In this chapter I develop the case history of Devon, drawing on interviews that took place over a four-year period between the ages of 18 and 21 and a memory book. I first met Devon in 1997, when he participated in a focus group as part of the Youth Values study, held at a lesbian and gay youth group. His first interview took place in January 1999 as part of the Youth Values study. Subsequently he was interviewed in March 2000 and November 2001. After this chapter was written Devon was interviewed again, in February 2003, and an account of this interview is featured in Chapter Eight. This is the only case history in the book where I, the author, was also the interviewer, and this is discernible in the tone and depth of analysis presented. Each of the interviews took place in my office at the university.

In describing and interpreting Devon's successive accounts I focus on the process through which he becomes increasingly familiar with gay culture, the way he manages the boundaries between gay and straight life and the articulation of sexual, gender, class and ethnic dimensions within his identity. I am interested in understanding Devon as being part of the same generation as Sherleen and Stan, yet, as white, gay and working class, managing very particular forms of identity work. Devon left school without taking his GCSEs, some time before I first met him in 1998. When first interviewed, he was living in a shared house (a gay foster placement), working as an office junior and beginning to explore commercial gay culture. Over the course of the research his circumstances were relatively unsettled, and he moved between four different jobs and an extended period of unemployment, paralleled by movements between independent living and his parents’ home. Continuity during this period was provided by his involvement in a lesbian and gay youth group and the support of his family.

The case history is structured by the three fields of existence that I consider to be most important in Devon's evolving biography: family, work and play. These three arenas characterise each of his interviews in different ways, family being the dominant theme of the first, work and the boundaries between work and other parts of his life dominating the second, and play dominating the discussion in the third.