A defining moment in my life occurred near the end of my college career. After several years of frequent LGBTQ activism, I began to be invited to speak at community workshops and in schools regarding the challenges facing LGBTQ youth, as well as their resilience. One afternoon, several of us spoke to a college class of future teachers and school counselors. I mentioned that neighborhood concerns could also affect school performance, such as in the case of young gay men who are involved in crime or gangs.
“A homo thug!” one of the students called out. “They’re called homo thugs now,” he declared with certainty and a smile. A sly, knowing smile. The class snickered, but I met his eyes.
I looked at his basketball jersey, his doo rag, his close-shaven goatee.
“Homo thugs,” I repeated. “I’ll remember that,” and smiled back.
By the end of that year, I sent in my graduate school applications and made it clear that I wanted to study gay gang members. My path was set.
This book is just one bend in a long and winding road. At the beginning of my senior year of high school, I became involved with several LGBTQ advocacy groups in Columbus, Ohio. Just a few months prior, the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down all remaining domestic sodomy laws with Lawrence v. Texas, but many states, including my home state of Ohio, had few, if any, protections for LGBTQ people in the realms of employment, housing, adoption, child custody, healthcare, marriage, or school-based bullying.
My civic participation impressed upon me the realities that many young queer people face with regard to homophobic school climates, families who react negatively to their identities, street harassment, and other harmful experiences that can lead to increased substance abuse, mental health concerns, and suicide. Adolescence is already a difficult time for many, featuring tumultuous romantic relationships, schoolyard trials, and growing pains. I was certainly going through those myself. For urban queer youth, these can be complicated by struggling school districts and neighborhood disorder, which can make our identities feel like another liability; a source of uncertainty instead of a source of pride. Luckily, Columbus youth could access a visible, vocal, and vibrant urban queer community, which included bars and cafes as well as community outreach organizations. We’d stay as late as we could until they closed, carded us, or kicked us out for being too rowdy.
One of the organizations I became involved with was a drop-in center for gay, lesbian, bisexual, questioning, and transgender youth and allies ages 12–20; it also offered opportunities to get involved with LGBTQ advocacy. During my years with the center, their demographic was primarily urban, non-white kids who received additional services from other community agencies or the state. Many were also in the process of questioning their sexuality and/or gender identity, and coming out as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or another “queer-spectrum” sexual or gender identity. There were some who we would not see for weeks or months at a time, only to later find out that one had been detained for assaulting a staff member at a group home; another had been removed from the only foster parent he had ever lived with who had acknowledged his gay identity. As a member of the center’s Youth Advisory Board, I was part of the first discussions the center had ever had about youth who came to it with knives or guns. While we wanted to maintain a safe space for everyone, we knew some youth felt they needed these implements for protection against the world outside the center, and had to create policies to deal with this reality. In light of these situations, I started to think about how the class, race, and sexuality of young people combined to shape their lives, specifically regarding their choices to join gangs, fight, sell drugs, and sometimes even sell sex. Their life experiences were vastly different than my own as a white, middle-class, queer woman, and I needed to learn more.
My research was borne of my efforts to do just that. Shortly after I began graduate school, I reached out to people I knew when I lived in Columbus to see if they’d be interested in talking to me about being a gay gang member. Although I did have some trouble with my initial recruitment, I didn’t seem to have much difficulty establishing rapport with participants, despite some concern I would. Because my sex, race, or education level could have discouraged them from sharing certain details of their lives with me, our shared knowledge as young queer people helped participants to feel that the social differences between us were not so great because I, in a way, spoke their language (both literally and figuratively). I understood their narratives of feeling “different” from a very young age. I understood the process of coming out as a seemingly neverending series of personal disclosures (with varying levels of risk associated with each, though many are fairly innocuous and without negative consequences). And I understood the struggle to live as an openly gay person while steering clear of pitfalls such as drugs, “drama,” and even death. When participants didn’t feel the need to elaborate on a gay-related concept, they would sometimes say, “You’re gay, you understand.” Of course I still always pressed for detail, because I could not presume that I did know what they meant in light of our social differences on dimensions such as biological sex, race, and class, but indeed, I often did understand.
There were also many moments of nostalgia during my data collection, especially related to Columbus’s queer scene. Depending on who was working that night, some of the gay establishments would allow underage patrons to stay until 11 p.m. or midnight; others would let them stay at all hours as long as they didn’t cause trouble. These places were an oasis where LGBTQ youth could get a taste of the nightlife before coming of age, since no other bars/clubs in Columbus carved out space for them. There were teen clubs, but I can hardly imagine it being easy for young queer people to dance with and show affection to same-sex romantic partners there. The “gay scene” provided opportunities for queer kids from all over the city to connect, as did the LGBTQ community agencies. Many of the men in this study named specific establishments or organizations in their interviews, and we had moments of longing for our teen years, an establishment or organization that had come under new management or leadership, or one that had closed. Or, alternatively, we’d make a plan to go to one of the places that was still open and thriving, and sometimes, we did actually go together.
Despite that piece of friendly advice years ago, most of my participants don’t actually use the term “homo thug,” partially because they resist claiming identities as “thugs,” and some are not out to their gangs, limiting their public usage of self-identifiers such as “homo.” I hope that even this nugget about the men I spoke with helps illustrate what this book is about: highlighting the identities and experiences of gay gang- and crime-involved young men, both challenging and providing further nuance to what we think we know about urban gay men and the ways they form close bonds and negotiate complex lives.
These days, it may seem like the necessary quest for respectable identity and acceptance for LGBTQ people has come to an end. I have met plenty of people who have never heard of the Stonewall Riots, but have definitely heard of Neil Patrick Harris. Gays and lesbians can serve openly in the military, and the Supreme Court has ruled that same-sex marriage is legal throughout the United States. However, these victories largely represent assimilationist ideals, and benefit some groups’ interests or desires far more than others. Our fight is far from over. We should be concerned with the lived realities of LGBTQ young people, many of whom already experience marginalization on the basis of their race or ethnicity, their refusal to fit within society’s expectations for their gender presentation, the acts they commit in order to feed and clothe themselves, or the ways they literally fight back against violence. What of these young people, who still experience harassment, assault, and exclusion of many forms? How are we to understand how they both respond to and resist this exclusion, especially if we don’t ask? We certainly had better start trying.