Existing research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth homelessness identifies family rejection as a main pathway into homelessness for the youth. This finding, however, can depict people of color or poor people as more prejudiced than White, middle‐class families. In this 18‐month ethnographic study, the author complicates this rejection paradigm through documenting the narratives of 40 LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness. The author examines how poverty and family instability shaped the conditions that the youth perceived as their being rejected because of their gender and sexuality. This rejection generated strained familial ties within families wherein the ties were already fragile. Likewise, the author shows how being gender expansive marked many youth's experiences of familial abuse and strain. This study proposes the concept of conditional families to capture the social processes of how poverty and family instability shape experiences of gender, sexuality, and rejection for some LGBTQ youth.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer (LGBTQ+) young people of color encounter interlocking systems of social prejudice and discrimination. However, little is understood about how subjective meanings of perceived structural stigma associated with multiple marginalized social statuses influence mental health. We document how perceived stigma can shape mental health inequalities among multiply marginalized individuals if they also encounter stigmatizing societal frameworks. Data come from in-depth interviews with 41 LGBTQ+ Latino/a young adults in the Rio Grande Valley collected from 2016 to 2017. Utilizing an intersectional minority stress framework, we qualitatively examine how young people conceptualize structural stigma, their multiple social locations (e.g., sexuality, gender, race/ethnicity, age), and their mental health. Findings highlight how LGBTQ+ Latino/a young adults experience structural racism, gender policing, and anti-LGBTQ+ religious messages in relation to their mental health. This study showcases the importance of an intersectional minority stress framework for documenting processes that can shape mental health inequalities.

Resilience has come to define a wide breadth of impactful research on marginalized groups, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth. This resilience framework shifted the deficit “at‐risk” model of research on marginalized populations to a more nuanced strengths‐based perspective. In this critical review article, we examine this research trend to understand how the shift to resilience has shaped patterns of LGBTQ youth research. In doing so, this piece calls for a more sophisticated engagement with operationalizing resilience–which is vaguely defined and often upholds dominant relations in society, such as capitalistic, heteronormative values of success and happiness. We show how a shift to understanding resistance, joy, and pleasure in LGBTQ youth's lives promotes a more dynamic and complicated look at how marginalized groups navigate their social worlds and exert power in shaping these worlds. Acknowledging and uplifting LGBTQ youth's resistance and power are necessary in pushing scholarly dialogue and the possible interventions informed by research towards a more fully transformative framework in changing and dismantling oppressive societal structures.

Existing research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth home- lessness identifies family rejection as a main pathway into homelessness for the youth. This finding, however, can depict people of color or poor people as more prejudiced than White, middle-class families. In this 18-month ethnographic study, the author complicates this rejection paradigm through documenting the narratives of 40 LGBTQ youth experienc- ing homelessness. The author examines how poverty and family instability shaped the con- ditions that the youth perceived as their being rejected because of their gender and sexuality. This rejection generated strained familial ties within families wherein the ties were already fragile. Likewise, the author shows how being gender expansive marked many youth’s experi- ences of familial abuse and strain. This study proposes the concept of conditional families to capture the social processes of how poverty and family instability shape experiences of gender, sexuality, and rejection for some LGBTQ youth.

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