“I’m Just a Dude Who Is Into Guys”: Identity and the negotiation of competing master narratives of gender and sexuality among young German Gay men

Young gay men draw on normative conceptions of ‘good sexuality’ to construct narratives of sexual identity development. Critical frameworks such as hegemonic masculinity highlight the normative constraints shaping sexual identity development, but do not easily account for how these become internalized. By employing a master narrative framework, we were able to trace the processes through which hegemonic masculinities and competing discourses shape individual sexual identities. The developmental narratives of eight gay German men (18-24 years old) were analyzed. Our analysis revealed that participants actively negotiated, creatively tweaked, and at times resisted dominant discourses of gender and sexuality, resulting in diversity in their personalized sexual identities. Furthermore, the narratives indicated that identity development was accompanied by an increased sense of agency in navigating normative expectations in everyday life, even as agency remained constrained by systemic power structures. Our findings underscored the heterogeneity of sexual identity among gay men and revealed a persistent tension between individual agency and normative constraints, advancing our understanding of identity formation as a hybrid process of content internalization and narrative negotiation.