implies that the high could not be high unless the low existed” (p. 360), or as Vanyoro and Dey (2025) state: “for individuals or groups in liminality, social life is a dialectical experience involving successive phases of … communitas and structure, homogeneity and differentiation, equality, and inequality” (p. 180).

The mythological presence of the normal, we propose, operates as an ideological force that, through legislative discourse, reproduces dominant ways of being, thinking, and feeling to enact and maintain forms of inequalities and oppression. Barthes (1972) has positioned mythmaking as a social process that legitimises concepts through repetition to naturalise particular ideologies; its function as an epistemological device centres the imposition of the hegemonic ideology upon society. Social life is always emplaced and embodied in the stream of experience as constituted through daily encounters.

van Der Kolk (2014) has noted being traumatised means continuing to organise your life as if the trauma were still going on – unchanged and immutable – as every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past. Menhinick and Sanders (2023) have observed how “people in the LGBTQIA+ community may be at higher risk of experiencing things that can cause complex trauma to develop” (p. 367) – a postulation supported by the CPTSD Foundation, which that shows 48% of LGB identifying people and 42% of trans and non-binary identifying people are living with complex trauma (Davis, 2023).

When subjugating powers are internalised by subjects, it is difficult to determine the distinction between the inside and the outside (Butler, 1997). In the darkness of disorientation – when the ability to comprehend and sustain a convincing narrative of self is induced – it is anguish and confusion that reveals a rupturing of the membrane that separates physiological and psychological self. van Der Kolk (2014) explored the extreme disconnection from the body, while Fraser (1999) has suggested it is “the body [which] is the site, or place where the ‘truth’ of identity is revealed” (p. 109). The body is inescapably imbricated in re-storying the self. As we recall sensations as they flood and course, they transcend the Cartesian dichotomy of body and brain. We wait while the rivulets of desire that circumnavigate bone, muscle, and connective tissue reactivate our limbic systems, which have, over the years, have given a fleshy form to our rewor(l)ding of the world.

Reflecting on how I (Mark) in my youth consciously enforced a strict separation between my interior homosexual worlding while maintaining a public heterosexual exterior, I am reminded of my efforts in trying to suppress and disavow my feelings through exercise; how I attempted to construct a body that would encase my desire in an impermeable protective shell. I began refusing meals, disposing of food and deliberately starved myself to stave off my mid-teen crisis of developing self-concept. For many gay men, the triggers of perfection and permission frame how we speak and move through the world without fear of correction. It is in whispers that we signal our imprecision in reifying normative gender and sexuality. To feel safe, to want, to express how we feel and be fully present is to think with and about what becomes visible and when we take the gut seriously as a sociological and psychological object, we glimpse with embodiment as a form of multiple perception. After seven months of starving, my self-enforced regime was interrupted. Recognised by my family as anorexic, I was packed off to the doctor for diagnostic confirmation. Brain (2003) suggests that “anorexia is a negotiation of subjectivity through a contestation of body boundaries” and that “anorexia can be seen as an attempt to subvert the regulatory binary of sex” (p. 1). She argued that “self-formations like anorexia are creative because through “being otherwise”, they create a distance from normalised ways of being, thereby opening up a space for critique of normativity (Brain, 2003). Recent research proposes that anorexia is a “sympathetic/parasympathetic imbalance” and “should not be viewed merely as a perceptual deficit but rather as a complex cognitive-emotional and somato-sensory process” (Di Giuliano et al., 2025, p. 1)”.

My condition afforded me a sabbatical from realising the divisions that were being daily produced: gay/straight, private/public, normal/abnormal and all that I had tried to keep inside became reified on my bony frame. Starting therapy, I secretly began to think how it would be just fine if I were “normal”. Food had become a vehicle through which I was able to maintain control of my emerging sexual identity; it was the latch of my closet door. One's relationship to “the closet” can become so instinctual, so reflexive that, like Foucault's (1995) panopticon, the individual engages a mode of self-subjugation (Butler, 1997): “becoming the victim and the victimizer, the prisoner and the guard” (McCarthy, 1994, p. 33). My mindbody experiencing was the score and at the end of each day, the cost of keeping the code and staying inside “the closet” meant I was so exhausted that it became impossible to do anything but collapse.

van Der Kolk (2014) has signposted how dissociation from the body is an adaptive response to trauma, noting how, for traumatised people, the past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort of silence. Sedgwick (1990) has suggested how silence disciplines differences and silence that is felt, heeded, and embedded leaves a trace: a way of understanding the self in the world; it is “a void to be filled, a wound to be healed, a flaw to be repaired” (Greene, 1993, p. 14).

