Under the Trees in Lincoln Center: Queer and Trans Homeless Youth Coming Together in the City

This essay explores the relationship of two homeless youth—one queer and one trans—as they move together through and pass time in public space between the opening hours of their shelters and groups homes. Pulling from a critical ethnography of the experiences of trans and queer youth in New York City, this essay examines how these two youth come to know how to navigate and be in relation with the affects, structures, bodies, and discourses that comprise the city. The essay centers their relationship as an act of resistance, or queerruption as per this symposium, against normative assumptions about race, gender, and sexuality that dictate how the city is “supposed” to be used. The essay is written in a narrative form that asks readers to consider how they are coming to know these two youth through the ways they are animated in the text, with the purpose being to unpack the assumptions of presupposing who, what, and where trans and queer youth are thought to be.