Our Kids on the Street

As I write this, there are four children playing in the Poetry Space of the gift shop next door. And guess what? The kids are loud, so periodically one of the parents has to come and give a directive—quiet down! That works for ten minutes, and then the crescendo begins. At some point, the other parent can abide it no longer, and will come down and reapply the directive. I, of course, am currently not attempting to squelch the noise, since these are not my kids. But I am observing the different parenting styles, and trying to assess the efficacy of each. My conclusion—both are pretty much as effective, which is to say…not very.

These kids are lucky—their parents are loving, concerned, educated. And there’s something else as well: these parents have known a lot of gay people, and if any of these kids is gay, the parent will barely blink an eye.

Now then—time for some facts:

One in every four LGBT kids who comes out to his or her parents ends up on the streets, either because she or he was kicked out, or because the child decided to leave.

The average age for kids to come out, nowadays, is fourteen. In the seventies, most people came out much later, when they were in college and relatively more stable.

Lastly, here is a paragraph from the Human Rights Campaign:

Youth homelessness in the United States is a national crisis in urban, suburban, and rural communities affecting nearly 2.8 million youth between the ages of 12 and 24. Furthermore, consistent research finds that gay and transgender youth are over-represented among homeless youth, comprising anywhere between 20 and 39 percent of the total homeless youth population even though they make up less than 10 percent of the overall youth population.

OK—my toy computer doesn’t have the calculator that my Mac does, but my feeble math skills suggest that we may have one million gay and lesbian kids on the streets. And while marriage equality and anti-bullying efforts are important—isn’t doing something for these kids important, too?

What are the problems? Well, the first is what to do with kids who are on the streets—are there beds in the shelters for them?

Answer—no. According to the clip below, called “A Day in our Shoes,” there are 3,800 homeless youth in New York alone, and 1,500 of them are LGBT. And how many beds are there for them? Two hundred.

Shelter is just one issue. A kid on the street is at major risk for drug and alcohol abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, prostitution, and being the victim of violent crime. That kid you see sleeping after “school” on the subway? That’s the only safe—relatively—place for him to sleep. He’ll be up at five minute intervals all night, checking to make sure he’s all right.

It may be there are treatment programs which will help a kid achieve the daunting task of being an adult: paying bills on time, going to the dentist, convincing the bank to let you open a checking account even though your only ID is a high school identification card. But even those programs “age kids out,” as one of the directors in the clip “Kicked Out” put it. So at age 21 you’re supposed to be on your own—but what happens when you fall at the disco and need to go to the hospital? Ask any parent—it doesn’t stop at age 21.

Which is why Caitlin Ryan’s work at the Family Acceptance Project is so exciting. She starts with a simple premise—virtually no parent wants his or her kid on the street. No matter how terrible the parent is, or how badly drunk or addicted he or she is—no parent wants that for their kid. So the trick is to find a way to get parents to accept their gay kids.

It makes intuitive sense—families do change. Mine did, and Raf’s as well. And as you can see in the second clip below—even very macho, Hispanic families can change. And as the clip on the Family Acceptance Project website shows—the Mormons can change as well. Perhaps especially so, since the family is of huge importance in the Mormon church.

Ryan has reached out to John Kerry, who in 2011 introduced the Reconnecting Youth to Prevent Homelessness Act. Here’s what the Human Rights Commission has to say about it:

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.

And now a confession—I know that this legislation was not approved in 2011, and I think it has been reintroduced, though as of June of this year it hadn’t been. But after Googling frantically for 15 minutes, I can’t find who reintroduced it or when.

Normally, this would upset me, but nowadays I have more perspective. Not being able to chase down a reference is annoying. Being fifteen, gay, and on the streets?

That’s major!

Ordinary People, Heroic Acts

For the last two Saturdays in a row, I have taken two chairs, a pair of jeans and a shirt, a video camera, and a satchel with information cards and consent forms as well as two books, each containing about 350 pages, to a public square.

It’s the 30,000 Lives Project, in which I cheerfully consent to look completely ridiculous. My object is to read the randomly generated names of 30,000 people: the number of people who die every year of gunshot wounds.

