In seventh grade Brian, who is twenty-one years old, white, and queer-identified, began sharing with his parents that he was experiencing homosexual desires. His pediatrician recommended Spectrum to his mom when Brian expressed that he felt he needed more support than he was getting at home and at school. He told me, “I was just looking for support; I was looking for community. I was looking for people who were going through the same things I was going through and have the same feelings I have.” So in eighth grade he made the plunge and attended Spectrum for the first time. His father came with him and hung out reading a newspaper while Brian made his way. I asked him if he remembered what it felt like that first day:
Yes, I remember the first time I walked in. It was a Wednesday ’cause we looked up the schedule and they said there was a support group, and I was like oh, maybe I should go the next day at the support group for the first night. And my dad was like, “Well, why don’t we [his parents] come the first day?” ’cause I’m from the suburbs. Never really ventured too much out, I never, before I started coming to Spectrum, I rarely came downtown. . . . It was the week right after queer prom, so everyone was kind of winding down from that and there was a lot of talk about oh, you know, “I did this at queer prom,” and “I saw this person,” and whatnot . . . but also at that time of the year they’re also doing their annual survey, so I remember . . . my first day being overwhelmed a little bit, but then also getting this big [survey], and back then we didn’t do it on computers, we did it on paper! And so I had this big packet, you know, full of survey to do, and I’m like well, “I’m really coming out,” I had to fill out this survey and like identify myself and all that stuff, so, that was overwhelming at first too . . . just like, what is this place? I remember they were also talking that there was a drag show that Friday, and so I went to the drag show and that was like, wow, like overwhelming. There was so many more youth. . . . It was interesting to see. I had never been to a drag show, I didn’t even know what a drag show was.
Entering Spectrum for the first time is not for the faint of heart; it takes an incredible amount of courage and self-awareness to walk up to the building, enter the front doors, and find your way down to the youth space. Someone who is afraid to be associated with the LGBTQ community likely would not come anywhere near The Resource. A majority of the youth who make their way down the stairs and into the dazzling milieu that is Spectrum are likely to be well on their way to recognizing their gay, lesbian, bisexual, or queer sexuality and/or queer gender identity. They learn about Spectrum from peers, siblings, and—like Brian—often from adults in their lives. For many youths there, making their way into Spectrum also means “really coming out,” as Brian described. Brian refers to the survey he was asked to fill out the first time he attended, which was part of data collection being conducted by a local university.1 The survey asks youth many questions about the climate at their school, at home, and outside in the world, various health-related topics like tobacco, drug, and alcohol use, suicidal thoughts and other self-harming behaviors, religion, support systems, and demographics. Respondents are also asked to identify their gender and sexual identities and answer questions about sexual conduct. Once that initial survey is completed, youth are asked to fill out The Resource’s census every time they come. They are asked their age, race/ethnicity, whether or not they are experiencing homelessness, health insurance status, citizen status, gender and sexual identity, and whether or not they get a free or reduced lunch at school. What does it mean to name your sexual orientation and gender identity? How do youth decide which terms best describe who they are? Do they maintain those identities once they have completed the survey, or do they feel free to change them? This process of completing a survey and census—one in the service of research, the other a mechanism for The Resource to justify its existence to funders—is part of young people’s identity formation.
I share Brian’s account of discovering Spectrum because it shows some of the processes of becoming that he encountered on his journey there. From the adults—his parents and his physician—who identified Spectrum as a resource, to the university-administered survey he was asked to complete on his first visit to the space, to the introduction to downtown and drag, two things he was previously unexposed to, Brian’s formation of a sexual and gender identity is not simply a matter of experiencing desire. My hope is that these processes of how youths come to understand their sexualities and genders become visible throughout the book, helping us to think about how we all become sexual, gendered beings. Because Spectrum is so much a part of this process, I spend some time here putting it into regional, historical, and political context.
