Gay Men's Identity Negotiation Strategies within the Methodist Church of Southern Africa in Grahamstown, South Africa

This paper explores the experiences of gay men within the Methodist Church of Southern Africa in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Their experiences of the church are explored in relation to gay identity creation and negotiation in a religious environment. Six participants spoke about how they negotiate their intersecting sexual and religious identities. While adopting a qualitative approach utilising in-depth open narrative interviews to explore the stories of the research participants, this study applied Brekhus's theoretical model, which was later employed by Schnoor to classify and categorise gay men into ideal types of gay methodist lifestylers, gay methodist commuters and gay methodist integrators in order to analyse the participants' gay identity negotiation strategies within the MCSA church in Grahamstown.