ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Brandon Andrew Robinson explores some of the strategies of addressing LGBTQ youth homelessness. Based on 18-months of ethnographic fieldwork in central Texas, 10 interviews with service providers, and 40 interviews with LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness, Robinson examines what success means for LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness and people trying to assist them, what does failure to achieve success do, and what the role of happiness and homonormativity is in all of these things. Robinson uses Sara Ahmed’s and J. Halberstam’s theories in order to explicate how success, failure, and notions of happiness shape homonormative strategies in addressing LGBTQ youth homelessness. Specifically, Robinson investigates discourses around failure and family rejection, rehabilitative framings that construct homelessness as a personal failure, and solutions surrounding success and happiness that some youth internalize. Through this examination, Robinson shows how these strategies and solutions potentially further the marginalization of LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness. Finally, Robinson briefly ends the chapter by thinking through some alternative queer solutions to addressing LGBTQ youth homelessness by challenging capitalism and the dire poverty that the exists under this system.