Berlant (2001) has written of the ineloquence of trauma: its sketchiness, its capacity to evade the enclosure of narration through the representationalism of language. How can I (James) produce a testimony and translation of traumatic experience that could possibly capture its very uncapturability? I am reminded by Cixous that writing is to be done without censor or hesitation: “[w]rite, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you” (Cixous, 1976, p. 877). Like Écriture Feminine, our reinterpreted Écriture (Homo) Sexualities wields transformational potential as a practice that is “precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures” (Cixous, 1976, p. 879). In the current social and political milieu, it has become urgent for us to counter-speak polyphonously about our lived realities as the fugitive (Hill, 1996), the subaltern (Spivak, 1988), the abject (Kristeva, 1982) and the minoritarian (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) in order to disrupt white cis-hetero-patriarchal hegemony.

As a gay, gender queer person in this zeitgeist of virulent anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiment and the intensification of the cis-hetero-norm, I find myself being re-interpellated as Other. The incendiary anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric characterising this neo-fascist sociopolitical moment has reacquainted me with the ghosts and phantoms from the past: I encounter the tendency of being returned to the traumatic temporality of my secondary schooling. Hill (2013) claims that “echoes from the past … have the power to move us in unexpected ways” (p. 380). Affectively provoked by these spectral visitations, I reexperience the fear in, and shame of being, the queer Other.

I have always been queer. Queer, here, meaning curious, peculiar, contrarian. This heterodoxy began when I was a child. It was in secondary school where my queerness was interpreted within a sexual economy. I learned that I could become subject to the disciplinarity of normative sexual and gendered discourses and be interpellated as gay named my identification with the cultural understandings of desires and attractions indexed under the sign. Faggot and poofter were daily staining utterances venomed by the athletic and popular boys. “The closet” first materialised, for me, as a way of shielding myself against these epithets. I witnessed how being suspected as gay could – prior to any declarative speech act – provoke and produce hostile reactions. Thus, when the awareness of being gay crystallised, “the closet” was already embedded in my orientation to the world. Stevenson (2023) has written that “[t]he experience of homophobia cuts deep and gnaws away subtly at your sense of self, making you the receptacle of a poisonous hatred which leaves you feeling excluded, unlovable and an object of disgust” (p. 4).

Trauma leaves its trace, marking and making subjects. Anxiety and depression are the aftereffects I carry with me. It has been almost 2 decades since I left secondary school, and I am only six degrees separated from my bullied teenager self. The affective impressions from this period resurface like a revenant in daily social life: prosaic doings, the sharing of public space. Anxiety flares from the vigilance and eschewal of those who might say or do something; depression follows as fatigue, the bodily and psychic lethargy that accompanies constant self-shielding.

Much like Nietzsche's (2001) eternal return, the moral panics surrounding – and the hysteria elicited by – LGBTQIA+ subjects and discourses are an epochal recurrence. Davis (2016) asserts that freedom is a protracted and tenacious struggle, and as rights and freedoms have been and continue to be won by sexual and gender minorities, so too do they become earmarked for renunciation and rescinding by politically conservative governments and groups. Often these censorial projects claim a heteropatriarchal ethos of reinstatement: restoring common sense and the common good for the common people. In such cases, “fear is stoked so that those who promise its alleviation can enter as forces of redemption and restoration” (Butler, 2024, p. 7). Ahmed (2004) has described the phantasmatic scenario where the fictional, nefarious intentions of the Other collectivise the majoritarian group, legitimising and intensifying their anxiety. In this arrangement, the love that communalises – the love of the nation, for normative social organisation and identities – is organised through an economy of hate. “The emotion of hate works to animate the ordinary subject, to bring that fantasy to life, precisely by constituting the ordinary as in crisis, and the ordinary person as the real victim” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 118). Religious conservatives and Right-wing populism employ this rhetorical tactic, peddling misinformation and unfounded assertions about sexual and gender minorities. The re-establishment of a hegemonic cis-hetero order bespeaks a normatively oriented herd politics. According to Nietzsche (1968), “[t]he more dangerous a quality seems to the herd, the more thoroughly is it proscribed” (p. 157). It is the very baselessness and immateriality of these claims that constitute their persuasive power and plausibility (McIntyre, 2018):

Similarly, Eribon (2004) offers an example of the determinations made of gay/queer subjects:

