Mapping Queer Futures: Life Calendaring as a Method for Studying Human Security
Article information
Cleofas, J. V. (2024). Life calendaring as a qualitative strategy to examine human security among queer emerging adult men: a pilot study. Frontiers in Sociology, 9, 1322032. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2024.1322032
What this article is about
This article is both a methodological paper and a pilot study. It introduces life calendaring as a way to study how queer emerging adult men make sense of their security in life. The study focuses on emerging adulthood, usually understood as the life stage between adolescence and full adulthood, when people are navigating work, relationships, identity, independence, and future planning.
The article argues that this life stage is often marked by uncertainty. Young adults are trying to build careers, become financially independent, form relationships, and imagine who they want to become. These questions can be even more complicated for queer people because sexuality may shape their access to family support, safety, dignity, work, healthcare, intimate relationships, and future possibilities.
The key question is: How can researchers study not only what queer young adults are experiencing now, but also how they imagine their future security?
The main concept: human security
The article uses the human security approach. Unlike traditional security thinking, which often focuses on national borders, military threats, or state protection, human security focuses on the everyday safety, dignity, and well-being of persons. It asks whether people are free from fear, free from want, and free to live with dignity.
For queer emerging adults, human security may include many things: being safe from violence, being accepted by family, having a stable job, accessing healthcare, building intimate relationships, avoiding stigma, and imagining a future where one can live openly and with dignity.
The article is important because it connects human security with sexuality. It reminds us that queer people’s sense of security is not only about income or physical safety. It is also about whether they can love, desire, disclose, marry, migrate, age, and belong without fear.
What is life calendaring?
Life calendaring is the method proposed in this article. It uses a visual timeline or table during an interview to help participants map their present and future lives. It combines two earlier methods: the life history calendar, which helps people recall past and present life events, and the future life map, which helps people imagine goals, possibilities, and future pathways.
In this study, participants were asked to reflect on their present life and then imagine their future in later life stages: their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond. They identified positive experiences that supported security and negative experiences or threats that undermined security.
Figure 1 in the article shows the life calendar visual aid used in the interviews. It was a word-processor table that guided participants to think across life stages and classify experiences as positive or negative. The researcher filled the cells with keywords and phrases during the session, then confirmed the entries with the participants.
What the researcher did
The article reports early insights from an ongoing qualitative project. Three Filipino queer emerging adult men participated in life-calendaring-aided interviews. They were recruited through online invitations and referrals, and each interview was conducted through Zoom for about two hours.
The interview began with broad questions: What is a secure life? How secure is your current life as an emerging adult? How does being gay, bisexual, or queer shape your life security? After this, participants completed the life calendar, describing their current stage and imagining possible futures.
Figure 2 combines the life calendars of the three participants: Socrates, Carlo, and Dudley. The figure visually summarizes how each participant mapped security and insecurity across present and future life stages.
What the study shows
1) A secure life is economic, relational, sexual, and political
Across the three cases, security included financial stability, career success, intimate relationships, family support, health, recreation, travel, and political conditions. The article highlights that participants did not define security narrowly. For them, a secure life was not only about having money. It was also about being able to love, travel, work, age, and live without fear.
This matters because many policy discussions reduce young adults’ well-being to employment or education. This article shows that for queer emerging adults, security is wider and more embodied. It includes sexuality, dignity, and future belonging.
2) Family acceptance can make the future feel more secure
One participant, Socrates, imagined security through two possible futures: migration to the United States or staying in the Philippines. His present security was strengthened by having a partner, an accepting family, an inclusive workplace, and the ability to act on his sexual desires. But he also worried about financial limits, health concerns, sexually transmitted infections, and the political climate.
His story shows how family acceptance and workplace inclusion can make queer adulthood feel more livable. Even when he imagined difficulties, he could still picture a future with intimacy, financial stability, and connection to family.
3) Concealment can become a strategy for security
Carlo’s case shows a different story. He was bisexual, in a relationship with another man, and living away from a highly religious family. For him, security partly meant keeping his sexuality hidden to avoid being rejected or disowned.
This is one of the most important insights of the article: for some queer people, “security” may not mean openness. It may mean concealment. Hiding can be painful, but it can also be a survival strategy when family rejection is likely.
