Negotiating racialised (un)belonging: Black LGBTQ resistance in Toronto’s gay village

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which homeless Black queer and trans youth embody and perform everyday acts of temporal and spatial resistance in Toronto’s gay village. By analysing interviews, mental maps and photographs from my research with homeless lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and Two-Spirit (LGBTQ2) youth, I present how homeless Black queer and trans youth counter the whiteness and anti-Black racism they frequently experience in the village through acts of remembering and placemaking. Specifically, I argue that despite the small-scale reach of the everyday resistance that manifests in our interviews, temporal and spatial resistance challenge the whitewashing of Toronto’s gay village, which is particularly crucial in a moment when the village is centred in conversations of anti-Black racism in the city’s queer community. Engaging in these forms of everyday resistance illustrates the ways in which homeless Black LGBTQ youth instruct their own placemaking in an otherwise uninhabitably racialised neighbourhood, shift narratives of their experiences in processes of knowledge production and spark processes of their own politicisation and community building.