LGBTQ Americans finally won Fair Housing Act protections. Here’s how they’re working.
It’s been a particularly difficult time for Dianne Karon, a 65-year-old transgender woman, as the political vitriol aimed at queer and trans people has escalated.
Despite this, Karon says she still feels lucky because she has safe and secure housing after landing a spot in Stonewall House, a Brooklyn LGBTQ- friendly senior housing development that opened in 2019. Like many queer and trans people, she has struggled to find permanent housing, and having served time in prison certainly didn’t make things easier.
“I would be living on the streets if it wasn’t for [Stonewall House],” Karon said. “It is the best, and I don’t have to hide myself.”
LGBTQ individuals have long faced difficulties finding and maintaining stable housing. Studies have found housing providers favor heterosexual couples over same-sex partners and provide transgender applicants fewer options than cis applicants when they disclose their gender status. Housing searches can be particularly challenging for the roughly 3 million LGBTQ adults over the age of 50, who grew up in a time when being open about one’s identity was far less accepted. And LGBTQ people have had little redress; while housing discrimination based on traits like race and disability status is banned under the Fair Housing Act, a landmark civil rights statute passed 54 years ago, sexual orientation and gender identity weren’t protected until 2021.
It’s a huge shift for the LGBTQ community, though experts say there’s a long way to go before these new rights reach those they’re meant to protect. To get there will require building trust among LGBTQ individuals that their concerns will be taken seriously, and standing up sustained and proactive training and enforcement for all the many gatekeepers involved in the housing market. The government’s track record in these areas is far less than perfect.
Implementation matters because policy changes alone aren’t enough to change behavior. And places like Karon’s Stonewall House, named for the 1969 Stonewall uprising often cited as a turning point for the modern LGBTQ movement, aren’t sufficient. Though it’s one of a handful of queer-friendly federally subsidized housing complexes across the country, experts recognize there will never be enough of those sorts of units to address the need, plus not all LGBTQ people want to live in those communities.
Long term, addressing America’s housing crisis would give landlords and owners less power to discriminate. But here and now, the federal government can vigorously enforce anti-discrimination laws to ensure everyone, including LGBTQ Americans, can have safe, affordable homes.
The Supreme Court has finally taken steps to protect LGBTQ Americans against some forms of discrimination
Despite the wave of political and rhetorical attacks against LGBTQ individuals in the last decade, civil rights experts say there have never been more legal tools available in the US to fight LGBTQ housing discrimination. This fact can be traced largely back to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, just two years ago.
In June 2020, Gorsuch, one of the court’s more conservative judges, wrote the majority opinion for Bostock v. Clayton County, holding that a fair reading of “sex” under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — which prohibits job discrimination rooted in “an employee’s race, color, sex, religion or national origin”— covers those workers who are gay or transgender, too.
The implications of this decision were enormous. On his first day in office, President Joe Biden issued an executive order directing all federal agencies to review and ensure that their rules, regulations, and guidances were consistent with the Bostock decision.
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was the first agency to respond; on February 11, 2021, HUD issued a memo authored by Jeanine Worden, the acting assistant secretary for fair housing and equal opportunity, affirming that the Fair Housing Act’s sex discrimination provision was comparable to that of Title VII. Given that, HUD concluded, LGBTQ individuals would now be entitled to the same federal housing protections as everyone else under the law. HUD is “open and ready to assist persons who believe they have experienced discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity,” Worden wrote.
Prior to Bostock, housing protections for LGBTQ individuals were spotty, and, in the majority of US states, altogether absent. As of 2016, 22 states had laws prohibiting housing discrimination based on sexual orientation, and 19 of those had bans on housing discrimination based on gender identity. While HUD promulgated a rule in 2012 to ensure all individuals have access to the agency’s programs, shelters, services, and facilities, LGBTQ individuals could find little relief in the courts for housing discrimination in the regular rental and home-buying markets.
