Black 2SLGBTQ+ Youth Navigating the Dis/Comfort of Home Place

Addressing the challenges faced by Black 2SLGBTQ+ youth calls for an understanding of how multiple social identity markers as well as various socio-cultural factors affect their lived experiences. Intersectionality facilitates a nuanced understandings of how race, class, religion, and gendered colonial histories intersect with queerness to produce different outcomes. This presentation underscores the need for queer positive community support that centres race and culture. It begins by highlighting the need for affirming and supportive parents in the lives of Black 2SLGBTQIA+ youth. I trouble the idea of “coming out” as one that is rooted in homo-hegemonic framings of queerness, and instead advance a decolonial and intersectional understanding through the conceptual framework “dash out”. I argue that, for Black queer youth, the lived experiences of straddling the intersections of Blackness and queerness results in more of a ‘dash out’ (meaning to throw out in the Jamaican language), rather than a “coming out”. This “dash out” experience is one that complicates simplistic Euro-Western constructions of the visibly out and proud queer. I share some cases and situations of African queer affirming parenting, and speak to positive outcomes that counter the perception of the suffocatingly homophobic African home place. Drawing on the narratives of queer Black youth, I conclude by underscoring the need to create culturally responsive safe spaces in homes and communities for Black 2SLGBTQIA+ youth.