2.8 Million Kids

We’d like to think it’s easier, now, but I think it’s not. When I was a teenager, gay was nowhere; it was un-talked about, it was taboo, it surfaced maybe once every two years in an article in Time. You’d see the pictures of the backs of men lurking in dark corners of smoky bars, in the shadows of abandoned warehouses, waiting, watching. Short of vampires, nobody, apparently, got less sun than we did.

So I could hide. I wasn’t too visibly gay, I was a musician—which meant that I was instantly weird anyway—and I was tall. It was easy for me. Here was my strategy: I pushed away dealing with being gay until I was older, in college, when I was better equipped to deal with it. Even so, it’s certainly one of the five hardest things I’ve done in my life.

Now, gay is everywhere. Which means that it’s on even adolescent’s radar screen. Which also means that the first hint that a kid is gay brings on condemnation, bullying, fear of rejection.

Which is often justified—the fear, I mean, not the rejection. Because while all of us are fighting for marriage equality, an issue of equal or even greater weight is going unaddressed.

There are 2.8 million gay kids homeless on the streets. Up to 40% of homeless youth are LGBTQ. Think about it—unless 2 out of five of all of the people you know are gay, that 40% represents an enormous skew.

And why are they on the streets? Take a look at the graphic below.

One study published in the Journal Pediatrics reports that half of LGBT kids experience rejection in some form from their parents. Granted, the study was from 1987—but is the situation better or worse, now? (Remafedi, Gary. (1987). "Male Homosexuality: The Adolescent's Perspective." Pediatrics, Issue 79. pp. 326-337.)

Once kids are on the street, what happens to them? You know perfectly well—the parent’s worst nightmare. Prostitution, drug addiction, HIV and AIDS, the litany of horrors that keep parents awake at night.

There aren’t enough shelters, and those that exist have age limits. So it’s a race; how fast can you get the kid ready for an independent life? This is a kid who needs to graduate from school, learn adult skills like driving and paying your bills, learn how to cook and negotiate the health care system when sick. That’s hard enough when you have a home and loving parents.

Sadly, most parents are loving parents—one researcher went off and talked to the parents of kids who had either been kicked out or had fled the house. Only about 2% maintained their stance of rejection, especially after hearing the statistics and descriptions of LGBT youth in the streets. They were loving, they were anguished, they were confused.

There are programs, there are people trying to help. Caitlin Ryan and Rafael Diaz started the Family Acceptance Project; here’s what they say:

The project is designed to: 1) study parents’, families' and caregivers’ reactions and adjustment to an adolescent's coming out and LGBT identity; 2) develop training and assessment materials for health, mental health, and school-based providers, child welfare, juvenile justice, family service workers and community service providers on working with LGBT youth and families; 3) develop resources to strengthen families to support LGBT children and adolescents; and 4) develop a new model of family-related care to improve health and mental health outcomes for LGBT adolescents. Findings will be used to inform policy and practice and to change the way that systems of care address the needs of LGBT adolescents.

And Ryan’s done more; she got ahold of John Kerry, and together they forged the Reconnecting Youth to Prevent Homelessness Act. Here’s the description:

The Reconnecting Youth to Prevent Homelessness Act requires that the Secretary of Health and Human Services establish a demonstration project to develop programs that are focused on improving family relationships and reducing homelessness for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth. These programs must include research-based behavioral interventions designed to decrease rejecting behaviors and increase supportive behaviors in families with LGBT youth and research-based assessment tools to help identify LGBT youth at risk for family conflict or ejection from their homes. Additionally, the Secretary must provide educational tools and resources to help families identify behaviors that put LGBT youth at risk as well as provide multimedia educational tools and resources that are focused on helping a diverse range of families understand how their behavior affects LGBT youth.

OK—let’s strip it of jargon. We gotta figure out which kids are at risk, what stuff works to get parents to start accepting, not rejecting, and then we gotta get the tools and resources out there.

And I think that we gay people who have made it through to the other side, who have spent some time navigating the land-mined landscape of fear, rejection, self-loathing, loneliness, despair and defeat—we’ve got to go back there, cross over again, and start bringing some kids with us.

Over to the other side.