Beyond Family Rejection: Gender, Sexuality, and Family Instability in the Lives of LGBTQ Homeless Youth

• In Event: 116 - Section on Children and Youth Paper Session. Family and Relationship Stability and Its Effects on Children & Youth

Abstract

Most research on LGBTQ homeless youth has focused on family rejection as the main pathway into homelessness for the youth. In conducting the first qualitative study of LGBTQ homeless youth in Texas, I qualitatively complicate this picture of family rejection by situating this narrative into the larger story of family instability. I turn to the extreme case of LGBTQ homeless youth to uncover how gender and sexuality operates for some LGBTQ youth within family disorganization. I reveal that LGBTQ homeless youth have experienced economic hardship, parental marital transitions, residential movement, disruption in family routines, and other negative life events, especially death of a family member and sexual abuse. I also argue that the mechanism creating the disproportionate number of homeless youth to be LGBTQ is how heteronormativity and homonormativity operates within family instability. Working-class and poor families, who are already constrained by so many structures in society, may find that a non-heterosexual and/or non-gender conforming child adds more instability to the family and adds fear that the child will not succeed. As a result, the threat or the act of kicking a child out for being LGBTQ may be a form of heterosexual compliance in trying to discipline the child to not be non-heterosexual and/or non-gender non-conforming. I propose a renewed investment in all families through welfare polices and social safety nets along side of LGBTQ education and challenging heteronormativity as solutions to preventing LGBTQ youth homelessness.

Author

• Brandon Andrew Robinson, University of Texas - Austin