Sexual stories go to Westminster: narratives of sexual citizens/outsiders in Britain

'Sexual citizenship' is relatively a new term, which emerged in recent decades with gay and lesbian demands for 'equal rights' with heterosexuals. Rather than taking the concept of sexual citizenship as given, this thesis investigates the conditions of its emergence and the process of its making by focusing on 'stories' offabout homosexuals or hoinosexualities, which have been circulated, debated and represented in the British parliament. I analyse these stories at three different moments in time: during debates on the Sexual Offences Act in the 1960s;Section 28 of the Local Government Act in the 1980s; and the Civil Partnership Act in the 2000s. In particular, I explore the gradual coming-out ofwhat Scott calls, 'the evidence of experience' in the debates, which, in the form of personal stories, has become an important way of (re)presenting/relating evidence of the 'truth' of homosexual identities, linked in turn to the idea of their rights/ rightness. A number of questions guide my inquiry. What are the conditions upon which a (sexual) story's access to the political arena is authorised (or rejected)? Who tells stories or whose stories are told? What 'problems' do stories recount? How are personal sexual stories publicly represented and contested in parliament? What moral and political effects do these stories have on political claims about sexual rights and responsibilities? In addressing these questions, I explore the complexity of stories' journey from personal to political in the sexual citizenship making process, which entails not just a transition from non-recognition to recognition, but also a process of exclusion and misappropriation whereby stories, in the process of becoming public narrative, are often rigidified and formalised, producing stereotypical/fixed 'facts' and 'moral' points. In analysing this problematic process by which sexual stories enter into a public and national political domain, and make their case for the recognition of sexual rights in Britain, I hope to shed light on the more general question of what it means to be a recognised (or recognisable) sexual citizen in contemporary Britain.