Queer/y/ing pathways through youth homelessness: becoming, being and leaving LGBTQI+ youth homelessness

Abstract

This article extends Clapham’s (2002) concept of ‘housing pathways’ to explore the nature of specific youth homelessness associated with diverse LGBTQI+ identities. Drawing on in-depth interviews with homeless LGBTQI+ youth in Ireland we offer a queer consideration of the structural challenges and agentic potentialities of young people’s housing pathways. Building on these young people’s experiences of becoming, being and leaving homelessness our queering process focuses on three phenomena: queer temporalities, queer liminalities and queer kinships. We argue that due to their evolving sexualities and gender identities ‘housing and home’ have distinctive meanings for LGBTQI+ youth. These meanings prioritise safe, non-homophobic/transphobic spaces, in which they can be themselves without the pressure to conceal their evolving identities or conform to heteronormative expectations. We suggest these meanings inform pathways into, through and out of homelessness and may contribute to higher rates of homelessness among LGBTQI+ youth. Finally, we argue these queerly informed understandings increase knowledge of how proactive interventions might best be framed.

Keywords:

• LGBTQI+ youth homelessness
• housing and home
• queer temporalities
• queer liminalities
• queer kinships

Introduction

A growing body of empirical evidence indicates that LGBTQI+ young people have distinctive experiences of homelessness compared to their straight and cisgender peers. The acronym LGBTQI+ refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex, the + denotes other sexual orientation and gender categories and potential anti-identitarian positions not accurately described by these terms including non-binary and gender queer (Savin-Williams, 2005). There is a strong consensus in the literature that LGBTQI+ youth face higher risks of homelessness (Curry et al., 2017; Rosario et al., 2012) and, as a result, are significantly overrepresented in the population of homeless young people (Cochran et al., 2002; Lolai 2015). Ecker’s (2016) comprehensive review of this research reveals that numeric estimates of this cohort vary from 8% to 37% of the total youth homeless population. Research on youth homelessness triggers further supports this position suggesting that LGBTQI+ youth are at greater risk of homelessness because they are affected both by the factors which precipitate homelessness among the young population in general and by additional challenges related to their sexuality and/or gender identity which can directly or indirectly result in homelessness (Abramovich, 2012; Abramovich & Shelton, 2017). For many young people, homelessness is associated with breakdown of relationships with their parents or caregivers (Edidin et al., 2012; Maccio & Ferguson, 2016; Toro et al., 2007; Tunåker, 2015). However, LGBTQI+ youth face additional risks of fracturing caregiver relationships due to conflict about sexuality and/or gender identity (Avramov, 1998; Castellanos, 2016; Durso & Gates, 2012; Robinson, 2018). In addition, research on services for homeless young people indicates they often do not meet the specific needs of LGBTQI+ youth (Shelton et al., 2021). LGBTQI+ youth may be reluctant to avail of these services due to concerns about homophobic and/or transphobic service cultures. For this same reason they may refuse to ‘be out’ when using services which can increase stress, isolation and loneliness and undermine the potential to build supportive relationships with key workers and to access the specific supports required (Norris & Quilty, 2021; Begun & Kattari, 2016).

In this article we draw on in-depth interviews with LGBTQI+ homeless youth in Dublin and other cities and towns in Ireland to explore their distinctive experiences of homelessness and, on this basis, to identify and conceptualise the nature of the specific youth homelessness risks associated with LGBTQI+ identities and the distinctive ways in which LGBTQI+ youth are affected by and negotiate their way through and out of homelessness. As its title suggests, the analysis presented here draws on Clapham’s (2002, 2005) concept of ‘housing pathways’, which he defines as ‘the continually changing set of relationships and interactions that a household experiences over time in its consumption of housing’ (2005, p. 27). This analytical framework is broadly rooted in social constructivism and focusses on the meanings housing has for individuals and households and the relationship between these meanings and personal and social identities. Additionally, Clapham’s (2005) approach acknowledges that housing pathways are shaped by broader societal factors including policy discourses, structural inequalities and social services (Anderson & Christian, 2003).

The housing pathways framework is very widely used in qualitative research on housing and homelessness to the extent that it could be considered ubiquitous (Fopp, 2009). Its popularity reflects the fact that it overcomes key problems in housing research, namely: its weak relationship to theory; its overuse of positivistic methodology; and its tendency to overemphasise the role of structure in influencing housing to the neglect of agency including the decisions, values and subjective experiences of individuals and households (Clapham, 2005). However, it is also the case that both the framework and its application by researchers have been criticised. Both Somerville (2002) and King (2002) challenge the need to ground the pathways framework within a postmodern social constructionist perspective as opposed to a more ‘substantial’ social theory. Jacobs (2002, p. 75) points out the impossibility of measuring ‘unconscious meanings and actions’ as the pathways framework requires. The question of whether the housing pathways framework can be ‘put into operation in a way that results in generalisable outcomes rather than a series of insights into the values and meanings held by a select group of individuals’ is raised by Beer et al. (2011, p. 30). The use of the pathways framework in homeless specific research has also been criticised, in particular the tendency to employ it as a metaphor rather than a systematically applied conceptual framework (Fopp 2009). Further, Norris et al. (2005) highlight the limitations of pathways nomenclature for this broad cohort, arguing that the term ‘pathways’ incorrectly implies ‘some degree of choice in becoming homeless’ (2005, p. 11). This critique is extended by Pleace (2016, p. 36) who exposes the risk associated with over emphasis on the individual by obscuring more systemic, structural contributors to homelessness. Despite these undoubted shortcomings, we argue that, if employed as Clapham intended, the pathways framework has important strengths and is particularly appropriate for analysing LGBTQI+ youth experiences of homelessness given its emphasis on the expressed needs of homeless people rather than policy makers’ or service providers’ assumptions (Fopp, 2009). It also holds potential to capture both the structural and agency factors which shape homelessness and homeless identities (Parsell, 2011) and the dynamic and fluid nature of homelessness which are particularly relevant for LGBTQI+ youth.