The effects of passing as straight and cisgender on LGBTQIA+ youth, it has been suggested, can make everyday life difficult due to an innate fear of inadvertently revealing their sexual or gender identity (Pachankis, 2007) and induce an “amygdala hijack” – when the emotional machinery of the brain asserts control before and over the thinking brain, inducing a fight, flight or freeze response. Foucault (1976) proposed in his notion of the repressive hypothesis how knowledge of the sexual and gender queer Other is produced as part of a normalising discourse whereby gender and sexual dissidence gets positioned in relation to what is considered as the norm, and in doing so, legitimates the norm as the ideal. In line with Nietzsche's eternal return, the repressive hypothesis can be evidenced in the contemporaneous discourse of LGBTQIA+ pathologisation which is, arguably, an epochal parallelism to the lavender scare of the 1950s, the anti-gay movement of the 1970s and the HIV/AIDS panic of the 1980s.

The contemporary anti-gender ideology movement is establishing non-normative gender and sexuality as rampantly contagious and enormously psychologically and emotionally destructive. The emergence of the TERF (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist) in early 2008 and the anti-gender ideology movement has become a spectral presence that is haunting the contemporary quotidian and it feels uncannily familiar. Freud (1987) suggested “the uncanny would always as it were, be something one does not know one's way about in” (p. 221) and is a “harking back to particular phases in the evolution of the self-regarding feeling, a regression to a time when the ego had not yet marked itself off sharply form the eternal world and from other people” (p. 236).”As soon as something actually happens in our lives which seem to confirm the old, discarded beliefs, we get a feeling of the uncanny” (Freud, 1987, pp. 247–248).

Drawing on Derrida's (1994) deconstructive notion of hauntology, Barad (2017) contends that hauntings “are not mere recollections or reverberations of what was … hauntings are an integral part of existing material conditions” (p. 74). van Der Kolk (2014) notes how what has been done cannot be undone and speaks instead of the importance of finding a way back from the imprints of traumatic experience. The tightening of the chest, the fear of annihilation, the vigilance of surveying for threat, the self-loathing and sequestering of self into solitude are somatic trauma traces that are all too familiar to those who are surviving survival. van Der Kolk (2014) claims trauma survivors are adept avoiders preferring solitude to sociality; their sensory world is, he suggests, largely off limits as psychological safety is a guarded practice of self; an intimate somatic relation and a way of manoeuvring through the world, that “can never be [fully understood] theorized, enclosed, [or] coded” (Cixous, 1976, p. 883). Psychological safety is “a material and metaphysical in-between space” (Somerville, 2010, p. 338) best captured in the Welsh phrase hiraeth that denotes a deep, nostalgic longing to return to something or somewhere now gone (or that perhaps never was).

Childhood experiences create hidden scripts actively programming the subconscious, and Ahmed (2006) has suggested how LGBTQIA+ “bodies [and minds] are shaped by their dwellings and take shape by dwelling” (p. 9). Haraway's (1988) argument that knowledge is formed by and out of positional perspective led us to draw on our summoned selves:

Positioning ourselves as “transgressive data” (St. Pierre, 1997), we situate relationality as a methodological refiguring: an approach that draws on the dynamic, fluid, intra-active, and contextual affordances of positionality, epistemically mining the interconnectedness and relationality of the observer and observed. Our learning to read the world as an antidote to just the word (Vicars and Sesta, 2023) is located in embodied narration. Engel and Anna (2023) have suggested that there is no language beyond embodiment. However, the question of how language and body belong together is open-ended, and controversial.

Inspired by Cixous et al.’s (1976) groundbreaking article, “The Laugh of Medusa”, which birthed the concept of Écriture feminine, our Écriture (Homo) Sexualities responds to Cixous' urging to “[w]rite yourself. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth” (Cixous, 1976, p. 880). Écriture (Homo) Sexualities as a methodology of reknowing draws on the logics of queer transgression “as the deliberate unstraightening and defamiliarisation of bodies, desires and orientations” (Palmer, 2020). Wolfreys (2008) posits that transgression “is the very pulse that constitutes our identities, and we would have no sense of our own subjectivity were it not for a constant, discontinuous negotiation with the transgressive otherness by which we are” (p. 1). Jenks (2003) argues that “[t]ransgression is a deeply reflexive act” that “serves as an extremely sensitive vector in assessing the scope, direction and compass of any social theory” (p. 2) and empowers and enables people to move outside of the spaces of expected conformity: to deny and affirm different modes of being and selfhood.

