"Better than Juvie": Family Policing and the Creation of the Gay Teen

In the 1980s, queer and trans foster youth in Los Angeles County became part of an unprecedented experiment. Social workers began placing the youth in group homes run by the Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services (GLASS), the first organization in the United States run by queer people for queer and trans foster youth. Youth had little choice in their placement at GLASS group homes. Some GLASS youth came to group homes upon parole from a juvenile justice facility, while others were placed in foster care as an alternative to incarceration after being arrested for a so-called “status offense” (e.g. truancy or running away from home). Thus, for many youth at GLASS group homes, a refusal to comply with the expectations of the group home would lead to incarceration. Building on legal scholar Noah Zatz’s framework of “better than jail” to describe the ways in which the threat of incarceration coerces participation in the labor market, as well as Dorothy Roberts’ conceptualization of foster care as a form of “family policing,” this paper explores how group homes functioned as a “better than juvie” alternative to incarceration for queer and trans youth. While foster care is rarely considered part of the carceral state, the two were structurally linked in 1980s Los Angeles. Moreover, queer and trans foster youth moved between carceral and community-based care, and the existence of incarceration was crucial to promoting youths’ compliance with the norms of foster care. Through the rarely stated, but omnipresent, threat of incarceration, group homes compelled queer and trans foster youth to adhere to a set of practices designed to build respectable queer and trans adults. Ultimately, group homes sought to create citizen-subjects that–while visibly gender or sexual minorities–rejected notions of deviance and reproduced adherence to capitalist orders.