Not a lot, is the answer. We know a little bit more thanks
to a project I’ve been leading on that finished last year and that is now being
published in academic journals. You can read my blog posts about the project as
it ran on here – it led me to quite a discovery of my own sexual identity.
Anyway, the first paper from the project is now out in the International Journal of Housing Policy
and, if I say so myself, it has an ABSOLUTELY CRACKING title: Lesbian,
gay, bisexual, transgender and queer experiences of homelessness and identity:
insecurity and home(o)normativity. Of course, this means
it will never be cited, but hey-ho.
Blogging about your paper is supposed to increase its
citations, although with my “Pink Pound in the Gaybourhood” paper it helped it
garner one citation after three years. So, here is my blog summary of the
paper.
In writing-up this project, I’m drawing on my positionality
as a public policy and housing scholar who has recently branched out into
research issues around sexual and gender identity. The mainstream literature in
public policy and housing is staggeringly silent on issues of sexual and gender
identity. Through this research I discovered the rich work in disciplines like
human geography (queer geographies); sociology and cultural studies. In writing
up the research I therefore wanted to do an activist project into public policy
and housing research by bringing the lives of non-heterosexuals, and how we
understand them from varying theoretical perspectives, into
heteronormative/heterosexist disciplines. It’s, therefore, reasonably good
public policy scholarship, and pretty shoddy queer studies scholarship, but it
is trying to bring the literatures together.
In the case of homelessness among LGBT+ populations the
literature is, let’s say, difficult. There’s some dated stuff that comes from
an era of less socially liberal attitudes that suggests that it is caused by
family rejection. But even a quite old study by Prendergast et.al. questions
this simplicity. There’s also the “pop” social science of things like the “a
quarter of all young homeless people are LGBT” which I rail against for their
lack of evidential basis. I also get annoyed at that stat, and it’s
presentation, because of the simplistic way in which it is assumed sexual or
gender identity is a variable in homeless; i.e. it is a direct cause.
There’s also US and North American research. However, this
is of limited applicability. Firstly, a lot of it is written from a public
health/social work perspective so it is mainly focused on the risks of harm to
health caused by rough sleeping, rather than detailed exposition of causes,
experiences and routes out of homelessness. Secondly, the situation in the UK
regarding homelessness and rough sleeping, although bad, is no way near as
horrific as it is in the US. Particularly in Scotland, a lot of the people
captured by US research would have a right to housing which would reduce their
risks.
In terms of the homelessness literature, I was pointed
towards the work of Carol McNaughton-Nicholls. She used the concepts of
“edgework” and “thin rationality” to explore the agency of the participants in
her research on homelessness in Glasgow. Thin rationality especially, really
resonated through our data – how these LGBT people had to make difficult
decisions at points of their housing pathways that resulted in them
experiencing homelessness and then experiencing a feeling of being-at-home.
And I use the term being-at-home on purpose here (it’s not
in the paper, but this is the argument we make). This is because, what we
actually uncovered was not that sexual or gender identity was a direct cause of
homelessness – indeed many of our participants would have experienced
homelessness whatever their sexual or gender identity – but that sexual and
gender identity was wrapped up in experiences of homelessness in complex ways.
Importantly, it seemed that for our participants, being-at-home (as opposed to
just being housed) was associated with a deeper sense of security in their own
identity as queer people. This meant that being-at-home could be felt at stages
of their housing pathway where, in legal terms, they would technically be
homeless or at least inappropriately housed.
Thus the paper begins to “queer” the homelessness/housed
binary to the extent that I have a fun opening conversation gambit now of “I
don’t actually think homelessness exists”. This is a theoretical route I want
to explore further – Dr
Lindsey McCarthy’s recent paper in Housing
Studies was interesting in this regard. I am reassured that two
recent pieces of doctoral research on the topic of LGBT+ homelessness by Carin
Tunaker who was at Kent, and Philip
Mullen at Newcastle, found similar results. And I cannot thank both
of them enough for their time in sending me stuff to read and talking to me
about their research (which is a lot better than mine!).
This finding also led me to my policy recommendations –
which are that homelessness service providers need to be less reticent about
opening-up conversations with young people about their sexual and gender
identity. I was quite shocked about how worried people were about doing this;
yes straight people, it is difficult to talk about your sexuality, but us gays have to do it all the bloody time, thanks, because we live in a
heteronormative world. Anyway, it is only by opening-up such conversations that
the complexities can be understood. I would add, that in my opinion based on
this research, that it is mainstream services
that should be doing this for two reasons. Firstly, practically because
arithmetically, in a country as small as Scotland, with a population group that
is three per cent of the whole population, it is going to be difficult to
deliver specialist services for LGBT+ across a wide area. Secondly, and
normatively, be because mainstream homelessness services should be welcoming, supportive and tailored to all people, no
matter who they are.