Here, we seek to further expand understandings of housing pathways by drawing on the rich narrative accounts of the young LGBTQI+ people in this research study to explore the links between their sexual and gender identities and interpretations of the meaning of housing and home (Choi, 2013; Elwood, 2000; Gorman-Murray, 2013; Robertson, 2018). We extend Clapham’s (2009) framework by offering a queer consideration of the structural challenges and agentic potentialities of young people’s pathways through their experiences of becoming, being and leaving homelessness. By reorienting the conventional, heteronormatively infused concepts of temporalities (linear ‘straight’ time), liminalities (limited to binary in-betweenness) and kinships (based on blood ties) in homelessness studies to embrace queer modes of thinking and disruption we deepen our understanding of LGBTQI+ young people’s navigations through homelessness in ways that reflect their lived lives and realities (Halberstam, 2005; March, 2021; Weston, 1991). We argue that this queering process will contribute to a ‘theorizing in the flesh’ (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983) as we navigate the deeply impactful, courageous narratives of the young people interviewed for this research and their ‘fleshy’, embodied experiences of being homeless.

The analysis presented is organised into three further sections. First, we detail the research methodology and ethical considerations underpinning this study. Second, we employ a queer interrogation of the pathways our LGBTQI+ homeless young people followed into homelessness, through homelessness and (in some cases) out of homelessness. We reflect on how emerging LGBTQI+ identities and queerly infused meanings of housing and home may have shaped these young people’s experiences. Lastly, we consider how homeless and youth services might be tailored to better meet young LGBTQI+ peoples’ specific needs and enhance their prospects of exiting homelessness.

Research methodology

The research examined here resembles many qualitative studies of homelessness in which researchers place emphasis on how individuals who are homeless ‘understand’ their lives (Loates & Walsh, 2010). It also reflects Clapham’s (2005) recommendation to loosely structure housing pathway interviews around interviewees’ personal biographies and particularly their experience of becoming homeless, being homeless and (if relevant) leaving homelessness. This research study encompassed a total of 22 one-to-one in-depth interviews conducted from December 2018 to August 2019 with young LGTBQI + people aged between 18 and 30 years.¹ In Ireland, as young people aged under 18 are under the care of child welfare services rather than homeless services they were not included in this research. To avoid excluding any sections of the LGBTQI+ homeless youth population we deliberately targeted young people who identified across the LGBTQI+ spectrum. We also welcomed participants whose experiences spanned the spectrum of homeless experiences defined by the European typology of homelessness and housing exclusion (ETHOS) by FEANTSA (undated). While some participants had exited homelessness most were still experiencing homelessness at the time of interview. For the latter, while their reflections on pathways out of homelessness were aspirational, they were no less relevant or insightful. The specific characteristics of the young participants in our study are set out in Table 1. To protect their anonymity, they were allocated numeric identifiers.

Table 1. Characteristics and anonymous ID numbers of the homeless, LGTBQI+ young people interviewed for this research.

ID	Location	Gender	Pronoun	Sexuality	Age	Housing situation at the time of interview with reference to the ETHOS Typology
1	Dublin	Cis M	He/Him	Gay	22	Houseless (Homeless hostel)
2	Dublin	Cis F	She/Her	Lesbian	23	Houseless (Homeless hostel)
3	Dublin	Cis F	She/Her	Lesbian	26	Houseless (Homeless hostel)
4	Dublin	Non-Binary/ Queer	They/Them	Bi	20	Insecure (private renting with housing allowances).
5	Dublin	Trans/Human	They/Them	Pansexual	23	Insecure (private renting with housing allowances).
6	Dublin	Non-Binary	They/Them	Bi	27	Inadequate (room rental/car)
7	Galway	Non-binary/ Trans	They/Them	Bi	19	Roofless (Bed and breakfast/street)
8	Dublin	Cis F	She/Her	Gay/Lesbian	21	Adequate (Social housing – recent)
9	Dublin	Non-binary	They/Them	Bi/Polly (non-cis men)	24	Insecure (family home returned to problematic)
10	Dublin/Glasgow	Trans	He/Him	Gay	26	Adequate (private rented)
11	Co Dublin	Trans	She/Her	Bi	28	Adequate (recently secured social housing).
12	Dublin/Waterford	Non-Binary	They/Them	Bi	27	Adequate (private renting)
13	Cork	Cis F	She/her	Bi	22	Houseless (supported accommodation)
14	Cork	Trans M	He/Him	Heterosexual	22	Houseless (supported accommodation)
15	Cork	Cis F	She/her	Lesbian	22	Houseless (supported accommodation)
16	Dublin/Sligo	Cis F	She/Her	Bi	21	Adequate (private renting).
17	Dublin/Tipperay	Trans F	They/Them	Bi	30	Adequate (private renting).
18	Dublin	Cis F	They/Them/She	Queer	28	Adequate (private renting).
19	Kerry	Cis F	She/Her	Queer/Lesbian	25	Insecure (couch surfing, Airbnb)
20	Kerry	Non-Binary/ Trans	They/them/ She/Her	Queer	28	Insecure (couch surfing, Airbnb)
21	Dublin	Cis F	She/Her	Lesbian	27	Insecure (family home returned to/problematic)
22	Dublin	Cis F	Queer/ agender	Bi	24	Inadequate (squat).

