Queer Street Smarts (original) (raw)
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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.
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.
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This paper reports on a short-term ethnographic participatory action research project that engaged urban Canadian, street-involved "queer and questioning" youth in a multi-media enabled inquiry into peer housing and support needs. The "Pridehouse Project" (http://www.sfu.ca/pridehouse) was initiated by, and accountable to, a community-based housing support group. These responsibilities raised central critical questions about education, epis- temology, and ethics in identity-based,
Journal of Lgbt Youth, 2009
This study, focused on five transgender and gay youth of color from San Francisco, explored how family problems, poverty, homophobia, and transphobia propelled them into homelessness and made gay-friendly spaces and resources especially meaningful to them. These young people describe seeking support in San Francisco's well-known gay enclave, the Castro District, to form community and find safety from a homophobic and transphobic world. This study also explored difficulties these youth face as homeless LGBTQ young people of color navigating this neighborhood, which is widely considered a safe haven for LGBTQ people. In the Castro, they experienced invisibility, police and community harassment, sexualization, and commodification. Finally, this article examined how participation in a visible gay neighborhood contributed to their vulnerability yet offered marginally housed transgender and gay youth of color an important space to explore their identities.
Homelessness and Housing Experiences among LGBTQ Young Adults in Seven U.S. Cities
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Heterosexism refers to the systematic marginalization of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people and the structural favoring of heterosexual people and relationships (Ansara and Hegarty, 2012). Cisgenderism can be understood as the belief system that produces transphobia (Pyne, 2011). This prejudicial ideology delegitimizes the inherent knowledge people possess of their own genders and their own bodies (Ansara and Berger, 2016) and presumes that all people are cisgender. Black LGBTQ YA experiencing homelessness must also contend with systemic racism and its subsequent effects, such as racial profiling, police and community harassment, and racial microaggressions (Gattis and Larson, 2017). Of concern, youth-serving systems (that is, housing, healthcare, education, employment
Symbolic Interaction, 2018
The Gang's All Queer is an attempt to address both the assumption that gangs are a heterosexual phenomenon, and that our understanding of gangs is noticeably flawed. Panfil's study takes places in Columbus, Ohio; it draws upon ethnographic fieldwork and fifty-three in-depth interviews with gay gang and crime-involved men. Broken up into seven chapters, Panfil's (2017) ethnography is reminiscent of early ethnographies conducted at the University of Chicago. This study challenges hegemonic cultural tropes rooted in heteronormative world views that gay men are not involved in criminal or gang activity. More specifically, Panfil explores a range of different gangs which she characterizes based on the overall sexual orientation of the members (gay, straight, or hybrid/mixed). By exploring different types of gangs, her analysis provides valuable insights that challenge the very notion of what a "gang" is, all the while revealing how masculinity and sexuality are performed by the participants in the study. Thus, Panfil explores the identity work that participants engage in as they negotiate the boundaries of their race, masculinity, and gay identity. Thus, she achieves what many in this field mention but ultimately gloss over (see Humphreys 1972). This study's major strength lies in its ability to challenge existing criminological and sociological frameworks on gangs and LGBT+ persons. Existing frameworks homogenize gangs, criminal organizations, and LGBT+ persons, and strip them of their variability and agency. Panfil shows that our understanding of the term "gang" has been shaped by media accounts which provide us with a biased and limited understanding of such groups. Her work challenges such ideas by "discovering" the existence of gay gang members, and exploring the lived experience of various gangs which is far different from the media-produced stereotypes. Much of this ethnography is devoted toward gang members' preoccupation with earning prestige, both personally and collectively, as members try to adhere to the "code of the street" (see Anderson 1999). For gay members in straight gangs, this
LGBTQ Street Youth Doing Resistance in Infrapolitical Worlds
Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change, 2013
A misplaced gesture or a misspoken word can have terrible consequences. (James C. Scott, 1990, p. x) We are also other than what the hegemon makes us be. (Maria Lugones, 2010, p. 746) When feminist philosopher and popular educator Maria Lugones (2010) talks about a resistant sociality, I recognize this way of being in the world with others; one in which lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and queer (LGBTQ) street youth share with each other gossip and information about jobs, teachers, social workers, the police and their security guard agents.
LGBTQ Street Youth Doing Resistance Infrapolitical Worlds
A misplaced gesture or a misspoken word can have terrible consequences. (James C. Scott, 1990, p. x) We are also other than what the hegemon makes us be. (Maria Lugones, 2010, p. 746) When feminist philosopher and popular educator Maria Lugones (2010) talks about a resistant sociality, I recognize this way of being in the world with others; one in which lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) street youth share with each other gossip and information about jobs, teachers, social workers, the police, and their security guard agents. These spaces away from the scrutiny and examination of those in power, when queer street youth compare their experiences and analyze power, become locations of creativity and possibility. A resistant sociality also makes space for the queer youth to rest without harassment, smoke and laugh with friends, dress provocatively with new-found clothes, dance to publically taunt onlookers, but also dance to enjoy their own and each other's bodies. It allows youth to release the "muscular tension" (Fanon, 1963, p. 17) accrued from constant negotiations with teachers, police, and medical personnel. When I first began working with queer street youth, I didn't recognize the infrapolitics, the dissident offstage practices that resisted the everyday humiliations, degradations, and experiences of exclusion that make up the daily fabric of LGBTQ youth lives. The young people I worked with often hung out together outside of the gates of the schoolyard and in front of the youth drop-in center. I often saw young people assembled at the bus stop or standing together on the sidewalks smoking cigarettes, joking around, and talking loud with each