These legal barriers were exemplified clearly in 2016 when Mary Walsh and Bev Nance, a married lesbian couple in Missouri, were denied housing at a senior living home explicitly because they were gay. The couple had been together for nearly four decades and applied to live in Friendship Village, a retirement community. The women had long conversations with the facility’s staff, made multiple visits to see the units, and even paid their $2,000 deposit. But just days before signing their final agreement, they got a call from management requesting more details about their relationship. Following this conversation, Walsh and Nance were told Friendship Village would only accept couples that followed the “Biblical definition” of marriage, asserting that marriage was defined as between a man and a woman.
Walsh and Nance filed a lawsuit alleging housing discrimination, but in 2019, a district court dismissed their complaint, stating that same-sex couples were not entitled to protection under the Fair Housing Act.
Then came Bostock. Michael Allen, a civil rights attorney who helped litigate Walsh and Nance’s case, said that following the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling, lawyers for Friendship Village called and asked if they would consider a settlement. Walsh and Nance agreed, and while the terms are confidential, Friendship Village now makes clear in its handbook that discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity is forbidden.
Progress has been made since Bostock, but not enough
Over the last year, Allen told me, there has been “no confusion at all” in the courts about applying Bostock to fair housing, and he says civil rights lawyers are “in very good shape” to build out more cases going forward, which will help solidify Bostock’s reasoning to future housing disputes.
But while the courts understand the law, the burden of enforcement generally falls to the individual. You have to know your housing rights to seek redress, and you need the wherewithal to take action.
HUD does have a tool to mitigate that burden: Individuals can file administrative complaints with HUD at no cost, and federal housing officials will then investigate them. In other words, people can start the process without paying expensive lawyer fees up front.
If an administrative law judge later hears a case, the plaintiff can get a lawyer, but they are not required to. Attorneys are also incentivized to represent individuals with strong evidence of housing discrimination because if the plaintiffs win, then the defense must cover their attorney’s legal fees.
HUD, in turn, has started to take steps to more proactively solicit concerns from LGBTQ tenants and homeowners. In announcing the Worden memo last year, HUD officials said they had received 197 claims of housing discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity in 2020. A HUD spokesperson told Vox the agency had received 232 cases in 2021, still a far cry from the number of race-based (2,514) and disability-related (4,855) complaints filed that year. It will take time, experts say, before more LGBTQ Americans really learn about the agency’s changes and trust HUD to take their problems seriously.
And more needs to be done. In 2021, Amy Hillier, a University of Pennsylvania social policy professor, and devin michelle bunten, an urban economics and housing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published an analysis on how to bring more queer and intersectional approaches to fair housing. Specifically concerning the Fair Housing Act itself, they say there’s still room to reinterpret the language to more broadly protect LGBTQ individuals. While the law protects people from discrimination on the basis of “family status,” this currently does not include the chosen families of many queer and trans individuals. “The legality of private discrimination against most household structures mirrors the skepticism of nonnormative housing long espoused by public policy,” they write.
To be clear, passing new federal protections won’t solve the broader shortage of affordable housing. Implementing those new laws with fidelity won’t even mean the end to LGBTQ discrimination. Race-based discrimination in housing has been illegal since 1968 under the Fair Housing Act. Anti-Asian violence has for years been illegal under civil and criminal statutes. Both still, unfortunately, exist throughout society.
“The Fair Housing Act is just a tool, but without it, at least in the housing realm, people could discriminate against LGBTQ individuals with impunity,” said Allen. “This will correct for that.”
Everything and anything can be a trend on the internet. Why are we so determined to name them?
One of the recent trends on TikTok is an aesthetic called “night luxe.” It embodies the kind of performative opulence one usually encounters at New Year’s Eve parties: champagne, disco balls, bedazzled accessories, and golden sparkles.
“Night luxe” doesn’t actually mean anything. It isn’t a reaction to wellness culture, nor is it proof that partying is “in” again (has partying ever been “out”?). It’s just one of many aesthetic designations for which the internet has contrived a buzzy, meaningless portmanteau. Rest assured that night luxe will likely have faded into irrelevance by the time this article is published, only for another meme-ified aesthetic (i.e., coastal grandmother) to be crowned the next viral “trend.”
