The new Yellow Brick Road: navigating the post-modern gay imaginary by the narrated migrant experiences of European gay men in the UK

This thesis examines the narrated migration experiences of European gay men who moved to the United Kingdom, exploring how identity, sexuality, culture, and political conditions intersect in their decisions to migrate and in their efforts to build a livable life. Rather than framing migration through economic or protection-based models, this research approaches gay migration as an affective and imaginative act, one shaped by the desire to be seen.

Guided by the metaphor of The Yellow Brick Road, inspired by The Wizard of Oz, this thesis interprets migration as a symbolic journey in which participants leave behind restrictive environments in search of spaces that promise freedom, belonging, and queer possibility. London frequently emerged as a kind of imagined queer refuge, an “Emerald City” shaped as much by media, pop culture, and language as by the political liberal wave that enabled EU mobility.

The study is grounded in a constructivist epistemology and adopts narrative inquiry as its methodology. Twenty semi-structured interviews were conducted with European gay men over the age of forty who migrated to the UK between the late 1990s and early 2000s. Their stories were analysed holistically, attending to the emotional, temporal, and symbolic layers through which participants made sense of becoming. The thesis is written in a reflexive voice that acknowledges my own positionality as a European gay migrant and the co-constructed nature of these narratives.

Findings reveal that migration was seldom motivated solely by economic opportunity or overt discrimination. Instead, participants were propelled by what I describe as a post-modern gay imaginary: a constellation of influences including British pop culture, MTV, queer-coded media, and the English language. These cultural references offered participants a vision of queer life that felt unavailable in their home countries and helped shape imagined futures in which they could exist more freely. London, in turn, became a site where these imaginaries could be explored, complicated, or re-authored through lived experience.

Building on these findings, this thesis advances Gay Migration Theory as an emerging theoretical framework that positions migration as a queer process of becoming, rather than a linear movement from oppression to freedom. Central to this theory is the concept of liberal waves: temporally bounded moments in which political reform, cultural visibility, and social acceptance converge to make gay migration both possible and imaginable. These waves shape not only who migrates and where, but when migration can be envisioned as a viable path toward a liveable life.

By integrating Queer Theory, narrative inquiry, and migration studies, this thesis addresses key gaps in existing literature, which continues to marginalise the cultural, emotional, and imaginative dimensions of mobility. It demonstrates that gay migration is not simply about crossing borders, but about navigating time, desire, and possibility. The Yellow Brick Road thus functions as both a metaphorical and methodological lens, offering a new way to understand queer migration as affective, and transformative.