Research
Research Philosophy
Over the past three years my research has focused on completing my dissertation, tentatively titled The Red Spectrum: Gay Men on the Right, which I completed this Fall. This project specifically looks at the historical permutations and organizational structure of three right-wing gay organizations, although it is situated within a larger socio-historical context around conservative social movements, masculinity, and nationalism. My broader areas of scholarly expertise include: collective behavior and social movements; gender, sex, and sexuality; race and ethnicity; nationalisms; sociological theory; feminist theory and research; and both historical and field methods.
Boots & Suits: Gay Men on the Right
My central research agenda is transforming my dissertation on gay men’s participation in right-wing social movements into a monograph that pairs historical, archival data with contemporary interviews with the men who make up the gay right today. In doing so, I hope to bring together organizational and frame analysis into conversation with the worldbuilding of right-wing gay men.
Gay Neo-Nazis in the United States
Victimhood, Masculinity, and the Public/Private Spheres
Scholars often describe the heteropatriarchal relationships that prop up fascist political ideologies and practices. This emphasis is rooted in counter-reading other historical texts, which often conflate homosexuality and fascism as (1) one and the same or (2) linearly related along a spectrum, between the “moral degeneracy” of homosexuality and the atrocities produced by fascist regimes. These traditional models fail to describe the National Socialist League (NSL), a US neo-Nazi organization operating from 1974 until the late 1980s, which was explicitly structured to incorporate and include gay men into the white supremacist and fascist far right. By exploring how the NSL situated itself within the broader US fascist movement, this article examines how public-private distinction, whiteness, and hegemonic scripts of masculinity shaped NSL recruitment. These mechanisms provide discursive space for white gay men to position themselves as responsible citizens and important actors within the cultural, social, and military mechanisms of an imagined fascist state. Confronting this political and historical reality is critical to understanding the neo-fascist political configurations that incorporate white gay men that we see today.
Buchanan, Blu. 2022. “Gay Neo-Nazis in the United States: Victimhood, Masculinity, and the Public/Private Spheres.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 28(4) DOI 10.1215/10642684-9991299
Community-Oriented Research
B. Trans Oral History Project
The B.Trans Oral History Project is a collaboration between the Black trans community and its scholars. Our goal is to compile and transcribe Black trans oral histories, to understand the life course and strategies of Black trans life in the United States. One of the latest facets of this project has been creating an interactive map of the trans deaths across the U.S. in order to remember those we’ve lost, learn from the patterns of violence, and end trans antagonism. This project is beginning in California, but is expected to branch out to communities across the United States.