Spectrum, and The Resource, the larger LGBTQ organization that houses the youth program, are located in the heart of a bustling urban community in the western United States that is home to industry leaders in health care, technology, and investment services and to over half a million people. In 2010, the city’s skyline, a growing mass of skyscrapers and cranes, attested to the economic vibrancy of an economy seemingly untouched by the recent recession. The urban center boasts a busy public transportation system with buses and light rail; multiple professional sports stadiums and arenas; art, history, and science museums; and a booming dining and nightlife industry. Youth often arrive at Spectrum after having come from downtown, where young people are known to congregate in public spaces, shop at stores like Hot Topic or H&M, or see movies at the multiplex theater.
The Resource is located in a mixed-use residential community near downtown that has historically been known as this city’s gay and lesbian neighborhood. Like many gayborhoods across the country, this slightly seedy yet creative and lively place is undergoing urban development and gentrification that is changing its look and feel.2 In many ways, this neighborhood is losing its queerness. As a result of the new urbanization and creative economies movements, the hardscrabble businesses and residents who have so long given it a special charm have been pushed out to make room for a whiter, more educated, and straighter population. It is this same influx of development money that helped The Resource to purchase and renovate a building on one of the busiest and most eccentric city thoroughfares.
The largest racial/ethnic minority in the city are Hispanics, who make up 32 percent of the population, followed by Blacks at 11 percent, Asians at 2.8 percent, and Native Americans at 1.3 percent. Whites make up more than 50 percent of the population, and residential racial segregation is the norm. It is one of the most educated cities in the United States, where 92 percent of the city’s population has completed high school and 35 percent have bachelor’s degrees. While the median family income is just under $40,000, with the median home price at $383,000, it has increasingly become the case that the wealthy are pushing the middle- and working-class residents out of the urban center and into its periphery. Regardless, this city remains one of the most racially and economically diverse communities in the state and bears the brunt of providing a disproportionate amount of social services to individuals and families in need.3
The Resource is one of the much-needed service providers in the city. Its mission is to serve all members of the LGBTQ community, yet the various programs and services it provides—including health services, legal aid, addiction services, and outreach—are often used by those who do not have the resources to access these services privately. The same can be said of The Resource’s LGBTQ youth drop-in center Spectrum, where the bulk of the youth in regular attendance are from working-class and low-income backgrounds, many of whom are experiencing or have experienced homelessness, are struggling to complete or have dropped out of high school, and generally do not have the resources or support that many middle- and upper-class teenagers might have, including access to health insurance, quality education, and jobs. While white youth make up the majority of the Spectrum community numerically, youth of color—particularly Latinx and Black youth—are strongly represented in the space. The combination of sexual and gender minority youth from a wide range of race/ethnic and class identities results in an unusually diverse space for this typically segregated city.
Michael, who identifies as gay and is white, cismale, and barely in his forties, rolls up on his bike wearing a T-shirt, cargo shorts, and sneakers. He locks up and takes me inside Spectrum for my first visit. We walk up a small flight of concrete steps and through the glass double doors. Someone behind the reception desk, recognizing Michael, waves us in. The reception area is bright and clean, with that brand-new, not-quite-lived-in feeling, but I don’t get a chance to see much of it as we take a hard right and enter a stairwell headed for the basement, where Spectrum is. At the bottom of the stairs is a small vestibule with colorful art hanging on the walls. The art is a project the kids at Spectrum worked on with a community art group, intended to represent youth participants’ relationship to Spectrum and each other. It makes for a warm transition for visitors who exit the outside world and enter Spectrum.
After opening another door, we encounter a desk with a sign-in sheet and stacks of various pamphlets and flyers: Some announce events, some are public health flyers about sexually transmitted infections and suicide awareness. On the other side of the chest-high counter, a kid wearing all black with shoulder-length hair, dyed black with a blue streak, and multiple facial piercings greets us. Behind the L-shaped counter that separates the reception area from the rest of the space, I see a wall of lockers, a few computer stations for staff, and the soundboard for the PA system, which is currently plugged into someone’s iPod. Loud pop music fills the room.