In our (re)worlding of the wordy enfleshments of power, we propose that any understanding of the social world that encourages reinterpretation is a productive task. Identities are akin to stories; they often evade fixation, and evocative stories can show something of how fugitive ways of knowing and experiencing worlds can be a productive trail – a trace of the past in the present. Post qualitative methodologies resist the tempting teleology of order and instead embrace disparities, otherness and ontological turns.

Identity, we suggest, is something that is processual, mobile and contingent: returning in new and resignifying forms, recontextualising and refusing to be silenced by a language that excludes it (Foucault, 1986). Evans (2024) has noted how “regimes which disappear bodies provide alibis in the manufacturing of denial” (p. 12). But we refuse to disappear into our diagnoses of anxiety, depression and PTSD. The clinical cannot adequately narrate how these have been happenings and identifications along our way, produced through historical and relational discourses. Palmer (2020) has stated that “language in its material strangeness has the power to advance … queer and intersectional politics. This power exists because the operations we perform on language that manifest its materiality share their dynamic potential with movement of emancipatory politics” (p. 1). Language's materiality can be used to transform the stories we tell of ourselves and, more significantly, ourselves in the story. Byung–Chul Han (2024) has called for the production of narratives that provide space for the Other to express something without the obligation to explain or be consumed as mere information, suggesting that the current zeitgeist is characterised by the rise of storyselling, not storytelling (Carver, 2024). In our endeavour to story-tell not story-sell we, engage Écriture (Homo) Sexualities as an embedded and embodied methodology to re-articulate the blends of the emotional, psychic, and cultural in which subjectivity is formed. We have not utilised an a priori criteria to sediment and secure how our voices will be heard and received, but choose to excavate the creases and ruptures of our emerging contradictory selfhoods. We do not accede to the premise that it is possible to partition off unruly parts of the self and live within the rhetoric of separateness. Psychological and emotional crises are experienced phenomena which can only ever be narrated, and as Carver (2024) has suggested are: “[l]odged in memories … narrations are knowledge” (p. 22). This statement requires vigilance to avoid mistaking the story as simulacra for the self. In our attempt to vividly recall and reconnect with places elsewhere that are re/membered, we have been guided by the critical tradition of re-reading and re-interpreting the world advanced by the Frankfurt school in the early 1900s, which posits that any understanding of experience is filtered through a posteriori interpretation, heteroglossia, deconstruction, counter-positioning and situatedness. Like Écriture Feminine, Écriture (Homo) Sexualities eludes definition and evades a predefined aesthetic.

In this article, we have endeavoured to explore trauma not only as a psychological phenomenon, but also as a sociological occurrence (Thompson and Walsh, 2010), suggesting how the rise of reactionary anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation is a repressive, stigmatising presence in the lives of LGBTQIA+ people. Warner (2000) has noted how: “[t]he stigmaphobe world is the dominant culture, where conformity is endured through fear of stigma” (p. 3), and Panter (2000) has written of the ideological practices that seek to exterminate “a specific targeted group who violate social, theological, and politically enforced heteronormative expectations” (p. 81). Onwuachi-Willig (2016) tells us that “cultural trauma arises because a public or official sanctioning of the everyday denigration and subjugation of the subordinated group reinforces that group's historically supported view that neither they nor their rights are protected and respected in society” (pp. 366–337). Richmond et al. (2012) have described trauma as “repetitive and enduring” (p. 47), akin to waves protractedly wearing away at the cliff face; the limbic system remains overactivated and at even the slightest sign of danger – real or misperceived – an acute stress response can be triggered (van Der Kolk, 2014). Onwuachi-Willig (2016), in their cultural trauma narrative framework, proposed three criteria that indicate the emergence of cultural trauma:

As politico-socio-cultural landscapes internationally are becoming increasingly legislatively hostile towards LGBTQIA+ people, the material-discursive effects destabilise and reopen survival scars. van Den Berg (2016) argues that “[queer people] need to produce their own representations of themselves and thus produce themselves as discursive subjects, who refuse to be the object of the dominant homophobic discourse and to be entrapped in the fabricated heterosexist ‘closet’” (p. 37). Our situating of Écriture (Homo) Sexualities within this article is aligned with the phenomenological intentionality and intersubjectivity of descriptive, embodied, critical hermeneutic phenomenography. It is a deliberate methodological imposition that we have chosen to dispel a Cartesian apparel and articulate the impactful presence of the emotional machinery of the margins to account for how contemporary LGBTQIA+ trauma is always emplaced and reactivated in the neurobiological underpinnings of being subjected to experiencing the social world in particular ways.

Approval to conduct this research was provided by the Victoria University Human Research Ethics Committee (VUHREC). Approval number: HRE23-154.