When you are granted a home, but you stay in the “closet”. Familism impact on LGBTQ+ housing pathway

In a country like Greece with an absent welfare state, and limited and precarious income opportunities, the provision of housing is considered mainly as a family commitment. The family is highlighted as the main shock absorber during socio-economic turbulence (Moreno and Mari-Klose 2013; Martin 2015), and the members who succeeded in their housing strategies during previous, more affluent periods, are now able to offer housing solutions to their family members.

The acceptance of housing support presupposes however the acceptance of control. Thus, family support may assume that the receivers of the support should ‘obey’ the rules and imaginaries that the family attributes to them. These imaginaries often include a prescribed heteronormative lifepath that the beneficiaries should satisfy.

Greek family welfare and home

One could argue that the Greek welfare state was never active enough to cover the needs of its citizens. Greek welfare pattern could be characterised as ‘familialism by default’ where ‘there are neither publicly provided alternatives to nor support for family care’ (Saraceno and Keck, 2010: 676). This is evident in the almost absent residential provision by the state. Housing policies in Greece were always mainly indirect economic indicators that aimed to nurture the self-regulation of housing needs through the support of the family and the kin, by enabling and promoting homeownership (Mantouvalou 1985; Leontidou 1990; Allen et al. 2004, for the state as an enabler see also Tulumello & Dagkouli-Kyriakoglou 2021).

Indeed, throughout the history of post-war Greece, urban home property, promoted or assisted by the state, constituted a good, stable and secure investment in light of the precarious financial climate (Leontidou 1990; Allen et al. 2004).  The property could be used as accommodation or a source of income, in the absence of good investment alternatives and the absence of a welfare state (Allen et al. 2004; Gentile 2016; Minguez, 2016). Correspondingly, it always constituted a standard cultural prerequisite to forming one’s family, a collective social desire, a representation of achievement, a status symbol and a proof of commitment to society and the family (Minguez 2016). This practice depended greatly on family savings and wealth, in connection with an underdeveloped local mortgage market and a weak welfare state (Poggio 2008). Therefore, access to homeownership has been stratified unevenly across the generations, penalising those who originate from families in the lower social strata (Micheli and Rosina 2010; Forrest and Yip 2012; Moreno and Mari-Klose 2013; Ronald and Lennartz 2018).

Crisis

Housing and everyday life in Greece have been restructured rapidly during the last decades as a result of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and the related austerity measures. The austerity measures imposed deep cuts in the total public expenditure, which impacted the formation of households and the related housing strategies that families adopted in order to face the challenges (Costa Pinto and Guerra 2013; Serracant 2015).

Also, since 2012, Greece has had some of the highest unemployment rates among OECD countries at all educational levels, and today even though it dropped slightly during the last years it is still relatively high (12,16% in 2022 [1] ) while the percentage of youth unemployment is 30,05% in 2022 [2]. Hectic and precarious employment opportunities lead to housing insecurity and postponed life decisions highlighting the role of the family as provider (Christopoulou & Pantalidou 2018).

Family housing strategies

People in Greece tend to follow housing practices in connection to the family welfare, such as late emancipation from the parental home, intergenerational co-residence and residential spatial proximity to the members of the same extended family (Ferrera 2010; Dagkouli-Kyriakoglou, 2018). In the context of Southern Europe, the family home is the base of the asymmetrical heteropatriarchal family, fostering certain heterosexual and gendered relations (Valentine 1993). The profound naturalisation of the heteronormativity that exists in society and at home may consequently ‘exclude’ LGBTQ+ members because of the socio-sexual power relations that are reproduced (ibid.). Moreover, as long as the well-being of these people is dependent on family solutions, the familial wealth reinforces the existing social inequity between those who hold property wealth and those who do not.

The Orthodox Church, in Greece, has a considerable influence on society and promoted, like the right-wing political ideology, the heterosexual family as the core structure of society (Allen et al. 2004; Trihas 2018). The strengthening of the institution of the family and its welfare frees the state from the obligation to offer care, housing and social protection support and its cost. Therefore, other forms of family outside of the heteronormative one could harm this equilibrium that hides the state absence. As bishop Ieronymos stated concerning the debate about the legal gender recognition based on self-determination: ‘All of these are games. The Church has its own stance. Our country has its traditions, and so has the family. All the rest are invented to spend our time’ (‘Ieronymos for gender identity’ 2017). These ideas in this highly religious country are representative also for a part of society and some of them could be parents of LGBTQ+ children as well.