Michael leads me to the right, and we walk along the reception counter as the space opens up to a large room with couches, stuffed chairs, and benches surrounding a low-lying table. There are just a few kids hanging out here, lounging on the couches, faces buried in their smart phones. In the lounge area there is a big-screen television and a foosball table. As we continue around to the right, another large, open room becomes visible. In it are long, banquet-style tables and stacking chairs, the far wall lined with cabinets and a countertop. Along the edge of these open spaces are bookshelves filled with the books that make up Spectrum’s lending library. Various doors leading to other rooms circle the space. There is a small room Michael explains is the “drag closet,” where clothes, makeup, mirrors, and the like are kept for drag shows. Next to it is a small, private consultation space. The remaining rooms are private offices for the various staff. There are two gender neutral bathrooms and a kitchen with a fridge, freezer, sink, and microwave.
Much like upstairs, Spectrum feels brand spanking new. The furniture is new, the rug on the floor is new, the paint on the walls is new. It’s a bit antiseptic and definitely unlived in. As he gives me the tour, Michael explains that the youth have been reluctant to make the switch to the new space. The old Spectrum, he tells me, was filled with ratty old couches, graffiti-covered walls, and an actual DJ booth, not just a PA behind a counter. Youth entered the space through a back door, so they didn’t have to encounter any staff at The Resource if they didn’t want to. Their refusal to show up seemed to be a bit of a protest to the relocation, although currently there is a contingent of kids posted up outside the building, smoking. The consensus among the adults is that the youth will reconsider coming inside once winter is on its way. For now, though, it is quiet and slow, adults often outnumbering youths in the space. During these early days at Spectrum, I often feel like I am hiding in plain sight. I hover behind the reception counter with the other adults and staff, reluctant to approach the kids quite yet. It will only be a matter of time, though, before I feel at home here.
From a generational perspective, LGBTQ-identified youth, gay-straight alliances (GSAs) in colleges and high schools, and drop-in centers like Spectrum are collectively a relatively new phenomenon. Of course, young people have always experienced homosexual desire and engaged in homosexual conduct, but it is within the context of the modern gay rights movement that people have adopted labels like “lesbian,” “gay,” “bisexual,” and more as identities marking one’s sexuality.4 In fact, the gay and lesbian rights movement—unlike the race-based Civil Rights Movement and the feminist movement—was missing a large youth-led contingent during its early stages.5 This was likely due both to the small number of self-identified gay and lesbian youth and the deeply stigmatizing and homophobic association of gay men with pedophilia.6 The first inkling of a youth-based gay and lesbian rights movement occurred on college campuses in the 1970s where students were advocating for their right to access to higher education. It wasn’t until almost twenty years later that similar student-rights-based arguments were made by high school students.7
While the growing number of gay-identified young people was resulting in a bona fide youth contingent of the gay rights social movement, a growing concern about the well-being of LGBTQ youth in the realm of public health, social work, and psychology was also developing. A 1989 U.S. Health and Human Services report on trends in youth suicide included a contribution from the San Francisco–based social worker Paul Gibson, who made a claim that there is a strong correlation between youth suicide and homosexuality.8 While Gibson was just one of many experts working with youth who had come to recognize that sexual and gender minority youth were vulnerable, his particular claim—that gay teens are two to three times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers—grew legs and has since become one of the most frequently cited “facts” used to argue that LGBTQ youth are at risk. Although Gibson’s concerns about gay youth suicide are valid, the data are disputed for being inflated, and the report critiqued, for not being grounded in the scientific method, therefore there are many who doubt the number is as high as he claimed. To be fair, Gibson never claimed to be a scientific researcher; he was asked to write a statement for the report based on his extensive experience working with gay- and lesbian-identified homeless youth. Regardless, it has been argued that the now commonly cited “Gibson numbers” resulted in the widespread recognition of the at-risk LGBTQ youth subject.9
The point is not to deny that homophobic bullying and violence are real problems that result in negative outcomes for victims—like suicide—but the story of the Gibson numbers is important to understand in the context of the construction of an LGBTQ youth subject. The story of LGBTQ youth precarity—or its correlate, resilience—has become the dominant narrative, leaving little room for an understanding of queer youth in other ways.10 And perhaps most significantly, the narrative of risk, which has situated academic scholarship on LGBTQ youth squarely in the fields of public health and psychology, has overshadowed the strength of the LGBTQ youth social movement. While this volume is not a book about social movements or organizations, it is important to recognize Spectrum’s role in the context of being a youth drop-in center for what are now broadly considered to be at-risk youth. The rise of the GSA in schools and youth drop-in centers like Spectrum is arguably a result of the at-risk narrative that began with the Gibson numbers.