Recruitment

The recruitment process was incredibly challenging and recruitment obstacles delayed the completion of the research by several months. These challenges reflect difficulties recruiting all categories of homeless people for qualitative research projects. However, they were aggravated by additional challenges specific to homeless LGBTQI+ young people (Durso & Gates, 2012; Savin-Williams & Ream, 2007). Notable challenges identified through this study were the high levels of stigma and shame internalised by many which made them reluctant to volunteer for interview; young LGBTQI+ people’s reluctance to use services for homeless people and thus their invisibility to service providers; minimising their homeless experiences as not ‘real’ homelessness which led to them to question their eligibility to participate in the study. Despite these challenges, 22 richly textured interviews were conducted following a recruitment process that operated on three fronts: first, an active engagement with homeless accommodation providers and specific key workers with an interest in the area to encourage referrals; second, a national poster and social media campaign involving the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) and the LGBTQI+ non-governmental organisation (NGO) sector; third, a rolling recruitment process that built on snowballing and word of mouth referrals from young people who had participated in the study. The breadth of recruitment strategies utilised also sought to reduce the possibility for sampling bias and to highlight the issue of youth homelessness across the LGBTQI+ community.

Research ethics

Young LGBTQI+ people are identified as a vulnerable group across the international literature on youth homelessness and the ethical challenges associated with researching vulnerable people are considerable (Liamputtong, 2007). As Barnard cautions, ‘harm is the very last thing we want to happen, particularly where those we research are already socially excluded’ (2005, p. 13). Young LGBTQI+ people have often had to be strong, creative, adaptable and resilient in the face of the challenges they have faced in their lives (Bidell, 2014; Mayock et al., 2009; Tierney & Ward, 2017). However, they are also likely to have experienced marginalisation which will have been reinforced by their homelessness or lack of secure, appropriate housing. Consequently, a robust plan to address ethical challenges and ensure the safety and anonymity of participants was designed, institutionally approved, and fully implemented. It spanned all aspects of the research process including inclusion and exclusion criteria to guide the recruitment process, generating detailed participant protocols on informed consent, participant distress, disclosure and confidentiality along with a range of referral options, resources and supports to participants. To ensure oversight across the project lifespan we also convened a highly experienced research advisory group with experts from the LGBTQI+, research, academic and homeless sectors. This explicit ethical sensibility was maintained by the researchers throughout the coding, analysis and write-up processes and ensured participants’ voices were prioritised and accurately reflected. Acknowledging the centrality of researcher’s subjective positionality within qualitative research (Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2006; Holmes, 2020; Savin-Baden & Howell Major, 2013) we note that both researchers drew on their extensive experience working with vulnerable and at-risk cohorts. Additionally, one researcher’s ‘insider’ LGBTQI+ status informed the interview context which facilitated these young people to share their powerful and intimate stories. The loosely structured one to one, in-depth interviews traversed a range of themes including: familial experiences; coming out; education and schooling; experiences of becoming, being and leaving (as relevant) homelessness; friendships and supports.

LGBTQI+ identities and young people’s homeless pathways

Pathways into homelessness

Jack Halberstam (2005) captures the heteronormative imperative that guides and structures our lived lives in the concept of the ‘life schedule’ - the phases spanning birth, childhood, teenage, youth, adult, middle age, old age, and death. Each phase is impacted by a complex series of normative expectations that structure how life – heterosexual life – should be lived at a particular time. The home or home place has a central function in maintaining this life schedule given its close association with the construct of the ‘traditional nuclear family’. However, as the young LGBTQI+ people’s narratives collated for this research affirm, resisting or rejecting this heteronormative imperative can have real consequences for their wellbeing and for many was a critical factor in their becoming homeless, as they became estranged from their (nuclear) family home place. This aligns with sustained scholarship on LGBTQI+ youth homelessness outlined in the introduction and raises interesting questions about queer meanings and experiences of home and how they become inscribed in LGBTQI+ homelessness.

Halberstam (2005) argues that the recognition accorded to heterosexual lives is based on sustained practice of respectful legibility established through the maintenance of straight-time conformity to age-bound heterosexual life phases. If we act according to our ‘straight age ‘we pass the age coded categories of life correctly and have a better chance of avoiding stigmatization’ (Carlström & Andersson, 2019, p. 1320). Given the pervasive nature and structure of the heterosexual family unit many of these life-phases are performed within the context of the ‘family home’. Queer lives not only challenge this straight time but also call the heteronormative code into question as was evident in the research through parental reactions to their children’s coming out processes. The young LGBTQI+ people’s rejection of heterosexual and cisnormative identifications represented a challenge to the legitimacy of this ‘code’. However, in doing so they also rendered themselves vulnerable to far-reaching consequences that exposed sometimes latent familial homophobia and transphobia.

Familial challenges relating to coming out and developing LGBTQI+ identities are among the most common triggers of LGBTQI+ young people’s inability to transition successfully to living away from the family home and thereby of their homelessness (Castellanos, 2016; Robinson, 2018). Our study was no different in this regard. Parental and caregiver relationship conflict and breakdown were key proximate triggers of homelessness for 12 of the young people interviewed. Whilst this conflict was not related to LGBTQI+ identity in all cases, for half of these young people it was a significant factor. Among most of the young people in this category their coming out process exacerbated, or brought to a head, existing challenges in family relationships. Participant 6’s recollection of their parents’ reaction to them coming out as trans reflects the power of the heteronormative code in influencing broader social and cultural norms relating to work, family, stability etc.