The tendency to register and categorize things, whether it be one’s identity, body type, or aesthetic preferences, is a natural part of online life. People have a penchant for naming elusive digital phenomena, but TikTok has only accelerated the use of cutesy aesthetic nomenclature. Anything that’s vaguely popular online must be defined or decoded — and ultimately, reduced to a bundle of marketable vibes with a kitschy label.
Last month, Harper’s Bazaar fashion news director Rachel Tashjian declared that “we’re living through a mass psychosis expressing itself through trend reporting.” There is, I would argue, as much reporting as there is trend manufacturing. No one is sure exactly what a trend is anymore or if it’s just an unfounded observation gone viral. The distinction doesn’t seem to matter, since TikTok — and the consumer market — demands novelty. It creates ripe conditions for a garbage-filled hellscape where everything and anything has the potential to be a trend.
TikTok plucks niche digital aesthetics out of obscurity and serves them up to an audience that might not have known or cared in the first place. While aesthetic components were once integral to the formation of traditional subcultures, they’ve lost all meaning in this algorithmically driven visual landscape. Instead, subcultural images and attitudes become grouped under a ubiquitous, indefinable label of a “viral trend” — something that can be demystified, mimicked, sold, and bought.
Trend brain, as I call it, encourages us to simplify everything online into something either buyable, understandable, or moral (and therefore worthy of consumption). We may tire of trend talk, but there is a devout certainty to the speed at which they’re cycled through. There are more choices than ever today, but seemingly less authority as to what constitutes a trend’s lasting legitimacy. Consumers are left to grasp at these dwindling markers of cool: fleeting fads to help us understand capital-C culture and ultimately, what’s on the horizon. How did we get here? And perhaps more importantly, will the trend churn ever stop?
My theory begins with cottagecore. Cottagecore, for the unfamiliar, is an online aesthetic that glamorizes aspects of rural living: bucolic pastures, pastel-colored sundresses, and the virtues of idle homemaking. It emerged on Tumblr in 2018, and, like night luxe, exists largely as an online state of mind — a moodboard intended for digital cosplay. Anyone on the internet could personify this charming sylvan lifestyle, simply by sharing images or videos of mossy fields, farm animals, and prairie dresses.
When cottagecore went viral on TikTok in 2020, however, it morphed into something concretely buyable. It became a lifestyle to emulate via mass consumption through nap dresses, woven bags, rustic home trinkets, and a room’s worth of potted plants. Cottagecore’s mainstream popularity coincided with the pandemic’s early months, a time when people were desperately searching for a sense of escapism, often by buying lots of stuff. The aesthetic reflected a kind of quaint domesticity, which was fitting for the spring quarantine. On Tumblr, a visual blogging platform, online aesthetics could transcend physicality. On TikTok, which has become an informal but powerful product recommendation engine, a prerequisite for most aesthetic trends is tangible accessibility. In other words, what could a person wear or buy to embody cottagecore?
@0utfits4.you cottagecore outfits!! #outfits #shein #fyp #trending #cottage #cottagecore #foryou
♬ Hey Lover by The Daughters Of Eve - maisy merkel
For media outlets, fashion blogs, and TikTok trend forecasters, the frenzy to identify, categorize, and decode every emerging aesthetic is not just driven by algorithms. The hype can be profitable too. This content-dependent relationship occurs most visibly in fashion, coalescing into what Vox’s Rebecca Jennings has dubbed “TikTok couture.” Trends, or the illusion of a trend, benefit the fast-fashion companies and direct- to-consumer brands making products that aesthetically align with such fleeting fancies. They can also often act as major sponsors and advertisers for content creators and publications.
The problem, so to speak, isn’t cottagecore, night luxe, or the concept of micro-aesthetics. It’s the fact that modern consumers are bombarded with a neverending stream of inconsequential trends to take note of — marketing vessels for products that fit into a paradigm devoid of meaning. This doesn’t just concern the fashion world: The effects of trend-induced brain rot have trickled into online discourse. The topics and figures deemed most important on the internet are based on where they fall along this spectrum of trendiness, depending on the scale of attention they command.