As the sociologist Melinda Miceli carefully documents in her book Standing Out, Standing Together, the rise of GSAs in high schools gained most of its traction during the 1990s, bolstered by the Health and Human Services report mentioned above. Gay-straight alliances are “groups established by students for the purpose of uniting with those who shared their interest in discussing gay rights issues, educating their school community about these issues and the extent and effect of homophobia in their school, and making school policy more supportive of LGBT students’ rights.”11 Indeed, a meta-analysis of research that examined the existence of GSAs and youth self-reports of school-based victimization found that “GSA presence is associated with significantly lower levels of youth’s self-reports of homophobic victimization, fear of safety, and hearing homophobic remarks,” forms of abuse that result in students missing school, getting poor grades, and engaging in various self-harming behaviors.12 Gay-straight alliances have come to be understood as an important component of creating safer schools for sexual- and gender- minority students. What is not clear about the findings that show that having a GSA in a school results in less homophobic bullying is the causation. It remains unclear whether the existence of a GSA in a school makes the school safer or if the culture of the school, one where a GSA is allowed to exist, means that it is less homophobic to begin with.13
According to the 2015 Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) School Climate Study, which surveyed over ten thousand sixth- to twelfth-grade students in schools in every state in the country, just over half of those surveyed have a GSA or similar club in their school. The GLSEN study also found that homophobic bullying is most prominent in rural/small-town locales in the South and Midwest regions of the United States.14 Therefore it is possible that higher rates of homophobic bullying can be better explained by geography than by in-school resources, although certainly the two are interrelated. My research does not address the question about whether or not GSAs encourage tolerance or if tolerance encourages GSAs, but I want to provoke thoughtful interrogations of the role place plays in the formation of sexual and gender identities.
Compared to GSAs, less is known about the impact LGBTQ centers’ youth programs have on kids. By the time I began my research in the second decade of the 2000s, LGBTQ centers were commonplace in cities and towns all over the country. When I checked the 2017 directory for CenterLink, a national organization of LGBTQ centers, it had 185 registered members.15 According to CenterLink, almost every state in the United States has at least one center, and some states have many. There may be more, given that not every LGBTQ center in the country is a registered member of CenterLink. It is safe to assume that many of these centers have youth programming of some sort, although it’s difficult to say exactly how many LGBTQ youth drop-in centers there are across the country. LGBTQ youth services come in a variety of forms, some well established within a community, others that are more grassroots in nature. To my knowledge, there does not exist a formal record of them.
There is little work in sociology that examines LGBTQ youth centers specifically. While there is a significant amount of research done in psychology, social work, and public health involving LGBTQ youth and LGBTQ youth centers, the focus tends to be on health and well-being outcomes. For example, in their study of a youth drop-in program for sexual and gender minority youth in Houston, published in Health Promotion Practice, health science researcher Kim Romijinders and her colleagues found that “secondary social ties were strengthened” for youth attending the program, resulting in reports of “increased confidence and self-esteem.”16 This study reinforces the at-risk/resilience narrative, as the research question is centered on mental health outcomes for youth who attend this program.
