Coming Out to the Streets

LGBTQ Youth Experiencing Homelessness

Brandon Andrew Robinson

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780520971073
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: LGBT-Studien

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 theLGBTQ 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.

1 Reframing Family Rejection

GROWING UP POOR AND LGBTQ

“My dad was getting his suspicions about me being gay. And he did threaten to kill me. He said, ‘I’m going to kill you, then I’m going to kill myself. Because I’d rather die, than people know that I have a faggot for a son.’ So, I took the initiative. I ran away at seventeen.” Prada, a twenty-three-year-old Hispanic heterosexual transgender woman, was discussing with me her life before experiencing homelessness. She said she grew up in Los Angeles, California, with her single father.¹ When she was sixteen years old, Prada—with the help of an aunt—was able to contact her mother, who lived in Laredo, Texas. “And I told [my mother], I really don’t want to be here anymore [with my father] because I’m scared for my life because I would have to act straight.” Prada used birthday money to travel to Laredo. Unfortunately, this arrangement did not last long, as her mother got into trouble with a drug dealer, who threatened their lives. “So, we just packed up what very little clothes that we had and took off—back to California,” Prada told me.

Back on the West Coast, Prada moved around, staying with grandparents and then with her aunt and uncle, who were pastors in Palm Springs. The aunt and uncle read Prada’s journal and found out that she had attraction toward men. Since Prada’s family perceived her as a boy, they interpreted this attraction toward men as a sign of homosexuality. Prada said her aunt asked her, “ ‘Is this true?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah. I’m not going to change who I am for anybody. I’d rather die before I change myself to please anybody.’ And then she’s like, ‘Well if you want to stay here, you can’t be doing that.’ I’m like, ‘Okay. Pay for my bus ticket. . . . Send me back to Laredo.’ ”

Back in Laredo, Prada could not get a hold of any family members. She began living on the streets and cycling in and out of shelters and transitional living programs before ending up in San Antonio at the shelter for LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness, where I interviewed her. Wearing punk-rock attire—an off-the-shoulder Hello Kitty shirt, cut-off jean shorts, and Converse shoes—Prada told me about her current relationship with her family. “They said I was a disgrace to the family name, and that I needed to change my name because they wanted nothing to do with me. Because they didn’t want a disgrace in their family, or an abomination as they call it now.”

THE FAMILY REJECTION PORTRAIT

In 2014, Rolling Stone published an article titled “The Forsaken: A Rising Number of Homeless Gay Teens Are Being Cast Out by Religious Families.”² The article explores the hardships of some LGBTQ youth who are forced to live on the streets and in shelters because their religious parents kicked them out after they came out. The Seattle Times ran a 2015 opinion piece with a similar narrative, “Young, Gay and Homeless: Why Some Parents Reject Their Children,” and in 2017, Slate published “Family Rejection Leaves Too Many Transgender Americans Homeless.”³ This predominant framing depicts family rejection as the cause of LGBTQ youth homelessness.

As Prada’s story shows, family rejection plays an integral part in the lived experiences of many LGBTQ youth who come to experience homelessness. Prada ran away from her father, and later, from other family members who refused to accept her as she was. According to a 2005 study, 73 percent of gay and lesbian and 26 percent of bisexual youth experiencing homelessness report that parental disapproval of their sexual orientation was what led them to their current situation.⁴ A 2012 study found that service providers who worked with LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness report that 68 percent of the youth—whom the providers worked with—ran away or their families kicked them out because of the young person’s sexuality and/or gender identity.⁵

But family rejection represents only a piece of the story. Prada grew up with a single father in an unstable environment in a society that does not provide enough resources for families suffering economic hardship. She also had to contend with a father who was intent on raising his Brown child to “act straight.” Because Prada had to navigate the class and racial inequalities of US society, her father’s gender-policing strategies may have been rooted in trying to protect her from further discrimination. But these gendered child-rearing strategies only served as points of conflict within the home, as Prada resisted them.

In effect, the portrait of family rejection obscures how poverty and economic instability shape the ways marginalized families—often families of color—negotiate practices around gender and sexuality within their households. This overarching rejection narrative also overshadows how reactions to a child’s gender expression and assumed homosexuality (often more so than an LGBTQ identity) shape familial strain and conflict, and it frames youth as passive victims kicked to the curb.

