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!

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.