An exception can be found in a cultural anthropology study published in the early 1990s. One of the first known gay youth support groups started in 1979 at Horizons, a LGBTQ community center in Chicago, later documented by Gilbert Herdt and Andrew Boxer in their ethnography Children of Horizons: How Gay and Lesbian Teens Are Leading a Way Out of the Closet.17 Herdt and Boxer’s ethnography set out to make LGBTQ youth visible and seems to be one of the first academic works to point to the power and promise of LGBTQ youth. But Children of Horizons, like the article mentioned previously, operates from the perspective of LGBTQ youth as a given, rather than LGBTQ spaces as places where identities are formed. In her review of the book in 1994, the sociologist Nancy Whittier makes note of this lack: “Also striking [about Children of Horizons] is an essentialist view of sexual identity. Despite their focus on shifting definitions of what it means to be gay or lesbian, Herdt and Boxer leave the social construction of same-sex desire unexamined. The assertion that youth are confused not about their sexual identity but about how to act on it aims to defuse accusations that adults ‘socialize’ youth to be gay or lesbian. Yet this assumption makes it impossible to examine how youths construct and interpret same-sex desire.”18 Whittier’s concern can be applied to all of the ways society takes for granted that the LGBTQ youth is a recognizable subject. While it may be true these youth-focused resources like GSAs and LGBTQ youth centers provide much needed support for a previously hidden and isolated population, the fact of their existence has the effect of influencing how young people understand their sexual and gendered selves and, in some ways, may “leave the social construction of same-sex desire unexamined.” What follows is a reflection on the effects of shifting ideologies within Spectrum.
One brisk January afternoon, Michael and I stepped out of Spectrum to grab a coffee. We chatted about my research project while walking down the street together. Always supportive of me, he expressed his excitement about the work and asked, “Are you going to talk about the influence the adult staff of Spectrum have on the youth in the space?” He explained that Sid and César, two adult staff at Spectrum, are both politically progressive and that the projects and discussions that happen in Spectrum often revolve around progressive politics. Having been an adult volunteer at Spectrum for a decade, Michael has experience with many iterations of staff, and not all of them have been what he described as “political”; he says some “were just concerned with keeping the youth out of jail.” His point was not that one approach—ideological compared to practical—is better than another but, rather, that the goals of the adult staff set the tenor of the Spectrum experience. I am not sure how to answer his question, namely because my role as an ethnographer is to observe and analyze what I see and experience, which will be limited to the Spectrum of right now. Yet I would come to understand over time how important his question is to the findings I share in this book.
Throughout this volume, I show how Spectrum youth come to form their identities as sexual and gendered persons, and I make a case that they be understood as queer-oriented. And while I don’t think it’s the case that their queer orientation is a result of the ideologies of the adult staff of Spectrum, it is true that the staff’s ideologies inform how the youths interpret their experiences. Further, it is equally important to acknowledge how the youths themselves are agents of change, whose influence will also leave its mark. As the youths encounter particular ideologies or ways of framing sexuality and gender at Spectrum—in this case, framings that are informed by a particular progressive politics—they may adopt similar framings, but in an adaptive way that suits the reality in which they live. The philosopher of science Ian Hacking, in his discussion of how scientific inquiry classifies people, suggests there is a looping effect in which efforts at classifying people create “moving targets because our investigations interact with them, and change them. And since they are changed, they are not quite the same kind of people as before.”19 While Hacking is particularly interested in the looping effects created by scientific inquiry, this can also be applied to how we understand identity formations around sexuality and gender. The youth of Spectrum are entering adolescence in a particular historical moment in which LGBTQ subjectivities are normalized, compared to previous generations. By thinking about the role Spectrum—and various other agents of socialization—play in the youths’ processes of forming sexualities and genders, we can ask ourselves, What is different about becoming sexual now?
During the time I spent at Spectrum, the United States was in the midst of a paradigm shift in terms of LGBTQ rights and awareness. Over the course of the three years I was doing research there, the U.S. military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and the Clinton-era Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) were both repealed.20 For the first time, a sitting U.S. president expressed public support for gay marriage.21 The “It Gets Better” campaign exploded in response to LGBTQ bullying.22 An increasing number of high-profile individuals came out publicly as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, including MSNBC news anchor Anderson Cooper and Los Angeles Galaxy soccer player Robbie Rogers. History was made during the 2012 election when three states—Maine, Maryland, and Washington State—passed voter-approved same-sex marriage laws and Wisconsin elected the first openly gay U.S. senator, Tammy Baldwin.23 Further, awareness of trans* rights increased steadily. Feature stories on trans* children ran in major national newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post.24 Finally, the 113th U.S. Congress passed a version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) that for the first time included gender identity as a protected status.25 It is important to remember that this era was the context for my field research because so much has happened since I stepped out of the field after the summer of 2013.
