Young, Queer, and on the Streets: Homeless LGBTQ2 Youth in Toronto's Gay Village

With a rapidly expanding homeless population in Toronto, the question of if and how homeless lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and Two Spirit (LGBTQ2) youth locate community and support in the citys gay village of Church-Wellesley is of increasing concern. This dissertation examines the ways in which homeless LGBTQ2 youth experience social, cultural, and political relations, and negotiate forms of power, within and around Torontos Church-Wellesley Village (CWV). The research in which this dissertation is based was conducted between September 2016 to October 2017, and employed various qualitative research methods with 29 youth, 11 employees from LGBTQ2 non-profit organizations in and around the village, and 11 employees from various municipal services. In this dissertation, I consider what it means to survive, and what strategies of survival are and are not enacted by homeless LGBTQ2 youth within the CWV. I place the experiences of youth participants as the central evidence from which I draw my analysis, using data from their interviews to dictate the direction of each chapter and how I engage with the other evidence gathered from interviews with adults. In doing so, this dissertation challenges the minimal consideration of homeless LGBTQ2 youth in scholarship within queer geography, critical urban studies, and youth geographies by centering their identities, lived experiences, and material conditions at the root of my research design and analysis. I explore the various actors that facilitate the social, cultural, and political landscapes of the CWV, and illustrate the ways in which village institutions cultivate a governable urban environment that targets homeless youth as sources of disorder. In spite of these dominating forces, some LGBTQ2 youth utilize consumer spaces within the village to foster kinship networks that aid in their strategies for survival. As well, despite logics of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism rooted in the village, homeless Black and Indigenous LGBTQ2 youth resist expressions of queer racism through momentary and, often, individualized actions of refusal. I demonstrate how such actions express forms of urban subaltern citizenship that reframe how gay villages are valued and understood within popular and academic discourses, and articulate important expressions of urban queer belonging.