In his 1967 book Society of the Spectacle, the French philosopher Guy Debord introduced the concept of recuperation: the process by which subcultural ideas and images become commodified and reincorporated into mainstream society. Throughout the 20th century, recuperation was achieved through mass media. It was done with the intent or effect of depoliticizing radical social movements and subcultures, rendering them comprehensible — and therefore less threatening — to mainstream society.
A version of recuperation is playing out on the internet today with micro-aesthetics, memes, and the online communities they stem from. Unlike the radical subcultures of yore, which had their own visual schema, language, and aesthetics, these digital scenes aren’t exactly subcultures, at least not in the traditional sense. (Subcultures like hippies, punks, and mods existed in stark opposition to the mainstream, often with a clear political ethos and a distinct style of dress.) Some draw inspiration or pay homage to distinct countercultures of a bygone era, but it might be more accurate to consider them “aesthetic submarkets,” to use a phrase coined by writer and creative strategist Ayesha Siddiqi.
These submarkets are not entirely void of politics. Instead, they often promote a sort of political anesthetization. The digital embodiment of a certain aesthetic or attitude (i.e., “reactionary chic”) takes precedence over genuine political resistance. Recuperation, at least on TikTok, isn’t always a process of depoliticization. It’s an attempt at repackaging ideas, attitudes, and aesthetics into identifiable trends — something that can be capitalized on for attention or profit, comprehended, and widely consumed by a mass audience.
Social media writ large has eradicated basically any sense of a digital monoculture. “You have so many taste communities, but they don’t exist in opposition to anything,” said Ana Andjelic, a brand executive who writes about the sociology of business. “Culture has decentralized. The center, the mainstream, has disappeared.”
The trajectory of TikTok’s many micro- trends is practically a parody of the early 2010s internet, a period that marked the beginning of the end of a mutually agreed-upon monoculture. There was still the “lamestream” to rebel against, a clear spectrum between normie and alt to position yourself on. The 2010s was, broadly speaking, the twilight of the hipster, when alternative music and fashion blogs were gospel and indie tastemakers the ultimate arbiters of cool. That is, until hipster-dom morphed into an aestheticized parody of itself on social media, transmuting into a rebloggable, buyable identity courtesy of Tumblr and Urban Outfitters.
“The visibility and virality of social platforms made it really hard for subcultures to stay subcultures. It became a way for people to connect online that didn’t need a specific physical space,” said Sean Monahan, a Los Angeles-based trend consultant who writes the weekly newsletter 8Ball. (Monahan was a member of K-HOLE, the disbanded art collective that coined the term “normcore” and is somewhat responsible for the prevalence of “-core” as an aesthetic suffix.)
“When something became popular in the 2010s, it would blow up online and onlookers would start showing up,” he added. “Instead of forming a subculture, brand partnerships started to happen.”
Virality isn’t always a bad thing, but it chips away at this once-valued notion of authenticity, of discovering a music or fashion scene first. Today, this sentiment doesn’t matter nearly as much. Trend mania is considered passé among young social media users. Teenagers, for instance, are accustomed to trying on digital aesthetics like clothes (and also buying fast fashion to represent these tastes), swapping out ones that no longer fit their aspirational personality, style, or vibe. Taste communities, as Andjelic mentioned, aren’t competing for social relevance. Cottagecore and night luxe can coexist in harmony — and might even overlap in the demographics that they attract.
“Gen Z is better able to treat culture as a playground with less self-conscious dissonance because it’s not as central to their identity formation as it was for [millennials],” argued Siddiqi in a newsletter post. “For them, the digital is the mainstream. And it’s disposable. Being ‘alternative’ doesn’t have the same currency since it’s an identity accessible to anyone.”
It’s fitting that the so-called revival of indie sleaze, or 2010s hipster-ism, induced a bout of mild hysteria among Twitter millennials, who fretted over whether they would survive the “vibe shift.” The phrase “vibe shift” has nebulous origins on the internet, but Monahan deployed the term in his newsletter — which was later picked up by New York magazine — to describe “the subjective experience that culture has changed when we left quarantine and Covid.” The vibe shift is just an empty signifier, he told me, like a lot of TikTok trend taxonomy.
