Conditional Families and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Youth Homelessness: Gender, Sexuality, Family Instability, and Rejection

• Published date: 01 April 2018
• Date: 01 April 2018
• Author: Brandon Andrew Robinson
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12466

B A R University of California, Riverside

Conditional Families and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,

Transgender, and Queer Youth Homelessness:

Gender, Sexuality, Family Instability, and Rejection

Existing research on lesbian, gay, bisexual,

transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth home-

lessness identies family rejection as a main

pathway into homelessness for the youth.

This nding, however, can depict people of

color or poor people as more prejudiced than

White, middle-class families. In this 18-month

ethnographic study, the author complicates

this rejection paradigm through documenting

the narratives of 40 LGBTQ youth experienc-

ing homelessness. The author examines how

poverty and family instability shaped the con-

ditions that the youth perceived as their being

rejected because of their gender and sexuality.

This rejection generated strained familial ties

within families wherein the ties were already

fragile. Likewise, the author shows how being

gender expansive marked many youth’s experi-

ences of familial abuse and strain. This study

proposes the concept of conditional families to

capture the social processes of how poverty and

family instability shape experiences of gender,

sexuality, and rejection for some LGBTQ youth.

One in 10 young adults, aged 18 to 25 years,

experience homelessness during the course of

Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of

California, Riverside, 900 University Ave., Riverside, CA

92521 (brandon.robinson@ucr.edu).

KeyWords: family instability, gender, homelessness, poverty,

sexuality, youth.

a year (Chapin Hall, 2017). Following the eco-

nomic restructuring of U.S. society, especially

the erosion of many social assistance programs

and state services (Lee, Tyler, & Wright, 2010),

people of color, women and their children, and

unaccompanied youth now comprise the bulk

of people experiencing homelessness (Wright,

2009). Notably, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgen-

der, and queer (LGBTQ) youth are dispropor-

tionately among the youth homelessness popula-

tion. LGBTQ youth comprise approximately 5%

to 8% of the U.S. youth population but comprise

at least 40% of the population of youth expe-

riencing homelessness (Durso & Gates, 2012;

Ray, 2006). Existing research identies family

conict about the LGBTQ youth’s gender or

sexuality as a primary reason for experiencing

homelessness (Durso & Gates, 2012; Rew,Whit-

taker, Taylor-Seehafer, & Smith, 2005; Whit-

beck, Chen, Hoyt, Tyler, & Johnson, 2004).

Seventy-three percent of gay and lesbian youth

and 26% of bisexual youth experiencing home-

lessness report parental disapproval of their sex-

ual orientation as the main reason for their home-

lessness, and service providers who work with

LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness indi-

cate that 68% have experienced family rejection

(Durso & Gates, 2012; Rew et al., 2005).

This attention on family rejection often por-

trays the parents of LGBTQ youth experiencing

homelessness as unaccepting of their child. Sta-

tistical surveys, however, often limit people to

marking their one cause of homelessness from

Journal of Marriage and Family 80 (April 2018): 383–396 383

DOI:10.1111/jomf.12466