T. T. Wilson - Photo credit Mark Bailey
From an article in the Indypendent.
That is per year. In the United States 575,000 to 1.6 million youth are homeless each year, of which 20-40% identify as LGBT. (Source for numbers is a report from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force)
This means 115,000 to 640,000 LGBT youth are homeless per year.
Twenty-six percent of LGBT youth that come out to their parents are kicked out of their home.
Twenty-five to thirty-three percent of homeless youth have engaged in survival sex.
Forty-two percent of LGBT youth abuse alcohol.
Nearly 50% of LGBT homeless youth have attempted suicide.
Across the United States, thousands of kids are kicked out of their homes each year for being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT ). In some cases, homophobic families dump them on the streets like litter. In other homes, kids run away in fear of retribution or as a result of ridicule.
They have nowhere to go. And the problem grows worse as American youth are “coming out” at increasingly early ages.
Across our country we are failing to address this problem. Carl Siciliano is the executive director of the Ali Forney Center in New York City. The organization provides emergency and transitional shelter for LGBT youth.
As Siciliano himself admits, the gay rights movement and its allies are failing to address the problem. “I don’t think there are 200 beds in the country for gay youth,” he says.
“I have stood on the steps and declared war on homelessness. I have done as much as I can to raise awareness,” Fidler (New York council member Lewis Fidler) said. “And still, Brittany [Spears] can climb into a cab without underwear and get three pages in the paper, but I can’t get three columns on kids who are couch surfing, who are selling their bodies to survive, who are exposed to unspeakable horrors.”
Fidler believes the only way to truly address the issue is through a mass social movement. “My belief is that if people knew that on the streets of this city in this day there are children by the hundreds who are sleeping on the streets, if this problem were known, then the public would create the political will to solve it.”
Meanwhile, however, young people like Damien Corallo will remain on the margins. “A lot of us feel rejected, like there is no place for us,” Corallo said. “We’re the bottom of the barrel.”
Damien is 18 years old and transgender, and his brother is gay.
“One day our aunt told us she didn’t want any faggots in the house. And we figured out that she had given our rights over to the state. So we left,” Corallo said. “I’ve lived in 32 group homes or foster homes. I’ve lived in shelters, halfway houses, safety houses. I’ve been into lock-up, stuck in residentials. I have been in every kind of home. I went to juvie for drugs. I used to inject drugs and snort coke. I was in for about a year. It was not friendly. It was a Missouri state jail and then I went to rehab.”
You can read Damien's story and the stories of others at the Indypendent.
For more info: Ali Forney Center, The Task Force, The Indypendent
Comments
Morality indeed, Heterosexuals.
Morality indeed.
These numbers are inflated. I am a gay man, but these numbers are inflated. I am listed in the phone book call me and we wioll discuss this if you don't believe me.
What about the 60%-80% of homeless kids who are not reperesented by this article. They suffer just as much. Being LGBT does not make you less able to cope, to say it does would admit some sort of deficiency in LGBT persons. By all means work on this problem but don't treat the symptom, treat the cause.
Clyde: Which numbers are inflated?
Elephant: Part of the problem may be that the gay youth don't trust the established help centers, just as they learned they could not trust their own parents. So they need a shelter that they know will accept them as they are, and not try to change them into something they are not.
No one is saying that all homeless kids should be cared for and have a place to go. But most shelters (at least in my state) are run by christian organizations. Do you think openly gay kids would be comfortable going there to be preached at and taught that the way they were born is wrong? Where they are ridiculed and treated like sinners? Hell they may not even be allowed to stay because of their orientation. That is no way for anyone to live and straight kids are certainly not treated that way.
This number is important because these kids are getting abused or kicked out of their homes by parents far out of proportion to the rest of the population. GLBT youth are 400% more likely to become homeless than hetero youth. I worked with homeless youth for about 15 years and these number are not inflated. In the area I now live in, I would estimate the percentage of homeless gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth is even higher as the area is conservative.
The other homeless teens are important, too. Many of them are also abused or discarded by their parents for failing to comply with parental religious beliefs. Some are homeless for other reasons. All of them are important but the GLBT teen homelessness rate is of all out of proportion to the population so it represents a different factor, one which education of people may be enough to fix. Building tolerance of GLBT youth in the community will tend to help other teens suffering from other belief motivated abuses, too.
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