Scholarship Review of Queer Youth Homelessness in Canada and the United States

This paper is a review of historical and social science literature on the subject of homelessness among LGBTQ+ youth. I ultimately seek to situate my future doctoral work, an oral history of queer youth homelessness in Ontario, within the scholarship surveyed here. Stories help us to understand what statistics look and feel like. This analysis takes a thematic and interdisciplinary approach that does not follow a linear, temporal understanding of events or accounts. The approach of this paper is meant to reflect the nonlinear and thematic modes of remembering that many experience when recounting their times on the street. The stories of queer youth on the street are complex and their ways of remembering these moments in time are ever-more so. But, as Sassafras Lowrey so accurately put it, sometimes it is in the complexity that the truth is most evident.