Choreographies of sexual safety and liminality: Forensic mental health and the limits of recovery.

Medium secure forensic psychiatric units are unique environments within the broader "post asylum" landscape of mental health services. Length of stay is much greater and restrictions on behavior, including sexual behavior, are legally and institutionally legitimated, due to concerns regarding risk. As a result, sexuality is rarely explored experientially with service users and no official policies on sexual conduct and sexual safety have yet been developed.

Sexuality, risk, and organisational misbehaviour in a secure mental healthcare facility in England.

Sexuality in secure mental healthcare has been overlooked in both clinical praxis and academic research. In the UK, there exist no formal policies to inform staff approaches to managing inpatient sexuality. The limited research that has been undertaken in this field has found that often, prohibitive approaches are favoured, which may affect how inpatients conceptualise and experience their sexuality in the long-term. The aim of this study was to identify discursive constructions of inpatient sexuality, as articulated in semi-structured group interviews with inpatients and ward staff from a secure mental healthcare facility in England. The analysis identified constructions of inpatient sexuality within two overarching and conflicting discourses: one of the normalcy and legitimacy of sexual expression in human experience; and the other of risk, wherein sexuality needed to be regulated and obstructed. Inpatients' expressions of sexuality could often only be conceptualised in terms of 'organisational misbehaviour', acts that violated the implicit norms and codes of the institution. It is suggested that recoding inpatient sexuality as misbehaviour could have implications for inpatients' long-term recovery.

Conducting sexualities research: an outline of emergent issues and case studies from ten Wellcome-funded projects.

This letter seeks to synthesise methodological challenges encountered in a cohort of Wellcome Trust-funded research projects focusing on sexualities and health. The ten Wellcome Trust projects span a diversity of gender and sexual orientations and identities, settings; institutional and non-institutional contexts, lifecourse stages, and explore a range of health-related interventions.  As researchers, we originate from a breadth of disciplinary traditions, use a variety of research methods and data sources. Despite this breadth, four common themes are found across the projects: (i) inclusivity, representations and representativeness, (ii) lumping together of diverse groups, (iii) institutions and closed settings (iv) ethical and governance barriers.

"It Takes a Man to Put Me on the Bottom": Gay Men's Experiences of Masculinity and Anal Intercourse.

In anal intercourse between gay men, men who are typically insertive ("tops") are often perceived as, and may identify as, more masculine than those who are typically receptive ("bottoms"). "Versatile" men, who may adopt either position, may be perceived as more gender balanced and may transcend the gender-role stereotypes associated with self-labeling as top or bottom. The aim of this study was to explore how gay men's beliefs about masculinity were associated with their beliefs about the gendered nature of sexual self-labels and their behavior in anal intercourse. Individual semistructured interviews were undertaken with 17 UK-based gay men. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) identified that perceptions of tops and bottoms as gendered social identities varied depending on the extent to which gay men subscribed to the mandates of hegemonic masculinity, the dominant masculinity in Western society. The findings also suggested that some gay men differentiated between top and bottom as social identities and topping and bottoming as gendered behaviors. This had implications for gay men's behaviors in anal intercourse. It is suggested that future efforts to engage with gay men about their sexual behavior should account for their beliefs regarding the gender-role stereotypes associated with gay sexual self-labels.