Furthermore, as the crisis in Greece were evolving, the violent manifestations of police forces against socially marginalised groups was increasing as well. In parallel, the power of Golden Dawn, the Greek neo-Nazi party, was strengthening. This formation was part of the parliament for the period 2012 – 2019, promoting homophobia and sexism, while praising heteronormativity (Eleftheriadis 2015). Lately, and after the right-wing government was elected in 2019, the police violence against non-heteronormative subjects and women has increased [3]. Also, gender issues seem to be handled from the state in a way that highlights the superiority of the asymmetrical heteropatriarchal family by queer individuals’ marginalization and social science targeting [4] (Vasilaki & Souvlis 2021). Moreover, the government abolished the general secretariat of gender equality – founded in 1985 as a victory of the feminist movement – and established during the same month (June 2023) a new ministry of Social Cohesion and Family.

Concerning housing, LGBTQ+ people who face discrimination are not protected per se. In other countries, such as the USA and the UK, LGBTQ+ youth has significant representation amongst the homeless population (Hunter 2008). In the societies where the problem is not hidden, there also exist demands to offer welfare services for marginalized social groups, which suffer from housing problems, abuse incidents and discrimination (ibid.). Meanwhile, in Greece, as citizens rely heavily on family-based assistance or informal solidarity networks, the danger of homelessness is related to the ability of a family or kinship to support its members and/or the will of an LGBTQ+ person to hide or suppress their identity and life plans in order not to implicate the support.

Family strategies in LGBTQ+ housing pathway

At least one incident of direct/indirect family support was encountered in each collected story during this research project [5]; there seems to be no particular age at which intergenerational support expires for LGBTQ+ members. The support can come from the parents but also members of the extended family such as in the case of Liza (45, open), who ended up living with her aunt. She decided to cohabitate with her for financial reasons, and even though her aunt “disapproved” of Liza’s personal life, she welcomed the idea of cohabitating as long as she kept her love life away from the house.

Figure 1: Patterns of family and friend’s (family) support

Source: Author’s elaboration (2018)

According to my PhD research in which this paper is only part of, I mapped the family housing supports as such: the support can come in two general ways: in-kind and financial. In-kind support may include granting semi- or in- dependent houses and, allowing and usually insisting on extended cohabitation or returns to the family house. In many of the stories collected, the participants returned to their family homes after being away for a period of time regardless of whether they had come out or not.

In other cases, the support comes financially in the form of direct or indirect housing support. The indirect support regards the situation when parents and other relatives offer (part of) the amount of money that the beneficiary needs in order to acquire and/or renovate a house or to cover the amount of rent. Meanwhile, indirect financial housing support comes in the form of ‘pocket money’ that even though it is not specifically for the payment of rent, it is still a stable financial income that eases one’s household difficulties. Olga (lesbian, 42, closeted) explained this procedure as follows:

This custom is not unfamiliar in Greek society, where parents tend to strive to offer to their children by all means. However, the support may be accompanied by specific rules that can limit a person’s freedom.

Impact of the LGBTQ+ identity on housing

Housing and financial support from the family can be disturbed as a result of denial or “disapproval” of non-heteronormative subjectivities. For the purpose of this work, the impacts were categorized as direct and indirect.

Only a few stories among the ones collected were about direct impact on housing which lead to homelessness even though this is not representative of the Greek reality (see Pettas, Arampatzi, Dagkouli-Kyriakoglou, 2022). Some of the respondents had to abandon their family homes to claim their identities or the financial support for housing was abruptly terminated. There were three incidents of involuntary displacement which the participants experienced as punishment and blackmail by the family when their sexual orientation was disclosed: in one case it was a “supported displacement” away from the family house that parents payed the rent for the new accommodation; in the second case her girlfriend’s mother offered her a place to live; while in the case of another research partner [6], he had to become financially autonomous and this led him gradually to migrate abroad for better work and housing opportunities. However, the high degree of familism in housing can also cause problems to outsiders, as Orion narrates bellow (31, open):

All in all, there were violent changes in the living arrangements of LGBTQ+ people when the family who supported them could not accept their sexual identity. To these “housing inconveniences” as a result of one’s sexual identity, we should also consider the “indirect” impacts, especially concerning the limitation to the freedom of living a non-heteronormative personal life as long as people are enjoying housing solutions supported by their families.