Why do I do this?

I had to ask myself the question that first day—when I was visibly nervous. I had support, thank God. Raf was there, holding the sign that announced the project. Pablo was there, reading names and talking to people. Nydia strolled into the scene, kissed me and got right to work. Then doña Ilia strolled in and stole—blessedly though not surprisingly—the show.

The point is that nobody would have been on the plaza doing what I was doing if I hadn’t gotten pissed. The NRA was making me crazy—how many more massacres would it take before we had gun control? And yes, Facebook and the social media are fine—but all my friends think like me, for the most part. That’s why we’re friends.

So the real work wasn’t the ten hours of copying and pasting in the one hundred name batches that it took to generate the 724-page document. And the real expense wasn’t the hundred bucks spent on printing the books, fliers, consent forms or sign. The real effort was to put myself out there—to make a fool out of myself and to expose myself to the possible scorn of NRA members or gun “rights” advocates.

I don’t do well with conflict. Or so I thought, because when I encountered that first day a gun rights advocate, the conversation was surprisingly cordial. I heard him out, disagreed, and parted company. No big deal.

Well, it’s been two Saturdays—we’ve read six thousand of thirty thousand names, or 5% of the total. And we’ve spent 4 hours doing it. So it should take 80 hours to read the names of all the people who die of gunshot wounds in the United States. Yup—two full work weeks.

So now we know. But is it worth it? Do we get anything from having Marc and friends stand / sitting around in public reading names?

I think Philip Zimbardo would say yes. And he should know—having written my Psychology 101 textbook those many years ago. So I clicked on his TED talk, and was immediately hooked. It’s that old question—if you were a German in Nazi Germany, what would you do?

Sadly, we know what you would do. You would follow the crowd, go off to war, press the button that sends the poison gas into the nostrils of the Jews, gypsies and homosexuals in the chamber next door.

Or you wouldn’t. There was a German resistance, there were people hiding prisoners of war or Jews or anybody who needed hiding. So maybe you wouldn’t have colluded, maybe you would have been a hero, which is, according to Zimbardo…

…an ordinary person. A seamstress with tired feet, as Rosa Parks was that day she sat at the front of the bus. She didn’t wake up and say, “hey, I really oughta be a hero today,” she later said; she just had tired feet.

Years ago, at Wal-Mart, a motivational speaker concluded a talk by pulling out a dollar bill. He talked about how a person had given him a dollar bill with the message: go ahead, dream, follow your passion, you’re a leader and you can make change happen. So at every talk he gives, he pulls out a dollar bill and gives it to the person he sees having leadership potential.

There were about thirty people in an one-of-you-will-betray-me-moment—‘is it me?’

Well, I took the dollar in complete confusion, and did the only thing I could think of—put it under the laughing Buddha that then sat on my desk and now sits on my desk. And no—I haven’t spent it.

But if I was the person with the most leadership potential—and that guy really should cut out the morning bottle—it’s probably due to one thing.

I’m gay and I came out.

After you do that, you learn two things. First, that you can do it—that you can have the courage to face social disapproval, professional suicide, parental rejection. After that, standing in a plaza reading names is no big deal.

Second, going along with the crowd is not so important. Being liked is not so important. You realize—I’ll make my crowd, I’ll make my family, and no, I don’t have to have people like me.

Zimbardo talks briefly at the end of his talk about the bullying issue. And I agree with what I suspect would be his analysis—it’s stupid to tell a thirteen-year old kid “it gets better.” Sure, it’s true, and yeah, if feels good to say it. But do you remember how long time was when you were a kid? Christmas or a birthday took centuries to come around—now they pop up every other day.

I would tell these kids—“hey, you know what? There’s a reason you’re getting bullied, and it’s a good reason. You’re different, and that’s wonderful. There’s something special in you. I don’t know what it is, but I can sense it, and so can the kids around you, and they’re jealous ‘cause you’ve got something special, something to give, something unique. Do you know what it is?”

Kid looks up.

“Nah….”

“Well, that’s what we’re gonna find out….”