Probably the two most significant changes to occur immediately following the completion of my research would be the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which guaranteed the right to marry for same-sex couples, and the skyrocketing increase in awareness of trans* rights. While often centered around celebrity trans activists like Laverne Cox, a transwoman actor best known for her role on the television show Orange Is the New Black, and Caitlyn Jenner, the U.S. Olympian and athlete who came out publicly as a transwoman in 2015, trans* experience has also been echoed throughout the country in the lives of many everyday people. Countless stories about trans* children continue to surface in various media outlets.
While I was doing my fieldwork at Spectrum from 2010 to 2013, observing what appeared to be a powerful progressive moment in LGBTQ rights, a sea change was occurring that would result in a Republican sweep of the 2016 elections and which threatens to reverse many of the gains made by the LGBTQ movement. Even though this book demonstrates evidence of progress through the narratives of Spectrum youth, I have been cautiously optimistic about what that means for the future of sexuality and gender in this country. Prior to the 2016 elections, I felt that the country was clearly moving in the direction of more and more acceptance (not just tolerance) of same-sex sexuality and gender fluidity, but that queerness would always be a marker of exclusion for some. But the Republican wins in 2016 shook me to my core, leaving me filled with cynicism and doubt about the country’s ability to move past old-fashioned, bigoted norms regarding sexuality.
In what appears to be a backlash to progress, as I completed this book manuscript in 2017, the Republican Party gained control of the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate. The president appointed one U.S. Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch, a politically conservative originalist, and will likely have the opportunity to appoint another.26 President Trump also appointed Jeff Sessions as U.S. attorney general—who as a former Alabama attorney general and U.S. senator for the state of Alabama consistently opposed various LGBTQ rights measures.27 As so-called “bathroom bills” that resemble legalized segregation of trans* people are popping up in states all over the country, the Trump administration is rescinding the Department of Education’s trans*-friendly interpretation of Title IX as a law that prohibits gender discrimination along with sex discrimination in federally funded educational institutions.28 Conflating a budget-related debate over covering medical services for those serving in the military and suffering symptoms of gender dysphoria with all transgender people, in July 2017 President Trump tweeted his intentions to ban all transgender people from serving in the military.29 And finally, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported an increase in hate groups across the country, including those who express bigotry toward LGBTQ people.30
While the state of California amended its education code with the passage of the California Healthy Youth Act in October 2015, mandating the most comprehensive, LGBTQ inclusive and affirming sex education policy in the country, in 2017 the Trump administration and the Republican Party are threatening to revive abstinence-only policies from the days of the George W. Bush administration, policies that the Obama administration had been consistently defunding since 2009.31 It has become painfully clear that the United States is deeply divided by partisan political values when it comes to rights-based policies regarding sexuality and gender. While surely an oversimplification, those divisions appear to be geographical: The Midwest and the South along with suburban and rural communities seem to be in opposition to the West Coast and Northeast and large metropolitan enclaves.32 In the wake of the 2016 presidential election there has been much talk about how the Republican presidential campaign played on race-, class-, and nationality-based anxieties and fears that helped to mobilize white voters across class for Donald Trump. Support for Trump is also evidence of a negative response to LGBTQ gains, inherent in the critiques of political correctness among so-called elites.33
Therefore any analysis of queer youth experience in the contemporary United States must be geographically situated: Around the same time that the state of California was amending its education code in the name of protecting children, the state of North Carolina passed House Bill 2, the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, one of the most transphobic pieces of legislation in the country, also in the name of protecting children.34 The Spectrum experience described within these pages might be seen by some as a metronormative one that “reveals the rural to be the devalued term in the urban/rural binary governing the spatialization of modern U.S. sexual identities.”35 But to suggest that Spectrum is progressive because of its metropolitan setting is not meant to also suggest that suburban, ex-urban, and rural settings are regressive.36 Rather, it indicates a deep political divide within the United States that is playing out along racialized, classed, gendered, and sexualized lines. It remains unclear whether or not the United States, on the whole, is becoming less trans- and homophobic or not; what is clear is that the nation is divided over the significance of identities to experiences and how exactly to solve the problems related to inequality that plague the nation.
