Brandon Andrew Robinson, "Coming Out to the Streets: LGBTQ Youth Experiencing Homelessness" (U California Press, 2020)

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth are disproportionately represented in the U.S. youth homelessness population. In Coming Out to the Streets, Brandon Andrew Robinson examines their lives.

Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in central Texas, Coming Out to the Streets looks into the LGBTQ youth's lives before they experience homelessness—within their families, schools, and other institutions—and later when they navigate the streets, deal with police, and access shelters and other services. Through this documentation, Brandon Andrew Robinson shows how poverty and racial inequality shape the ways that the LGBTQ youth negotiate their gender and sexuality before and while they are experiencing homelessness. To address LGBTQ youth homelessness, Robinson contends that solutions must move beyond blaming families for rejecting their child. In highlighting the voices of the LGBTQ youth, Robinson calls for queer and trans liberation through systemic change.

This interview is part of an NBN special series on “Mobilities and Methods.”

Brandon Andrew Robinson is Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside and coauthor of Race and Sexuality.

Alize Arıcan is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work has been featured on City & Society, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography.

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