Carlo imagined a more secure future outside the Philippines, particularly in a country where he could legally marry his partner and live farther from family surveillance. His case shows how sexuality, religion, migration, and legal recognition can shape queer future-making.
4) Queer futures may not always follow linear identity narratives
Dudley’s case complicates simple assumptions about sexuality. Although he was sexually active with men in the present, he imagined a future where he would eventually have a heterosexual relationship, marry a woman, and form a nuclear family.
This does not make his experience less important or less queer. Rather, it shows that sexual identity, desire, and future plans can be fluid, conflicted, or shaped by social expectations. His idea of security included financial independence, emotional support, self-love, schooling, friendships, civic engagement, and later family life.
5) Politics and migration appeared as part of queer security
All three participants mentioned the political environment as a negative factor in their lives, and all imagined the possibility of a more secure life outside the Philippines. The article interprets this as a sign that queer human security is shaped not only by personal coping but also by national conditions, including the absence or presence of legal and social protection.
This is a strong social development point. If queer people imagine leaving the country to access dignity, marriage, safety, or acceptance, then insecurity is not only personal. It is structural.
Bottom line
This article shows that life calendaring is useful because it makes time visible. It helps participants map how present conditions shape imagined futures. For queer emerging adult men, it reveals how security is built from many life domains: economic stability, sexuality, intimacy, health, family, recreation, politics, migration, and aging.
The method is especially valuable because it does not treat queer life as only a story of risk or trauma. It also captures hope, aspiration, desire, planning, and imagined futures.
Policy/practice recommendations
- Use life calendaring in youth and LGBTQ+ research
Researchers can use life calendaring to understand how young people connect present struggles with future hopes, fears, and decisions. - Treat queer security as multidimensional
Programs for LGBTQ+ youth should address not only mental health or discrimination, but also housing, employment, family support, sexual health, legal protection, migration desires, and future planning. - Include future-making in counseling and social services
Counselors, social workers, and youth workers can invite queer young adults to discuss what a secure future looks like and what threats make that future difficult. - Recognize concealment as both risk and survival
For some queer youth, hiding sexuality is not simply “lack of pride.” It may be a strategy for staying safe in family or religious contexts. - Strengthen family and community acceptance
Family support can shape whether queer young adults imagine a future with belonging or a future of escape. - Link LGBTQ+ well-being to policy protection
When young queer people imagine security abroad, it signals local gaps in rights, social protection, and dignity. Legal and institutional reforms matter for everyday life.
Glossary of key terms
- Life calendaring — A qualitative method where participants use a visual calendar or timeline to map present experiences and imagined future life stages.
- Human security — A people-centered approach to security focused on freedom from fear, freedom from want, and freedom to live with dignity.
- Emerging adulthood — The life stage between adolescence and full adulthood, often marked by identity exploration, instability, career planning, relationship formation, and increasing independence.
- Queer emerging adult men — Young adult men whose sexual identities or desires fall outside heterosexual norms, including gay, bisexual, and queer men.
- Freedom from fear — A human security dimension referring to protection from violence, harm, threat, stigma, or rejection.
- Freedom from want — A human security dimension referring to access to basic needs such as income, work, food, housing, healthcare, and education.
- Freedom to live with dignity — A human security dimension referring to recognition, rights, respect, inclusion, and the ability to live meaningfully.
- Life history calendar — A research tool that helps participants recall past and present life events using a calendar or timeline structure.
- Future life map — A visual method that helps participants imagine possible future pathways, goals, risks, and opportunities.
- Present life — In this study, the period around the participant’s current emerging adulthood stage, including recent past and near future.
- Projected life — The imagined future across later life stages, such as one’s 30s, 40s, 50s, and old age.
- Concealment as security — A situation where hiding one’s sexuality becomes a strategy to avoid family rejection, stigma, or harm.
- Sexual fluidity — The possibility that sexual desires, identities, or relationship plans may shift or be understood differently across time.
- Queering human security — Reframing human security so that sexuality, gender, intimacy, dignity, and queer futures are treated as central to well-being and development.
Comments
Post a Comment