This book examines why Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ+) young people continue to face homelessness and intersectional disadvantages, even as legal and social attitudes appear to improve. Drawing on seventeen years of ethnographic research and frontline work in England, it offers an intimate and rigorous account of how young people navigate housing precarity, family rejection and uneven access to state support. It shows how sexuality, gender, race, class, disability and religion shape encounters with welfare systems, revealing how well‑intentioned policies can reproduce harm and how celebrated progress in LGBTQ+ rights can obscure the structural conditions that leave many behind. Tunåker argues for a deeper understanding of the “paradox of progress” and its consequences for those at the sharpest edges of marginalisation. The book speaks to scholars and practitioners in socio‑legal studies, legal anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, homelessness and housing research, and anyone concerned with state power and meaningful social change.

Dr Carin Tunåker is a legal anthropologist and Senior Lecturer at Kent Law School, UK, and Co‑Director of the Centre for Sexuality, Race and Gender Justice. Her research exposes hidden and everyday forms of housing precarity. She leads major studies on LGBTQ+ homelessness and intersectionality. Her scholarship advances a critical, activist socio‑legal approach that reframes homelessness as a political and relational crisis rather than an individual failure.