Abstract
As a new president restores the LGBTQ protections stripped away during the Trump administration, Brandon Andrew Robinson’s Coming Out to the Streets signifies an urgent call to action. Centering the voices of LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness, Robinson illuminates the contradictions of a LGBTQ movement that too often conflates white, cisgender homonormativity with social progress. The increased visibility and social acceptance of sexual minorities in the United States have empowered youth to come out earlier than previous generations, yet too often many discover the devastating costs of this newfound freedom. Families abuse, reject, and disown them, forcing them to fend for themselves among social and political institutions that reluctantly accommodate them. Schools and foster systems respond to bullying by blaming the victim. Police officers exhibit indifference, often hypercriminalizing (Rios 2011) LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness in public spaces as sex work. Working low-wage jobs leaves them vulnerable to gender policing and excludes them from accessing social services essential for survival. Yet despite the tragic circumstances structuring their lives, Robinson avoids essentializing these youth as passive victims. Rather, they develop “queer street smarts,” creating alternate support and economic systems to navigate and leverage the limited opportunities at their disposal. These elements converge in an engaging and sophisticated ethnography of a multiply marginalized population unable to take solace in the empty promise that “it gets better.”
Illuminating the experiences of homelessness among transgender and gender-expansive youths allows Robinson to reframe “homelessness” beyond the lack of “a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence” (p. 4). Homelessness also involves what sociologist Gloria González-López (2015) refers to as “heteronormative compliance”: the policing of gender and sexuality to reproduce heteronormativity. In addition to physical and sexual victimization and mental health challenges, LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness must also navigate institutions hostile to the safe exploration of sexual and gender identities. State laws may prohibit these youth from obtaining identification that aligns with their gender identity and expression, limiting opportunities to access employment or proper medical treatment to facilitate their transitions. Social service organizations and state custody systems misgender transgender and gender-variant youth, forcing them into gender-segregated housing and shower facilities that leave them vulnerable to harassment and violence. Even LGBTQ-friendly shelters may hold transgender and gender-variant youth to homonormative dress and behavior standards in exchange for safer living conditions, access to hormone treatments, and support in changing gender markers on government forms. These obstacles do not even include the hypercriminalization and racial profiling that LGBTQ youth of color endure at the hands of police, social service administrators, and white LGBTQ community members in gay neighborhoods who exclude them from participation in local cultural and commercial institutions.
These constellations of heteronormative compliance, which Robinson refers to as the “queer control complex,” extend well beyond the institutions that LGBTQ youth experiencing homeless navigate for survival. The very institutions intended to protect youth normalize violence against LGBTQ youth in the name of heteronormative compliance. Schools, for example, enforce gender norms through punitive measures. Not only do teachers and administrators sanction bullying by blaming LGBTQ students for their own victimization, but they also set the example by publicly mocking transgender and gender-variant students for failing to conform to established gender norms. State child welfare systems, often tasked with protecting children from abuse, often rely on the same punitive tools (e.g., punishment, rejection, eviction) that LGBTQ youth have experienced at home and schools. Churches and religious organizations that provide numerous support services for those experiencing homelessness demonize LGBTQ people, intimidating LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness from accessing vital services. Combined with the homophobia and transphobia at the hands of their own families, the queer control complex reinforces the devaluation of LGBTQ youth—particularly, queer and transgender youth of color—as disposable and unwanted, pushing them out into the streets and cycling through the criminal justice system.
While much of the book sheds light on the structural obstacles shaping the lived realities of LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness, Robinson avoids characterizing them as passive victims within a racist, homophobic, and transphobic system. These youth develop queer street smarts, strategies for “navigating the public sphere and the harassment and violence that come from living on the streets” (p. 115). Some strategies include finding handicapped and single-use restrooms to avoid the surveillance and harassment in public restrooms, engaging in sex work for economic resources and temporary shelter, and developing what have I referred to in my research as “queer street families”: affective communities that leverage social and economic opportunities to create bonds of kinship, grounded in mutual support and obligation (Greene 2018). Queer street smarts often depend on LGBTQ youth refashioning the codes of the street (Anderson 1994) to meet their daily needs. As a result, these practices make them vulnerable to police surveillance and potential danger. Yet Robinson’s analysis also reveals the lengths these youth undertake to live their authentic lives.