Yet there is something else at work here that complicates a simple urban versus rural moral divide. I am struck by the presence of young, gay white men in the so-called alt-right movement: men like Milo Yiannopoulos and Lucian Wintrich, who are not rural conservatives but high-profile media pundits who live and work in major urban centers like London, Washington, DC, and New York.37
Milo Yiannopoulos is a British political commentator and former editor of the “alt-right” media outlet Breitbart News, who is perhaps most infamous for the February 1, 2017, University of California Berkeley stop on his “Dangerous Faggot” speaking tour. His appearance on campus was the target of protests that resulted in a full-scale riot and cancellation of the event, sparking nationwide debates about free speech on college campuses. The English journalist and feminist activist Laurie Penny describes Yiannopoulos as “a bratty, vicious court jester of the new right who made a name for himself by saying grotesque and shocking things that he may or may not have ever believed. He does this compulsively, with no respect for the repercussions, or for the fact that a lot of people do believe what he says and act accordingly.”38
According to a New Yorker profile written by contributing editor Andrew Marantz, Lucien Wintrich has no training as a journalist, but as a high-profile Trump supporter he announced at the New York City DeploraBall, a pre-inauguration celebration of Trump’s election, “We’ve been in contact with people in the new Administration, and . . . I’m going to be . . . the youngest, gayest correspondent in the White House in history!”39 In his profile, Marantz describes photos hanging on the walls of Wintrich’s apartment of semi-clothed young men in “Make America Great Again” hats. Wintrich produced these photos for a series titled “Twinks 4 Trump.”
These unapologetically gay members of the extreme right have made it their mission to denigrate the “libtards” whom they see as enemies of democracy. That the white male backlash includes a hefty representation of gay men supports arguments about normalization: that gayness—in and of itself—has become an acceptable way to be in U.S. society, as long as it is white, male, and heteronormative. As a high-profile conservative commentator, Yiannopoulos’s obnoxious, bigoted behavior was willfully ignored—and sometimes embraced—by the Republican Party and the conservative Right in the United States until he was toppled from his pedestal by a very queer claim: He joked about his sexual experiences as a minor with a Catholic priest, suggesting that intergenerational sex among men was not always harmful. It was this—not his bigotry—that caused the Right to disavow him (and for book publishers Simon & Schuster to revoke the $250,000 advance they had offered him for his biography).40
To suggest that an LGBTQ-identified person represents a particular set of (progressive) goals or strategies is ridiculous. Yet too often that assumption is made. Perhaps ironically, when one can be both gay and profoundly vitriolic toward all kinds of marginalized people, it is a sign of the democratization of sexuality. It’s also a sign that sexuality and gender are always constituted in relation to other identities like race, class, ability, and more. That characters like Yiannopoulos and Wintrich exist and are revered is less a sign that gayness has arrived than a sign that white supremacy and hegemonic masculinity persist.
The rights of LGBTQ-identified and queer people are not, by any stretch of the imagination, the sole target of the Trump administration. But there is no denying the profound social change that has occurred related to issues of sexuality and gender in the United States in the last fifty years. Young people, like those I met at Spectrum, are transforming the way we as a society think about sexuality and gender faster than people like myself can publish scholarship on the topic. Similarly, the political climate has shifted in ways I never could have anticipated since I stepped out of the field in 2013. Keeping these things in mind, I invite the reader to join me as I explore an LGBTQ youth drop-in center at a particular historical moment during the early stages of the twenty-first century.