Queer street families

Even as recent scholarship on gay neighborhoods highlights their decline and disappearance in the “post-gay” era (Ghaziani, 2014), iconic gay neighborhoods have attracted queer youth of color seeking asylum from the homophobia and violence that many encounter within their own local communities. Often lacking the economic, socio-cultural, and legal resources to participate formally in gay community life, these youths reproduce “street-corner practices” traditionally associated with the iconic ghetto (Anderson, 2012) to develop queer street families—affective communities forged around “mutual support for and encouragement for an alternative lifestyle that appears highly attractive to many adolescents, regardless of family background” (Anderson, 1991, p. 375). Drawing on qualitative data collected in Chicago’s Boystown, this chapter examines how queer street families refashion the “codes of the street” into not only bonds of kinship and mutual obligation, but also political claims of community membership within local gay neighborhoods. Enduring sexual exploitation and hypercriminalization by local residents who misrecognize their presence and participation as a threat to community safety, queer youth of color develop a competing spatial and relational order that reinforces the enduring value of iconic gay neighborhoods as safe spaces where public forms of gender and sexual expression are affirmed and supported.