Drawing on empirical and theoretical traditions that approach people's movement through spaces as stories about culture and possibility, this article considers how the conditions occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic rigidified societal institutions — such as the home and the relations it envelops — and articulates “queer roaming” as an integral method of queer ontologies of mobility. The authors’ analysis of interviews conducted during the pandemic with queer people in Toronto, Ontario, considers queer people's ability to engage in physical and psychological roaming amid pandemic policies that relied on and affirmed cisheteronormative framings of home. The authors ask what happens when roaming — a method of queer exploration of self and community — is curtailed, and ways of moving beyond the protective and suppressive shell of home become less apparent? This article finds that queer movement toward, through, and past possibilities and destinations outside normative institutional structures was compromised by lockdowns and social distancing and that queer people roamed during lockdowns through new terrains and possibilities, both physical and virtual. In finding new ways to roam, queer people inhabit, rupture, and transform their worlds; make apparent persistent collective needs outside normative social structures; and insist on the ability to pursue new desires, paths, and ways of being.
Fields et al. (Wed,) studied this question.