The whiteness of gay urban belonging: criminalizing LGBTQ youth of color in queer spaces of care

ABSTRACT

Chicago’s gay village of Boystown has long been linked with whiteness, and in the past decade, tensions have flared between neighborhood residents and queer and transgender (trans) youth of color, often homeless, who come to Boystown for the many services provided by its lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) nonprofit organizations, or queer spaces of care. While scholars have attended to community policing in Boystown through the Take Back Boystown movement, the role of LGBTQ nonprofits has yet to be examined in their role of criminalizing queer and trans youth of color in the neighborhood. Through an autoethnographic approach, this paper explores how several nonprofit organizations in Boystown have adopted policing strategies toward the queer and trans youth of color they serve. I argue that community policing has infiltrated these organizations to further defend and maintain an exclusive gay urban space informed by whiteness, which marks and regulates young, Black masculinities and trans femininities as deviant, untrustworthy, and criminal. Racism diminishes the ability for queer spaces of care to fulfill their mandates of supporting queer and trans youth of color, rendering the neighborhood a space of surveillance and furthering a White gay urban belonging that alienates and criminalizes these youth.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer geography
• community policing
• racism
• whiteness
• youth

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Editors and the anonymous referees for their detailed comments on this paper, and to extend a special thanks to Pablo Bose for his supportive and insightful editorial feedback. The original version of this paper was written for a course at York University in July, 2015, “Mean Streets: Class Struggle, Capital Circulation, and Public Space”, taught by Don Mitchell and organized by Laam Hae. Thanks to both of them for inspiring me to write this piece. I would also like to acknowledge the helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper from those who attended Geography Research Day at York University, and the panel ‘Queer in the City’ at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in San Francisco, California in March 2016.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Cisgender refers to non-transgender people, or those who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.

2. Because this was not a research project, I am drawing from my personal journals, text messages, and e-mails in lieu of standard field notes to gather my observations into a coherent collection of events that stood out during that time.