Bad Queers: The Institutional Production of LGBTQ Youth Homelessness (original) (raw)

Outed and outside: the lives of LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness

Around 2 million youth experience homelessness each year, and LGBTQ youth are estimated to make up at least 40 percent of the population of youth experiencing homelessness in the United States, despite being about 5-8 percent of the U.S. youth population. Based upon an 18-month, multi-site ethnographic study and 50 in-depth interviews, this dissertation turns to LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness to document the youth’s views on life before experiencing homelessness as well as their current needs and challenges while navigating the streets and shelters. In this project, I foreground how gender non-conformity and its intersections with sexuality, race, and poverty are the tapestry weaving through many of the young people’s stories and how they understand their experiences of homelessness. I show how the family and other institutions (i.e., schools, child welfare systems, religious communities, and the criminal legal system) discipline, punish, and criminalize the youth’s gender non-conforming presentation and behaviors. The abuse and punishment within these institutions were often linked to the youth’s perceived pathways into homelessness later in life. Once experiencing homelessness, the gender non-conforming LGBTQ youth often faced challenges on the streets because of their ix gender presentation and behaviors, but the LGBTQ youth felt protected and accepted for their gender non-conformity within a specific LGBTQ shelter. At the same time, sexuality was a resource on the streets, but sexuality was regulated in the shelter to the point that many youth at the shelter often got suspended for violating shelter rules. This gender and sexuality paradox kept the youth in this study cycling between the streets and the shelter, but not achieving and maintaining housing stability. Ultimately, this dissertation proffers a new understanding of homelessness and how gender and sexuality shape experiences of poverty and being a poor young LGBTQ person. I contend that as homelessness is about a cultural and moral status position in society, and hence, is about the devaluation of certain lives, then LGBTQ youth homelessness is about demeaning and demoralizing certain gender non-conforming poor LGBTQ youth, especially youth of color, as unworthy and unprotected by society.

Messy, Butch, and Queer LGBTQ Youth and the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Emerging evidence suggests that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth experience disparate treatment in schools that may result in criminal sanctions. In an effort to understand the pathways that push youth out of schools, we conducted focus groups with youth (n = 31) from Arizona, California, and Georgia, and we interviewed adult advocates from across the United States (n = 19). Independent coders used MAXQDA to organize and code data. We found that LGBTQ youth are punished for public displays of affection and violating gender norms. Youth often experience a hostile school climate, may fight to protect themselves, and are frequently blamed for their own victimization. Family rejection and homelessness facilitate entry in the school-to-prison pipeline. Narratives highlight new opportunities to challenge inequity in schools.

Coming Out to the Streets: LGBTQ Youth Experiencing Homelessness

Coming Out to the Streets: LGBTQ Youth Experiencing Homelessness, 2020

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth are disproportionately represented in the U.S. youth homelessness population. In Coming Out to the Streets, Brandon Andrew Robinson examines their lives. Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in central Texas, Coming Out to the Streets looks into the LGBTQ youth's lives before they experience homelessness—within their families, schools, and other institutions—and later when they navigate the streets, deal with police, and access shelters and other services. Through this documentation, Brandon Andrew Robinson shows how poverty and racial inequality shape the ways that the LGBTQ youth negotiate their gender and sexuality before and while they are experiencing homelessness. To address LGBTQ youth homelessness, Robinson contends that solutions must move beyond blaming families for rejecting their child. In highlighting the voices of the LGBTQ youth, Robinson calls for queer and trans liberation through systemic change.

The Whiteness of Gay Urban Belonging: Criminalizing LGBTQ Youth of Color in Queer Spaces of Care

Chicago’s gay village of Boystown has long been linked with whiteness, and in the past decade, tensions have flared between neighborhood residents and queer and transgender (trans) youth of color, often homeless, who come to Boystown for the many services provided by its lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) nonprofit organizations, or queer spaces of care. While scholars have attended to community policing in Boystown through the Take Back Boystown movement, the role of LGBTQ nonprofits has yet to be examined in their role of criminalizing queer and trans youth of color in the neighborhood. Through an autoethnographic approach, this paper explores how several nonprofit organizations in Boystown have adopted policing strategies toward the queer and trans youth of color they serve. I argue that community policing has infiltrated these organizations to further defend and maintain an exclusive gay urban space informed by whiteness, which marks and regulates young, Black masculinities and trans femininities as deviant, untrustworthy, and criminal. Racism diminishes the ability for queer spaces of care to fulfill their mandates of supporting queer and trans youth of color, rendering the neighborhood a space of surveillance and furthering a White gay urban belonging that alienates and criminalizes these youth.

Youth in Crisis: Recognizing Homelessness in the LGBTQ Community

This paper will address the importance of recognizing the large number of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning /Queer (" LGBTQ ") identifying youth who are at-risk, or less likely to transition successfully into adulthood and become financially independent. More specifically, this paper focuses on homeless LGBTQ youth. It will shed light on community centers and other groups that are advocating for LGBTQ rights, will inform readers of possible housing solutions for LGBTQ youth such as LGBTQ specialized housing, and will give an overview of programs that are aimed at ensuring that youth are safe in their own homes. I will also touch upon a few alternatives that are in the process of being created, such as LGBTQ training for foster families and host families. My main goal in this paper is to describe the importance of supporting the LGBTQ youth community, to urge organizations to complete LGBTQ 101 training to ensure their missions are LGBTQ friendly, and reveal systems that are working to keep LGBTQ youth off the streets and defend them from possible harassment, abuse, and discrimination.

"It's not fiction, it's my life": LGBTQ+ youth of color and kinships in an urban school

Theory into practice, 2020

This article argues that chosen family structures are critical for LGBTQ+ youth of color. Further, it articulates the inherent sense of agency that is found in choosing a family-something that not only shapes young ways of being, knowing, and doing but impacts their ability to resist toxic cultural norms that all too often position students for the school-to-prison and school-to-coffin pipelines. Finally, this article argues that schools should attend more closely to chosen family structures and find ways to include them in school culture to better sustain students, classrooms, and communities of color. Davonte 1 : When I came out, I lost my family. Seriously, I lost them. I was kicked out. I had to build a new family. It was sad but also kind of cool because I got to pick the people who love me.