…that I would never be able to get a job and I’d never be able to get married and have a good partner and good relationship. And so many things that just wouldn’t be able to have because I kept my transness as like this core part of my identity… They’d say that I was pigeonholing myself and that I was an embarrassment to them, and like years that my sister would get bullied. And that they, my parents would get, would have to deal with crap from their colleagues.

The research participants painfully attested to the impact of collisions between these two temporal frames, queer and cis/heteronormative, particularly when such collisions were experienced as violent temporal ruptures that exposed their vulnerability and highlighted the implications of their rejection of hetero and cisnormativity. Sara Ahmed argues that homes ‘always involve encounters between those who stay, those who arrive and those who leave’ (1999, p. 176). Our young interviewees’ stories offer powerful insights into the manner of this leaving process as a sudden, violent, temporal rupture. Some of the young interviewees shared powerful accounts of being ‘kicked out’ or being asked to leave their family home by a parent or caregiver. Participant 5’s account captures the suddenness of this event coupled with a profound sense of being completely ill prepared:

The reason she kicked me out at that time, was because I had come home wearing makeup, after going out on a date with a guy and she went crazy that night. Went upstairs. When I came back down the next day, she basically just told me to leave. I think I stayed at a friend’s house that night and then, I was calling people and I found one friend who had let me stay in her house for a month and then I had another friend, who knew these people who had a spare room in their attic.

Whereas, for Participant 8 the breakdown in familial relations happened more slowly:

It was always not great in the home. It was always at a level where it was really bad, I would have to leave eventually. But when I came out, I just felt like they felt that they didn’t know me. And that I was completely alien to them. She’d [mother] always say that she was very positive about the whole thing, but from my experience and from my point of view and my truth, she was disgusted by it and horrified by it. Everything got worse.

It would, however, be incorrect to overstate the prevalence of these experiences. For many of the young interviewees ‘leaving home’ reflected a deliberate decision-making process albeit one they felt forced to make by negative responses to their LGBTQI+ identities on the part of their parents and caregivers. We could read these agentic acts as articulations of queer temporalities (Freeman, 2010) which ‘leave(s) the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance’ (Halberstam, 2005, p. 4). And yet given the structural impediments and sustained impact of homophobia and transphobia, Jensen’s concept of ‘thin agency’ (Jensen, 2014, p. 164) or the notion of LGBTQI+ ‘edgework’ put forward by Matthews et al. (2019) might be more appropriate descriptions, wherein agency is acknowledged but simultaneously restrained by the presence of oppressive social, cultural, and structural scripts. These scripts are further aggravated by the ‘political, economic and cultural forces that restrict young people’s transitions’ from the family home into independent living (Mackie, 2016, p. 137).

In addition to these individual articulations of family and caregiver conflict triggering homelessness our research also revealed that the broader structural influences, emphasised by Clapham (2005), including the limitations of the private rental sector (Parkinson & Parsell, 2018), were at play. The severe shortage of affordable housing in Dublin when the research was conducted, particularly of private rented housing, was significant. Hoey & Sheridan’s (2016) research indicates that the vast majority of homeless people have come from the private rented sector in recent years. For instance, Participant 17 reported:

Because I couldn’t find anything in my budget, I kind of fell back on staying in a car a few nights a week. That’s kind of… a stupid idea but that’s what I ended up doing.

However, among the LGBTQI+ young people interviewed, housing access challenges were augmented by their specific housing priorities and needs. They faced particular challenges accessing housing that met their privacy and security needs. Securing sufficient personal space such as en-suite bathrooms came at a price premium. Interviewees seeking rental accommodation also frequently faced homophobic and transphobic discrimination from landlords and flatmates. Participant 18 reported: ‘A trans girl moved in with me for the better part of a year because she’d just moved to Dublin and the people she moved in with didn’t know she was trans before she moved in and then became very, very hostile’. Similarly, Participant 6 reflected that in their experience:

Yeah, renting was a lot harder as a trans person. Or as a visibly queer person. So, like one instance, there was this place that was perfect for me… I could afford the rent and the people seemed nice, and it was nice place… But they say that, oh what was it? That I wouldn’t fit their culture. That was how they worded it.

Many of the young interviewees, such as Participant 12, found the necessity of always having to ‘suss people out’ to ascertain their suitability as flatmates stressful:

That was always kind of an anxiety that I’d have in my mind around looking for a place and when I would go to view a place. I’m always kind of, whether I make a good decision or not as regards to when to come out to someone that I might be living with, just that’s churning over in my mind as I’m searching [for housing], and it’s adding to the stress of looking for a place.

The impact of constantly facing possible rejection and not wanting to compromise their queer gender performativities, was for some interviewees a direct pathway into homelessness. This was the case for Participant 4, who reported: ‘So, we both look really queer…we knew we’re not going to get this place so after a while we kind of gave up’. These interview quotations are reflective of many of our young people’s narratives that spoke of the effort, energy and exhaustion that can be associated with what Browne (2004) terms ‘betweenness’, namely the tactics of adaptation used by gender non-conforming people as they navigate everyday life, and the impact on their mental health and well-being (Shearer et al., 2016). For our research participants these everyday navigations shaped their pathways into homeless and had a significant influence on their experiences of ‘being homeless’.

