New Perspectives on Language and Sexual Identity presents a range of new and exciting data to illustrate and explore aspects of the relationship between language and sexuality. Using data drawn from lesbian and gay conversations and narratives, reflections on coming out, representations of lesbians in film and erotic fiction, and representations of prominent gay men in newspaper reports, the book exemplifies some of the ways in which lesbians and gay men construct identity from among the symbolic resources available within lesbian and gay communities of practice. The book uses analytical techniques such as spoken discourse analysis, critical text analysis and corpus linguistics to uncover and investigate how sexual identities are discursively constructed across a range of real life contexts and text types.