Anchored in a queer-of-color critique, Robinson’s study offers a master class in intersectionality. Despite its ubiquity in popular and academic discourse, intersectionality remains somewhat difficult to apply empirically, specifically as it relates to how interlocking systems of oppression operate on the ground. However, Robinson attends to these complexities in an accessible way by showing how different configurations of marginal identities yield specific manifestations of heteronormative compliance. These strengths come into sharp focus in their chapter “Reframing Family Rejection” (pp. 31–52). Here, they demonstrate how cultural constructions of gender result in families applying different pressures on their children to conform. For example, Robinson found how parents often understood gender-expansive men as hypersexual and would exhibit a “gendered homophobia,” policing their masculinity as a means of controlling their perceived homosexuality. Black parents would force their gay and gender-expansive sons to play sports to toughen them up. However, Latina queer and gender-expansive children would often face pressures to perform femininity because their families could not control their sexuality. Therefore, while Alaina, a white Hispanic lesbian, would often be punished for their tomboyish presentation more than their sexual preference for women, Naomi, a transgender, bisexual Latina, experienced abuse from their parents not because of their sexual preferences but because her gender presentation signified to their parents that she “took away [their] son” (p. 48). Instructors might find Robinson’s emphasis on sexuality in their intersectional analysis a valuable counterpoint to traditional intersectionality studies that often center around gender, race, and class (e.g., Collins 1990, 2004; Crenshaw 1991; Romero 2018). Additionally, this chapter might pair well with Gardiner and McKinzie’s (2020) activity that uses ethnographic vignettes to help students understand how different configurations of oppressions produce unique outcomes.
Coming Out to the Streets also provides a practical blueprint for instructing students on conducting ethnographies that center on marginalized and vulnerable populations. As sociology instructors embrace antiracist pedagogies, students and scholars alike have become more sensitive to the “cowboy ethnographies” and “jungle book tropes” that not only perpetuate minority stereotypes but have also become so canonical in the discipline (Rios 2015; Small 2015). To that end, scholars often avoid designing research around LGBTQ youth, especially those who have encountered abuse and rejection from their families, continually raising ethical concerns of exploitation and exoticism. Robinson avoids these pitfalls. Wrestling openly with these concerns, Robinson effectively shows how centering the histories and experiences of LGBT youth reveals major blind spots in eradicating social problems, like homelessness. Their analysis balances a scientific responsibility of accurately reporting these experiences with their feelings of concern about these youth’s safety and well-being. Pairing Robinson’s “Research Appendix” (pp. 181–94) alongside ethnographic reflections by scholars like Tey Meadow (2013) might help students of ethnography consider more closely how their identity and positionality create unique challenges and opportunities when studying vulnerable populations.
The strengths of this beautiful study notwithstanding, I wish that Robinson considered the role of place in shaping their population’s experiences. Despite Texas’s politically conservative reputation, both San Antonio and Austin represent “creative cities” (Florida 2003), where displays of tolerance for LGBTQ populations represent amenities for attracting liberally minded urban cosmopolitans. Reading about the various institutions and how they policed gender and sexuality through heteronormative compliance left me wondering how state laws and state funding—which, in conservative states, like Texas, could be hostile toward LGBTQ communities—shape the limits of municipalities in addressing the needs of LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness. Robinson’s analysis conflates these various levels at which these institutions may function and, in doing so, loses some critical nuances that could shape a place’s queer control complex.
Similarly, a more explicit discussion of how a place’s culture may also shape cultural expectations would help contextualize the expectations that many LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness may have for resources and support. In my research on LGBTQ youth in Chicago (Greene 2018), I found that many expected their gay communities to address issues of importance to LGBTQ youth and to work to accommodate them in LGBTQ neighborhoods. This sense of entitlement to spaces within iconic gay neighborhoods also shapes the queer street smarts these youth cultivated, allowing themselves at times to challenge openly local residents and commercial institutions that find their presence as a threat to public safety. Robinson’s exploration of more “ordinary cities,” like San Antonio, draws attention to different expectations from LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness arising out of the local cultures. Combining this text with a more explicit exploration of place cultures and reputation, like Brown-Saracino’s (2017) work on how places shape identity, could expand students’ understanding of the limits and opportunities of LGBTQ youth’s agency in securing resources and protecting their interests.
Finally, while reading the chapter on LGBTQ organizations that support youth experiencing homelessness, I could not help wondering the extent to which they also comprised the queer control complex. Indeed, LGBTQ homeless shelters offered spaces and resources that affirmed gender and sexual identities. However, they also worked to police gender and sexuality, exerting control over transgender and gender-expansive youth to behave according to an organization’s expectations of gender and sexuality to protect funding or avoid punitive intervention by the state. The various rules and regulations governing these spaces also seem to privilege homonormative standards in dress and behavior, forcing youth to develop queer street smarts to navigate these spaces. Pairing Robinson’s work with scholarship like Myrl Beam’s (2018) study of gay nonprofit organizations might help students situate these spaces within the queer control complex, demonstrating how even the most “supportive” organizations can perpetuate the same inequities that they hope to eradicate.
My concerns aim to provoke opportunities that introduce and support students’ engagement with the nuances of space and place in shaping the lived circumstances of LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness. Those critiques notwithstanding, Coming Out to the Streets offers an accessible and engaging exploration of gender and sexuality that would fit as easily in an introductory class in sociology as it would in a graduate seminar on ethnographic methods.