"Please #Help": Care and Caring Through Housing Insecurity with Online Queer and Trans* Social Support

Abstract: An abundance of research confirms that queer and trans* folx are overrepresented in populations experiencing housing insecurity; however, less is known about how queer and trans* folx navigate such precarity. Utilizing a publicly accessible archive that documents online discourse from Reddit, TikTok, Twitter/X, and YouTube about 2SLGBTQIA+ folx and housing insecurity (Desjarlais-deKlerk et al. 2023), this study explores online social support as one approach to surviving housing insecurity. We find that queer and trans* folx utilized each of the social media platforms to foster community care by seeking, requesting, offering, and delivering instrumental, informational, emotional, and spiritual support. In addition to excavating online social support trends, we identify and introduce the concept of anti-care to describe content or actions that have the ability to negatively impact housing insecure 2SLGBTQIA+ folx. We characterize anti-care between three categories: hate speech, negative support, and deservedness. We determine that online social support can be characterized as caring, compassion without action, or as a practice of care. Caring, while not valueless, and perhaps invaluable in certain online contexts, does not rise to a practice of care without action.