(Un)Veiling Sexual Identities: Plays, Characters and Language in 21st Century British Drama

This study, situated within the field of Language and Sexuality Studies, investigates the characterisation of fictional gay men in 21st-century British drama. The research is based on a corpus of 61 plays, staged between 2000 and 2020, which collectively feature 187 gay male characters. The study employs methodological triangulation to explore the corpus from three distinct perspectives, moving from broad trends to more detailed analyses. The first section offers an overview of 20th and 21st-century British drama featuring gay characters, identifying general trends in the portrayal of homosexuality in contemporary British theatre. The second section delves into the 187 fictional gay characters, classifying them according to both sociolinguistic variables (such as age, social class, and linguistic variety) and variables specific to Language and Sexuality Studies (including levels of openness about their sexuality and their distinctive use of “gayspeak”). The final section takes an eclectic approach, providing a multifaceted analysis of the “gayspeak” observed in the corpus. This is done through both manual analysis and a corpus-assisted approach using #Lancsbox software […]