Pathways through homelessness

Curry et al’s (2017) research on youth homelessness in the United States found that LGBTQI+ youth are over-represented in homeless accommodation. In Ireland, homeless accommodation for homeless people without children, such as the young people interviewed for this research, is provided primarily in institutional settings called ‘hostels’ (equivalent to ‘shelters’ in North America) which often provide beds in communal dormitories or rooms shared with one or two others (Allen et al., 2020). Among the LGBTQI+ homeless youth interviewees there was widespread reluctance to use emergency hostel accommodation for homeless people. Provision of additional hostel accommodation has been a key Irish governmental response to the rapid growth in homelessness during the last decade, so access difficulties were not the primary reason why the interviewees did not avail of these services (Hearne & Murphy, 2017). These interviews give deeper insight into the specificity of young LGBTQI+ people’s experiences and their reluctance to engage with homeless accommodation.

Negative perceptions of these services, what O’Carroll & Wainwright (2019) term ‘conversations of exclusion’, were commonly cited by interviewees as barriers to using hostels. For instance, Participant 5 reflected: ‘…thank fuck, I didn’t end up in hostels. Sorry, for cursing but I didn’t end up in a hostel, no, thankfully’. Participant 6 echoed this view: ‘I felt really lucky because I wasn’t on the street or using emergency accommodation, because that would have been a lot worse’. These perceptions were informed by the participants’ LGBTQI+ identity, as Participant 1 noted:

I’m accustomed to it I guess. I just think as well, especially if you’re transgender, and going to a hostel. I think that would be incredibly difficult. I don’t know. I guess I can hide that I’m gay.

Additional barriers to accessing and using homeless services for these LGBTQI+ young people related to meanings and interpretations of housing and home. Anderson et al. point out that while ‘housing meets a fundamental need for physical shelter and contributes to psychological wellbeing by fulfilling a sense of personal space, autonomy and privacy…housing per se does not deliver this where the housing is unsafe, inadequate or lacks privacy’ (2020, p. 1). Housing becomes further problematised when considered in relation to the significant academic attention and resultant cross disciplinary literature on home including: harm and home (Gurney, 2021), mental geographies of home and attachment (Reinders & Van Der Land 2008), home as subversive queer space (Kentlyn, 2008), home and wellbeing (Garnham et al., 2022), home shaped by ‘difference’ (Di Feliciantonio & Dagkouly-Kyriakoglou, 2022), home/homelessness dichotomy (McCarthy, 2018) and feminist critiques of home in the pandemic (Kay, 2020). It is, however, also the case that there has ‘never been so much disagreement over what the concept entails’ (Meers, 2021, p. 1). Understandings of home invoke a range of meanings which have developed over time (Brickell, 2012) and reified interpretations of home as sanctuary have been comprehensively challenged (Sibley, 1995; Tyner, 2012). Conscious to avoid uninterrogated assumptions, the broad understanding of home as the complex interplay between material and affect, often invoked as shelter and belonging, is useful. Shaw (2004) distinguished between the ‘hard’ aspects of housing, namely the material conditions of a dwelling, and its ‘soft, social and meaningful’ dimensions which refers to a subjective sense of being ‘at home’. Whilst Gurney (2021) has argued these ‘soft’ aspects remain notoriously difficult to identify, Padgett (2007) helpfully suggests these ‘soft’ dimensions connote a feeling of well-being or ‘ontological security’ that arises from a sense of constancy in one’s social and material environment. Thus ‘home is neither the dwelling nor the feeling, but the relation between the two (Blunt & Dowling, 2006). Consequently, whilst ‘home is a powerful ideal, it is located within the immediate context of people’s lived realities’ (Parsell, 2012, p. 159) and is thus unstable and subject to the vagaries of individual biographies.

For these young LGBTQI+ people the particular meanings they attributed to home, as shelter and safe place and their concerns that their safety could not be guaranteed within homeless services was a significant barrier. Participant 12 highlighted the stress and fear that arose from being without ‘ontological security’ as an LGBTQI+ person inhabiting places of physical shelter that were constantly changing and in-flux:

I pre-play situations in my head, and I try to think of several different scenarios on how to avoid or how to manage them. There was something I read once about particularly LGBT people but the concept of minority stress and how a lot of minority groups have a kind of hyper situational awareness, are hyper aware of other people’s body language, of their facial expressions or the tone of their voice much more so than you might be otherwise because people are kind of constantly having to think, ‘Could this person suddenly turn hostile?’

Fear of homophobic and/or transphobic bullying by other service users was frequently cited. Participant 1 who had used homeless hostels and found himself: ‘… sharing a room with two people. It was awful. It was really bad. If you’re gay and you’re sharing a room with other men, they’re not going to want to share a room with someone who’s gay’. Additionally, several interviewees referenced the predominance of dormitory style accommodation as a critical barrier due to the direct conflict with their need for privacy as central to their understanding of housing. For instance, Participant 22 said that they wouldn’t consider using homeless hostels because: ‘I would never have my own room. That’s really, really taxing on my mental health, to be sharing a room with so many other people’. The intersectional implications of being gay and homeless, particularly in relation to experiences of loneliness were powerfully conveyed:

Well yeah kind of. I think it’s very easy to get into drugs or whatever if you’re homeless, and especially if you’re gay. You know. It’s like, you’re hiding the fact that you’re gay and you’re in homelessness, and then it can be incredibly lonely when you’re homeless. A few months ago I ended up taking drugs because I was lonely, and I wanted companionship. I just did it… You just want some sort of release. (Participant 1)

Another participant referenced the importance of fostering meaningful friendships: ‘I didn’t have good friends at the time, so I just felt so alone, and now it’s so nice to have my good friends who are always there for me, and who know me’ (Participant 9).