This chapter reframes this rejection portrait and demonstrates how the oversimplified rejection paradigm erases the complexities of the youth’s lives. This reframing also challenges the narrative that puts too much blame and burden on the families of the youth and highlights how society and other institutions also maintain and enforce heteronormativity and the gender binary. Family rejection is a factor, but it exists in the intersections of systems of oppression in relation to poverty and racial inequality.

Furthermore, because poor Black and Brown youth disproportionately make up LGBTQ youth homelessness populations, this family rejection paradigm greases the slippery slope of depicting poor families and/or families of color as more prejudiced than middle-class, white families.⁶ The rejection paradigm does not allow us to see how class and racial inequalities shape how poor LGBTQ youth—mainly poor Black and Brown LGBTQ youth—say they negotiate and navigate gender and sexuality within their familial contexts. The rejection narrative also simplifies how experiencing homelessness often entails a long process, born out of intergenerational poverty, and how the marginalization associated with poverty reproduces social inequalities across generations. Instead, the family rejection narrative paints a picture that says homelessness and going to the streets happen overnight. Many structural inequalities, however, come into play, and these inequalities unfold over time, generating familial strain and loosening the ties that bind youth to their families.⁷

In reframing this rejection portrait, I document the meanings and contexts underlying the familial rejection of the LGBTQ youth in this study. I outline how processes around poverty, gender, sexuality, and race shaped the youth’s experiences of family rejection. I also foreground how the policing of the youth’s expansive expressions of gender constituted a salient part of the tension and conflict within the family. I show how families often rejected the youth because of their expansive expressions of gender and its association with homosexuality and how poverty and racial in-equality exacerbated this rejection. In chronicling the youth’s complex familial stories, this chapter serves as a class-based analysis to examine how poor LGBTQ youth—mainly poor Black and Brown LGBTQ youth—said they negotiated and navigated gender and sexuality within their families. The chapter also shows how policing gender and sexuality, along with racial and class inequalities, formed the youth’s pathways into homelessness, particularly in relation to how policing the child’s gender and sexuality related to experiences of familial abuse and strain.

POVERTY, INSTABILITY, AND INTERSECTIONALITY

Obadiah, a twenty-year-old white man who dates transgender women, often wore ball caps and cowboy boots whenever I would see him at the LGBTQ shelter. “I used to go to school with bruises all over me when I was little,” he stated. “And my mom was a drug addict.” Obadiah continued to tell me about his childhood experiences as we sat together on his bottom bunk at the shelter. “And I remember when I was little, me and my brothers had to literally frickin’ take off the door knobs to the restroom—took it apart—and we found her in there shooting up with this guy, when my dad was in jail.” He went on, “[My father] was always an alcoholic. He spent more times at bars than anything.” At eight years old, Obadiah went into Child Protective Services (CPS) custody. He spent the next ten years bouncing around CPS placements, until he “aged out.”⁸ He then lived in his grandfather’s shed for a year, before moving to the shelter in San Antonio for LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness.

In this section, I show how poverty and instability upset the lives of the youth in this study and underlie the processes of experiencing homelessness. Obadiah’s story offers a glimpse into the instabilities that all youth described in talking about their childhoods. Not a single youth in this study reported living in a stable environment. Most youth detailed growing up in poverty, and how poverty goes hand in hand with instability. For many youth, this instability includes parental romantic transitions, residential movement, changing schools, the incarceration of a parent, the fracturing of social ties, and other major stressors that accumulate across a child’s life.⁹ Poverty and instability—two sides of the same coin—have devastating consequences for families, generating stress, depression, and other mental health challenges, as well as drug and alcohol use, familial conflict and abuse, strained familial ties, and other disrupting family dynamics.¹⁰

Rather than providing enough support services, the state often punishes poor families. One punishment involves taking their children away. In a study of court cases, researchers found that state child custody agencies remove children from their families for “reasons of poverty.” As the researchers documented, economic hardship resulted in state child custody agencies removing children from the home.¹¹ This removal from the home exacerbates strained familial ties. Obadiah said state child custody workers did not place him with his siblings; consequently, he did not see his siblings for years. As youth move through various foster homes and other CPS placements, they struggle to maintain contact with family members. In the next chapter, I also show how state child custody systems further the processes of rejection and instability for LGBTQ youth.

