The very notion of home can be painful for some kids and adolescents. The homes we are born into cannot always fulfill all our needs. Intergenerational misunderstanding is inevitable. While this holds true for most teenagers, it is much more intensely felt among queer and trans youth. Parental knowledge imparted across generations rarely furnishes all the tools necessary to assist a child’s unfolding life.
Michael Bullock, First Day of High School, North Attleboro, Massachusetts, September 1991; Courtesy of the Bullock family
Many queer children are born outsiders, bound to a longing for the unconditional love and support that home promises. Queer teens often mature into disillusionment, understanding home as a place that was not built for them. These conditions can cause them to grow suspicious of the nuclear family. As they evolve and grow, they realize this disadvantage offers an enormous opportunity—the freedom to reinvent home on their own terms, to reject traditions and morals that exclude them, and to search for new models and approaches to making a home.
As friends and collaborators, we began a conversation about our own formative experiences with home, documented here as narrative reflections. Together, we came to the conclusion that home is in the lives we share, the communities we form, and the bodies we inhabit. Home happens when we decide what our homes look like, which values we want to articulate and share, and with whom we want to share them. Home divides, like mitosis, into a plurality. We often exist between worlds—the conventional household we were born into and the queer spaces we create for ourselves. The following two experiences, from creators born just over two decades apart, show us that even though social acceptance, visibility, and consciousness for queer and trans people have improved immensely over the course of a generation, the structures that drive us to reimagine home remain a formative aspect of the LGBTQ experience.
Excerpt from Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt | The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)
Journey Streams, Collage by Mom, Los Angeles, California, 2002; Image courtesy of Journey Streams