The factors which discouraged some of the interviewees from using homeless accommodation services, discouraged many (but not all) of those who did use these services from being ‘out’ to other service users and staff. Rasmussen (2004) argues that the decision to not come out can be an agentic act of asserting control over their very challenging and potentially harmful and unsafe social location. Participant 6, who identified as non-binary, shared this view as we see in their strategic gender-navigation of dedicated homeless services:

So, like in the situation of the homeless shelter when I’m going to access services it’s safer not to be out, because then I can use the female showers. That’s a privilege that I could have, that trans women might not have, that I can pass as a cis woman and use those bathrooms. And that means I am less likely to be attacked.

Begun & Kattari’s (2016) research on homeless trans people revealed the widespread use of similar strategies which they call – ‘conforming for survival’. However, these survival strategies are not without their frustrations particularly when trying to access homeless services such as counselling as an out trans or non-binary person.

That counselling appointment was incredible, but just having someone that understood transness and understood child abuse and trauma and sex abuse and, I don’t know, and homelessness and all these layers of trauma and validate that. And not ask questions like why do you use they pronouns and what is that and explain that to me and so you are non-binary? And what does that mean? And why aren’t you just a girl? And, all these questions that like you’re just there to get help, you’re not there to educate someone. (Participant 6)

This highlights the importance of challenging deep, structural cisnormative assumptions within homeless service provision (England 2022). Another key survival mechanism employed by the research participants, which might also be read as agentic avoidance of emergency homeless accommodation, was what Mayock & Parker (2020) term ‘living off-grid’ namely the decision to rely on friends for temporary accommodation (so called ‘couch surfing’) or to live in vans or cars. A friend’s couch provided many with an opportunity to access housing which, although insecure and inadequate was supportive of their queer LGBTQI+ identities. We could read such living-off-grid decisions as a rejection of binary, cis and hetero spaces and as a means to protect themselves from the sense of disorientation that can result from LGTBQI + and especially trans encounters with limiting binary gendered space (Doan, 2010). However, these agentic acts to ‘not be in a hostel’ were not without negative mental health consequences. Participant 12 reflected:

But there is a very grim fucking feeling about the first experience I had of staying, not even on a friend’s couch…And it’s just the kind of sense of, ‘God, this is a disaster. Like I have massively messed up’.

For some interviewees, such as Participant 5, couch surfing triggered additional stressors based on feelings of guilt: ‘I felt burdensome because I was staying with my friends and not paying rent or anything. I just felt like I was living off the back of the people, you know what I mean?’. For other interviewees, the lack of personal space when couch-surfing was intolerable because it conflicted with their interpretation of the meaning of home as a private space:

…Having an environment where I can do that, where I can just kind of go home, close the door, I know no one is entitled to come into this bedroom. I might share the apartment with a flatmate, but this room is mine, and I don’t have to interact with anyone if I don’t want to. That’s incredibly important to me. Situations where that’s not being possible, like staying on the couch, I don’t feel as comfortable as at home, as safe there. (Participant 12)

Bryant’s (2015, p. 277) work on queer (and trans) meanings of home helps progress a fleshy theorising of these wholly negative perceptions of hostel living and reluctance to spend time in them and the challenges posed by ‘living off the grid’. The young people’s narratives can be conceived as the embodied and material stories of their fleshy experiences of being homeless. Bryant invokes Nael Bhanji’s (2011) work on critical race and trans studies to queerly connect the ‘logic of skin’ to the notion of ‘body-as-house’ which he links as follows: ‘to feel “at home in one’s skin” is to be taken in the world for who one feels oneself to be’ (Bryant, 2015, p. 278). For these young people one of the key implications of their homeless experiences was the distinct absence of holistic contexts to facilitate an exploration and cultivation of ‘body-as-house’ where that could feel ‘at home in one’s skin’. Drawing on Ahmed’s (2000) insightful work on skin as a site of opening out as opposed to containment, the sense/site of how bodies are touched by others, Bryant suggests that the logic of skin imparts value and wellbeing to transgender people through a ‘complex phenomenological assemblage of the subject with the social (including the subject’s relations with and feedback from social systems of gender, race, class, sexuality and identity’ (2015, p. 277). For the young people in this study this was a privilege they had not been afforded and the impact on their lived lives and mental wellbeing was evident. It was challenging for many participants to navigate the comfort of ‘their body as house’ within the external, often deeply homophobic and transphobic, world:

…I do this thing of trying to figure out what’s the safest thing to do. Is it safest to come out, out as trans or is it safest to – hide that? Yeah, and then even down to how to dress as well. And like if you wear make-up and what kind of make-up. And how you wear your hair that day, and if you wear a hat on top of your head so they don’t see how short your hair is. And it depends on the situation. (Participant 6)

For these young LGBTQI+ people one of the key implications of their homeless and off-grid experiences was the distinct absence of holistic contexts to facilitate an exploration and cultivation of ‘body-as-house’:

It’s [couch-surfing] incredibly exhausting. So much worse than squatting ever has been for me. Just not having any space that’s your own. The impact of not having your own space, like a space that you can exist alone and not have to deal with anyone or be expected to perform in any way … The effect that has on you, on every part of you, is really exhausting. (Participant 22)

