1 Author Copy Queer Religious Youth in Faith and Community Schools Yvette Taylor, University of Strathclyde and Karen Cuthbert, University of Strathclyde Abstract Queer youth are positioned as ‘at risk’, and queer youth in religious settings and communities are seen as especially vulnerable due to the anti-LGBT sentiment assumed to inhere there. Governmental funding has recently been directed towards challenging homophobia, biphobia and transphobia in English faith schools specifically, as the political discourse of ‘British values’ comes increasingly to include an ostensible commitment to LGBT rights. It is in this context that we present qualitative research with queer religious youth who attended both faith and community schools in England. The lived experience of queer religious youth in faith schools is much more multi-faceted than is commonly represented – this was also the case for pupils in (non-faith) community schools. Rather than locating the problem within religion, attention needs to be paid to the heteronormativity and gender binarism that structures the entire educational experience. Furthermore, in engaging with the experiences of queer youth who are also religious, we explore the ways in which religion can be mobilised as a form of support, and more broadly argue against the tendency to see queer youth exclusively in terms of their queerness. Keywords Sexuality; Religion; Education; Youth; Queer Introduction This article comprises a qualitative exploration of both the ‘faith’ and ‘community’ school experiences of queer 1 religious 2 youth in England. This is timely given the UK government’s recent allocation of funding to the charities Stonewall and Barnardo’s to tackle homophobia, biphobia and transphobia in faith schools in apparent recognition of these sites as particularly problematic. This occurs amidst wider concerns over ‘British values’ and the increasing mobilization of ‘sexual orientation equality’ rhetoric as part of these discourses. Faith schools, and religion more generally, have increasingly come to be identified as problem sites. But what has been missing from these conversations and debates has been the voices of queer young people themselves (and particularly queer religious young people who are frequently assumed not to exist at all (Taylor 2015). We argue against this tendency to locate the ‘harms’ in faith schools and in religion more broadly, suggesting that not only does this misrepresent the