Sex Panics and LGBT Youth Homelessness

• In Event: Sex Negativities: The Discursive and Institutional Life of Sexual Violence

Abstract

Sex panics detrimentally fall on marginalized people. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I trace how sex panics shape perceived pathways into homelessness for some LGBTQ youth and how sex panics perpetuate their experiences of homelessness. These sex panics contribute to the marginalization of LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness – all of whom are poor, most of whom are black or brown, and many of whom are gender expansive or transgender. As I show, families rely on sex panics, such as linking their child’s non-heterosexuality to HIV/AIDS, as an excuse to police, punish, and abuse their LGBTQ child. Furthermore, in child state custody systems, workers often placed LGBTQ youth in isolation, as staff stereotyped the youth to be hyper-sexual pedophiles, who would harm other children. These negative experiences related to sex panics contributed to the LGBTQ youth to go live on the streets. Once experiencing homelessness, police profiled gender expansive and transgender black and brown youth as engaging in sex work. This trans-profiling and its connection to sex panics around sex work kept the youth in constant contact with police and cycling between the streets and jails. At times, the youth found a respite at a shelter for LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness. But this shelter also had policies informed by sex panics. Staff expelled youth who got caught having sex in the shelter, utilizing the discourse that sex in a shelter is a public health threat. The shelter also had a curfew, whereby engaging in sex work was not seen as a legitimate job to miss curfew. In enforcing a type of “homonormative governmentality,” shelter workers tried to govern and produce LGBTQ youth who upheld white, gay, middle-class, capitalistic notions of sex. Indeed, the sexual behaviors of the youth were constructed as a reason for why they were experiencing homelessness. If the youth could “control” their sexuality and sexual behaviors and get a “legitimate” job, then the youth would supposedly not be experiencing homelessness anymore. These discourses related to sex panics eclipse how poverty, structural racism, heterosexism, and cissexism are causes of LGBTQ youth homelessness. Moreover, this policing of the youth’s sex lives on the streets and in shelters becomes another contributor to why the youth cannot achieve housing stability. Ultimately, this project serves as a cautionary tale on the detrimental consequences of sex panics for some marginalized people. In these current times, we need to be mindful of how our discussions around sex, sexual behaviors, desires, assault, harassment, and other aspects of sexuality do not contribute to societal sex panics, and hence, do not contribute to the marginalization of LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness and other marginalized populations. This tale, though, can also push us to imagine better worlds where sex panics are not a foundation to society, where LGBTQ youth are free from being policed and punished, and where homelessness is no more.

Author

• Brandon A Robinson, University of California-Riverside