This fleshy account of ‘couch living’ highlights the impossibility of experiencing their ‘body-as-house’. Rather, their embodied experiences in this in-between space were as imposed, compulsory performance of being on display. The messiness and breadth of liminality as a concept can help us interrogate and understand these particular queer fleshy off-grid, spatially in-between, experiences. March (2021) foregrounds liminality as ‘an everyday lived, experiential realm of in-betweenness that unsettles existing binary constructs’ that ‘brings together queer ways of thinking through unboundedness, spillage, fluidity, multiplicity, and processes of contingent, non-linear becoming, as well as the relations of power and regulation that seek their stability or closure’ (March, 2021, p. 455). Whilst liminality has both a subversive and productive role in promoting alternative ways of being, given the vulnerability of these unstable homeless spaces and subject positionings we are mindful of the dangers in reifying such alternative potential. Indeed, such careful considerations reflect Tunåker’s (2015) cautionary but insightful use of liminality to capture the temporary, neither here nor there, in-between nature of LGBT youth homelessness (2015, p. 252), Wimark’s (2021) invocation of ‘perpetual liminal homemaking’ among queer refugees and Chamberlain & Johnson’s (2018) use of ‘liminality’ to capture the ‘outsider’ experiences of people transitioning from long-term homelessness to being housed. We argue that the young people’s decisions to inhabit, and their lived experiences within, this liminal in-between space of being homeless, without home, but inhabiting other space/place realities including cars, vans, couch surfing, can help us understand the specificity of LGBTQI+ youth experiences not just into but potentially beyond homelessness.

Pathways out of homelessness

Most of the LGBTQI+ homeless youth interviewed for this research remained homeless at the time of interview but a small number had successfully exited homelessness or started on this stage of their homeless pathway (see Table 1). Their stories, along with the aspirational imaginaries of those still in homelessness, highlight the importance of queer kinships and the creation of queer ‘homes’ in enabling their successful navigation of pathways out of homelessness.

Kinship studies provides fertile ground to develop these queer home (un)makings. Kath Weston’s (1991) early work was foundational to demonstrating that lesbian and gay families had unique characteristics that provided indispensable sources of solidarity and security. The devastation of the AIDS crisis added further momentum to the scale of queer home making and prompted a re-engagement with the ‘chosen family’ discourse and a renewed reimagination of kinship practices (Mizielińska et al., 2018; Pearl, 2013; Pidduck, 2009; Sahlins, 2013). By centring queer modes of connecting and community-building, kinship in a queer sense becomes as Butler describes, ‘a set of community ties that are irreducible to family’ (2002, p. 38).

The importance of queer kinship communities or queer ‘family’ ties took on a particular resonance within the young interviewees’ stories of leaving homelessness. Notwithstanding some of their experiences of being disowned by ‘natural families’ and their consequent vulnerabilities to homelessness, they carried a strong belief in the capacity for the LGBTQI+ community to ‘make families’. This agentic imperative reflects Reed and O’Riordan’s observation that queer kinship ‘is always made, not given’ (2022, p. 7) and is reinforced by Participant 5:

Obviously, you know this already because you’re LGBT, but the LGBT community are really good at making families very quickly because we’re really good at being disowned by our natural ones. I think, if you give a bunch of LGBT people a space, a comfortable warm space, then there’s stuff to do that and a family will emerge. A good family group will emerge.

This performative conjuring of queer family, as place of comfort and warmth, resonates with the understandings of home and housing discussed. Additionally, queer kinships involve the creation of what Bates (2019) describes as their own intra-active and non-genetic recognition systems. While such systems are often fraught they offer opportunities to think, live and be in otherwise ways that challenge the heteronormative biological familial imperative. Having access to such queer kinships by virtue of being queer was keenly felt to be a benefit other marginalised or disenfranchised communities might not necessarily have access to:

Obviously, we’ve all been fucking ostracized and stuff for our identities, but we also from community around those identities, and support networks, and a lot of people without that identity don’t have access to those supports. (Participant 22)

These benefits of belonging to a ‘chosen family’ were conveyed in relational terms by interviewees who emphasised the importance of being emotionally connected and proximous to other queer people who ‘got it’. These queer families actually understand what was going on and could therefore help them make sense of themselves in a world that challenged their identities and ways of being in the world on so many levels. For instance, Participant 10 reflected:

…Like if I had been on my own it might’ve gone worse…in fairness, I wouldn’t have gotten through the year without knowing other queer people. I don’t know how people come out with just a bunch of cis/straight friends, that scene’s really scary…

These interpretations of kinship communities for young LGBTQI+ people can be extended to encompass sex-gender specific organisations and support groups. Schmitz & Tyler (2018), drawing on the work of Allen et al. (2012) note that connections to broader community-based LGBTQ support groups are especially crucial to provide young people with accessible resources throughout their lives (2019, p. 728). Participant 12 mentioned support from a virtual queer community in securing housing as particularly helpful:

I mean, one thing I’ve dealt with, there is a queer Dublin alternative housing group on Facebook to help people find each other, so that’s one way of LGBT people trying to find each other to live with, which is kind of my preferred situation. (Participant 12)

Another area specified by participants was the presence of dedicated and accessible NGOs and LGBT specific youth services as having a direct impact on increasing their life skills and confidence:

Yeah. When it comes to gender and sexuality related stuff, I’m actually … I have developed like good skills, and I’ve been really lucky there like at [named LGBTQI+ Youth Organisation] because I was in majority in my friends, you know what I mean? And all my friends were suddenly like queer, and it was great. So that built a lot of confidence in terms of just being fine with myself. (Participant 4)

Given the number of young people who were still in precarious accommodation or formal homelessness at the time of interview, it is also important to acknowledge how difficult exiting homelessness is for these young LGBTQI+ people. And yet, notwithstanding these challenges, the housing aspirations of these young poeple not only for themselves but other young LGBTQI+ people in the future were clearly articulated:

I just think it will be a home for people that just don’t have it, and not a home where you have to go and pretend that you’re straight and you’re not trans, where you have to hide your body or your voice or your partners, you know, whatever. (Participant 5)

When all else was stripped away what these young LGBTQI+ participants commuicated was a desire for a sense of belonging, or attachment based on a vision of house/home that had simply been unattainable to them throughout their lives but one that would allow them to be.

