More-than-safety: co-creating resourcefulness and conviviality in out-of-school spaces for suburban LGBTQ2S youth

Between the sub-disciplines of children’s geographies and geographies of sexualities lie the spatialities of children’s and youth’s sexualities, an understudied subfield especially in non-metropolitan contexts. This paper examines the co-creation strategies of three LGBTQ2S out-of-school youth programmes in the Canadian peripheral municipality of Surrey, British Columbia. It argues that larger youth populations, a circumscribed hetero-temporality, and limited spatial resources necessitate attention to specific modes of co-creating out-of-school spaces for suburban LGBTQ2S youth (aged 15–24). The paper examines the practices of adaptive spatial co-creation with suburban LGBTQ2S youth within the fragmented local suburban governance landscape of community organizations. In contrast with the public visibility stressed within adult urban gay identity politics, a goal of ‘more-than-safety’ is primarily achieved for suburban LGBTQ2S youth through privacy, invisibility, and boundary work that results in weak integration, a lack of collaboration, and the re-bounding of identity parcels across suburbia’s extensive geography.