Coming out for Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays: From support group grieving to love advocacy

Abstract

This article traces how a 1990s’ US social movement organization, PFLAG (Parents, Friends and Family of Lesbians and Gays) constitutes itself and its work by extending the story of coming out via particular emotional promises featured in its motivational framing. I trace how PFLAG’s motivational framing carefully balances a call to participate in terms of grief with a call to action in terms of love, thereby offering potential participants the ‘emotional promise’ of getting beyond negative feelings of homophobia to restore and celebrate the love for their offspring. I show how this motivational framing is tied to PFLAG’s dual mission of support and advocacy. Finally I discuss how these emotional framings are tied to two political logics resonating in LGBT movement work at the time, noting that love operates well to motivate an identity logic (‘supporting LGBT people’) but does not work as well to motivate an interest-group logic (‘fighting for LGBT equality’).