Conclusions

This article employed Clapham’s (2005) ubiquitous housing pathways framework, together with insights from the queer studies literature to examine pathways into, through and out of homeless among LGBTQI+ young people in Ireland. The key insight offered here is that ‘housing and home’ have distinctive meanings for LGBTQI+ young people linked to their sexual and gender identities which can impact their subjective experiences of becoming and being homeless and their pathways out of homelessness. Crucially, we argue that through these deepened understandings we also increase knowledge of how solutions and interventions can best be framed (Cochran et al., 2002; Curry et al., 2017; Ecker, 2016; Lolai 2015; Rosario et al., 2012).

The fracturing of familial and caregiver relationships is a key trigger of homelessness for all young people (Mayock & Parker, 2017, 2020; Mayock et al., 2014). However, as highlighted here LGBTQI+ young people face higher risks of such fracturing based on conflict about their emerging sexualities and gender identities and coming out and consequences of their rejection of the heteronormatively infused and biologically dictated ‘life schedule’ (Castellanos, 2016; Durso & Gates, 2012; Lolai, 2015; Robinson, 2018).

King (1996, p. 35) suggests that housing ‘is a means of fulfilment that allows other human activities to take place’. For the LGBTQI+ young people interviewed one of the most important features of housing and one that shaped distinctive pathways into homelessness compared to the young population-at-large, was that it provides a safe space in which they can be themselves without the need to hide or censor their identities or deal with the poorly informed, negative, homophobic, and transphobic responses of others. Other research on LGBTQI+ people’s housing priorities supports this analysis (Choi, 2013; Elwood, 2000; Gorman-Murray, 2013). Many of the LGBTQI+ homeless young people interviewed for this study were unwilling to use emergency accommodation for homeless people due to concerns about the risk of transphobic and/or homophobic bullying from other service users or staff. They also identified the lack of privacy associated with much of this emergency accommodation as an acute barrier. Additionally, those who did engage with these services were rarely out to other service users and service staff and the specificities of their sexual and gender identifications were rendered invisible as a result. Such reluctance to use emergency homeless accommodation is significant from the perspective of both experiences of, and pathways out of, homelessness. Many of the support mechanisms (healthcare, addiction and mental health, education and labour market) that facilitate access to social housing and private rented housing are dependent on prior engagement with the emergency accommodation sector infrastructure. As the research evidence links successful exit from youth homelessness to higher levels of engagement with services and strong links with service professionals (Mayock & Parker, 2017, 2020) these young LGTBQI + people were at a distinct disadvantage.

The young people’s narratives explored here suggest three LGBTQI+ specific interventions that could address what Beer et al. (2011) call the key ‘transitions’ in housing pathways. The first targets supports at parents and caregivers during the period when young LGBTQI+ come out. This largely preventative intervention could help address the breakdown of familial relationships which, as was evidenced in this study, is a key trigger of youth homelessness (Cray et al., 2013). Second, the barriers to accessing homeless accommodation and services, also discussed here, need to be addressed. The safety and security concerns of young LGBTQI+ people need to be heard and adequate sectoral responses implemented. Key here is the important role frontline homeless service workers can play if sufficiently supported through education and training provision to increase awareness, and importantly understanding, of the particular needs of young LGBTQI+ people at different stages in their lives (Preece et al., 2020) and homeless experiences (Hunter, 2008; Maccio & Ferguson, 2016). Finally, the development of timely, and queerly informed LGBTQI+ youth homeless supports and dedicated housing provision needs to be prioritised. The accommodation requirements of young LGBTQI+ people need to be reflected in a range of accommodation solutions including tailored LGTBQI + emergency provision, short, medium and long-term rental solutions, university campus accommodation and LGBTQI+ queer foster family/kinship opportunities. As was clear from our research, queer kinships and queer specific support networks can have a significant, though as yet under-realised, role in supporting young LGBTQI+ people to exit homelessness.

The rich, first-hand accounts shared by the young LGBTQI+ people who participated in this study have provided invaluable insights into the issues at play in becoming and experiencing homelessness but also potential ways forward. Their compelling narratives leave us in no doubt that queerly informed, targeted interventions and supports are crucial if we are to guarantee young LGBTQI+ people have access to real-world spaces of shelter and comfort Bryant (2015) in which they can fully live and flourish.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to everyone who was interviewed for this research and to Mike Allen and Sarah Sheridan from Focus Ireland and Moninne Griffith from BeLonG To.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by funding from Focus Ireland.

Notes

1 The authors also conducted thirteen interviews with fourteen policy makers and representatives of homeless service providers and support and advocacy groups for LGBTQI+ youth and care leavers at the same time as the interviews with the young people (Quilty & Norris, 2020). The issues raised in these interviews echoed many of those raised by the young people but, for reasons of space, data from these interviews are not included in the analysis presented here.