ABSTRACT
Early studies of queer youth suicide published in the late 1980s pointed emphatically to the role of isolation among LGBT youth as a causal factor of suicide attempts. Usefully, this helped move the understanding of queer youth suicide from being seen as an effect of abnormality and shame towards an understanding of the pressures of closetedness and loneliness. Problematically, however, this early work continues to frame the ways in which young non-heterosexual persons are perceived, apprehended and understood through a stereotype of lonely, isolated, typically rural young persons who can overcome suicide risk by following a clichéd pathway of moving to larger, urban queer ghetto (with all else falling automatically into place).
This chapter critically addresses the ways in which a queer youth identity is manufactured through transitional concepts of isolation and loneliness. Drawing on Butler’s more recent work on vulnerability, it explores the intersection of the performance of isolation/loneliness and the precarity of youth. Using queer theoretical tools for the investigation of identity, the chapter critiques the linearity of identity narratives that align youth with loneliness and adult queerness with sociality.