Some youth in this study also grew up experiencing familial homelessness. Jenna, an eighteen-year-old white bisexual youth, talked to me about her experiences of homelessness as a child. She told me that her dad “was always kind of abusive toward my mom,” and over time, “the fights got worse and worse and worse.” Her dad eventually left the family, Jenna explained, “and [my mom, my siblings, and I] were left with no money—nothing like that. And my mom needed support for being a victim of this violence for nineteen years. So, we found a domestic violence shelter. And we went there.” Jenna said her family then moved around a lot. “[My mom] would honestly get churches to pay for like hotel rooms and stuff like that—when we were in between houses. She would try to find jobs. But it’s hard with little experience,” she stated. “[My mom] gets food stamps, though, so that’s pretty much how we got food. And the hotel, the electricity and water never get cut off, so that’s fine. But it’s hard because I have four younger siblings, and we were staying in one hotel room.”

Poverty and homelessness often afflict people across generations. Several youth in this study, like Jenna, discussed experiencing homelessness with their families before experiencing it on their own. In an Australian study, almost half of the people who received homelessness assistance reported having parents who also experienced homelessness.¹² In the United States, poverty and instability also pass down through generations. Childhood adversity, often also associated with poverty and instability, links to homelessness as well.¹³ Like many women experiencing homelessness, Jenna’s mom had fled a domestic violence situation and, without safety nets, had to rely on shelters and churches to help support her family. Jenna eventually moved on her own to a transitional living program in Austin.

For most youth in this study, these experiences of poverty and instability also intersected with their experiences as youth of color, as well as explicitly with people rejecting them because of their sexuality, gender identity, and gender expression. Justice was an eighteen-year-old Black “glamazon,” “diva,” heterosexual transgender woman whom I met at the same shelter as Prada and Obadiah.¹⁴ Sitting outside on a curb with me, Justice said her grandparents raised her “because they didn’t think my mom was suitable for the job.” She said she “felt safe and secure [with my grandparents], where I didn’t have to move around or anything.” After her grandparents’ deaths, Justice—at age eleven—went to live with her mother. Justice told me, “I don’t really have any family now. My relationship with my mom—it was always kind of rocky—up until I got to be like fourteen, when she got a new boyfriend. And then, I guess, her boyfriend didn’t really like Black people—me being half Black, half white kind of bothered him, especially because I was his girlfriend’s daughter.” The boyfriend’s racism intersected with other forms of prejudice as well. Justice added, “And he didn’t like the fact that I was trans. He thought that faggots were going to hell—quote quote. So, he was just a very ignorant, ignorant man. He caused a lot of friction between me and my mom’s relationship—a lot of the depression and stuff I was going through.” At fifteen years of age, Justice went into CPS custody until she was eighteen, at which point she lived on the streets of San Antonio until the shelter for LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness opened.

Research shows that youth experiencing homelessness come from backgrounds of poverty and instability.¹⁵ These experiences generate strained family ties between parents and their children, and youth often leave or are pushed out of families that have little to hold them.¹⁶ Curiously, the lives of LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness do not get situated within this literature. The family rejection paradigm does not talk about poverty and instability as part of the LGBTQ youth’s familial lives. At the same time, the work on youth homelessness, poverty, and family instability does not fully account for why poor Black and Brown LGBTQ youth disproportionately experience homelessness. Partly, this gap occurs because the work does not document how race, sexuality, and gender, including gender identity and expression, interconnect with experiences of poverty, instability, and strained familial ties.

Justice, for example, had a secure life until her grandparents died, which she said then pushed her into a situation of instability and hostility in the home. Justice had a strained relationship with her mom even before her mom’s boyfriend generated further tension and conflict with his racism and use of homophobic slurs. Unlike white gay and bisexual men, who often experience violence and/or homophobia as an attack on only their sexuality, white lesbians and bisexual women often experience violence as an attack on their sexuality and gender, and LGBTQ people of color often experience violence directed at multiple aspects of their identity.¹⁷ These compounding discriminatory experiences not only strained Justice’s relationship with her mother, but also generated some of her mental health challenges. As the intersections of one’s social positions shape experiences of poverty, instability, and familial strain, youth of color, non-heterosexual youth, and/or transgender and gender-expansive youth often have harsher experiences of poverty, instability, and familial strain.

GENDER EXPRESSION AND FAMILIAL CONFLICT

One main source of conflict and strain for the youth in this study was the parents’ negative reactions to their child’s expansive expressions of gender. These reactions related to policing the youth’s assumed non-heterosexuality. “She’s racist. She doesn’t like Black people. She doesn’t like gay people. She definitely doesn’t like transgender people,” Adelpha empathically stated to me in talking ab...