Balancing the Personal and the Public across Borders: How LGB Migrants Manage ‘Otherness’ in Different Institutional Contexts

Despite great advancements in the LGBT rights in the Western world, heterosexuality remains the predominant social norm in most societies. Those with non-normative gender and sexual identities are ‘othered’ in public representations and socio-institutional frameworks even within the EU, which formally promotes LGBT equality and advocates for full inclusion of same-sex families. The issues of LGBT rights and the families of same-sex partners remain divisive across Europe, which is simultaneously characterized by a growing number of countries legalizing same-sex marriage and those constitutionally banning it. Intra-European migrations of lesbian and gay individuals across such closely associated but different institutional and socio-cultural contexts expose in particular how personal lives of individuals are embedded in the political and the public. This paper focuses on these connections between private lives and public contexts by examining experiences collected through biographic narrative interviews with a particular group of LGB migrants in Belgium and the Netherlands – those who are coming from Central and Eastern European countries with a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, but who are now married or raise children with a same-sex partner. The analysis focuses on two research questions. First, it examines how the experience of migration has affected personal trajectories of LGB migrants. Second, it analyses how these migrants manage ‘otherness’ of sexual identity and non-normative family across different institutional and socio-cultural contexts in the same transnational field. The findings suggest that the migration functions as a watershed moment, altering not only personal trajectories, but also profoundly transforming everyday practices related to the management of the ‘othered’ identity in their receiving country. At the same time, transnational character of these migrants’ interactions also necessitates keeping a precarious balance of the personal information that is negotiated and communicated in the contact and visits with the family members and friends in home countries