Attorneys asked the court to sanction the school district, saying it could not properly prepare its case without the documents which were to have been turned over last May.

Last fall, Judge Paul R. Cherry ordered the district to turn over the files and fined the school board $540 for dragging its heels. This time the fine is expected to be substantially higher.

In December 2007, Lambda Legal filed a lawsuit on behalf of K.K. Logan challenging a Gary School Corporation policy barring clothing that advertises sexual orientation or indicates that a student’s gender is different from the student’s sex.

Logan argues that the policy violates students’ First Amendment freedom of expression.  Logan also claims that his exclusion from prom constitutes discrimination on the basis of gender. 

Students and teachers knew that K.K. Logan was transgendered.  During his senior year, Logan attended West Side High expressing a deeply rooted femininity in his appearance and demeanor. At school, Logan wore makeup, accessories and clothing typically associated with girls his age.

However, on May 19, 2006, Principal Diane Rouse stretched her arms across the door of the senior prom, blocking Logan’s entrance because Logan was wearing a pink gown. Classmates and friends rallied to Logan’s defense to no avail—even though a female student was allowed to attend dressed in a tuxedo.

Principal Rouse enforced a Gary School Corporation policy that forbids any clothing or accessories that “advertise sexual orientation” or “portray the wearer as a person of the opposite gender.”

Ragen Hatcher, the attorney for the school district, said the board was not deliberately trying to prevent Lambda from access to the files, but that gathering the information had taken longer than anticipated.

Hatcher said that she is confident the board will win its case.

In the early 1980s, when AIDS was first identified, Ryan was doing her clinical internships in Atlanta. At the request of a public health worker, she helped start AID Atlanta, the first AIDS organization in the Southeast, and became the organization’s first director.

Caitlin Ryan

By 1985, she had lost 100 clients to AIDS, many of them young gay people who had left their homes and families.

“I met their families when their son was in intensive care and the parents found out within the first few minutes that their son was gay and was dying of AIDS,” she recalled. “The parents were devastated. Their world was falling apart. They realized that they were about to lose their child and there was often no time to reconcile; no time to tell their son that they loved him.

“Those experiences stayed with me and I think especially motivated me to develop the family interventions, based on our research, to help families decrease rejection and increase support for their LGBT children,” she said.

When she first began looking for resources to help LGBT youth, however, almost all of the professional literature discussing “homosexual” patients was about risk for suicide and the isolation and pain of being gay, with little focus on the positive.

“Gay youth were really seen just as walking risk factors,” she said.

“No one was looking then at what it took to be part of a very stigmatized social minority, to survive living in the closet and come out of that, to be able to be a successful adult and have a good life and a family and career. . . . As an adolescent, people were told, ‘You can’t be like that because those people live on the fringes of society.’ The concept of resiliency and inner strength and coping capacities were never attributed to young gay people who had to struggle with all of these issues, and yet largely as a community, did very well as adults.”

In the early 1990’s, therefore, Ryan joined forces with Donna Futterman, a lesbian pediatrician in New York, and other experts across the country to develop the first appropriate, supportive clinical care guidelines for working with lesbian and gay adolescents.

Ryan and Futterman then wrote the first book on health and mental health care for this population, Lesbian and Gay Youth, in 1998.

She noted that at the time, “People weren’t quite sure what bisexual identity meant during adolescence, and there were very few transgender youth.” After days of searching at the Library of Congress and the National Institutes of Health, she said, “I couldn’t find anything written about transgender youth that wasn’t pejorative, that was in any way seeing that as a normative adolescent identity.”

She and Futterman nonetheless included a chapter in the book on transgender adolescents, taking a more supportive approach.

Ryan came to realize, though, that still, “there was a critical gap in our understanding of how LGBT young people were evolving and developing. . . . We didn’t know how their families were adjusting and adapting.”

Although the general healthcare literature talked about families as “a very important protective factor against major health and mental health risks,” providers knew nothing about families’ role in contributing to well being and increasing or decreasing risk for LGBT young people.

Even though children were coming out at younger and younger ages, there were no resources to help families understand their LGBT children’s developmental needs, to find appropriate health care providers, or to address peer victimization and school-related problems.

She therefore decided to develop a family-based project that would include research, education, intervention, and public policy in culturally and socioeconomically diverse ways.

“The research,” she said, “would be a basis for developing interventions that would change the way that we were working with LGBT young people.” In 2001, she received a grant from the California Endowment to begin the work.

Publishing the first paper to come out of the FAP and getting ready to release the first of the resources they have developed is “incredibly exciting,” she said.

“We’re able now to write about promoting positive coping among LGBT young people to foster well being in adulthood . . . all of the kinds of positive things that are absent from the literature. We also can write about the health benefits of coming out during adolescence as well as the impact of reparative therapy on health and mental health outcomes, the long-term impact of anti-LGBT school victimization, and how do we use school environments to promote well being for these young people in adulthood?

“There are many, many research papers as well as a lot of tools. There are all kinds of things I want to do.”

Dana Rudolph is the founder and publisher of Mombian, a blog and resource directory for LGBT parents.

The way in which parents or guardians respond to a youth’s sexual orientation profoundly influences the child’s mental health as an adult, say researchers at San Francisco State University, whose findings appear in Monday’s journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“Parents love their children and want the best for them,” said lead researcher Caitlin Ryan, a social worker who directs the university’s Family Acceptance Project. “Now that we have measured all these behaviors, we can see that some of them put youth at extremely high risk and others are wellness-promoting.”

Among other findings, the study showed that teens who experienced negative feedback were more than eight times as likely to have attempted suicide, nearly six times as vulnerable to severe depression and more than three times at risk of drug use.

More significantly, Ryan said, ongoing work at San Francisco State suggests that parents who take even baby steps to respond with equanimity instead of rejection can dramatically improve a gay youth’s mental health outlook.

One of the most startling findings was that being forbidden to associate with gay peers was as damaging as being physically beaten or verbally abused by their parents in terms of negative feedback, Ryan said.

In the two-part study, Ryan and her colleagues first interviewed 53 families with gay teenagers to identify 106 specific behaviors that could be considered “accepting” or “rejecting.” For example, blaming a youth for being bullied at school, shielding him from other relatives or belittling her appearance for not conforming to social expectations fell into the rejecting category.

Next, they surveyed 224 white and Latino gay people between ages 21 and 25 to see which of the behaviors they had experienced growing up. The responses then were matched against the participants’ recent histories of severe depression, suicide attempts, substance abuse and unsafe sexual behavior.

While the results might seem intuitive, Ryan said the study, funded by the California Endowment, was the first to establish a link between health problems in gay youths and their home environments.

She has used the information in workshops with parents and other caregivers who have strained relationships with their gay teenagers, and said many were alarmed enough to make immediate changes in their interactions.

Ryan recalled a teenage girl whose mother forced her to date a boy and sent her to live with her grandmother when she learned her daughter was a lesbian. After hearing about the connection between parental attitudes and suicide, the mother stopped arranging the dates with the boy and instead inquired about her daughter’s girlfriend.

“She was really concerned,” Ryan said. “She saw that her daughter had become increasingly withdrawn and that she was contributing to these feelings of isolation and sadness.”

In her paper for the journal Pediatrics, Ryan recommends that medical professionals ask young patients how their families have reacted to their sexual orientations and tell parents that negative reactions may prove harmful even if well-intentioned.

Such conversations are necessary because young people have been coming out at younger ages. Consistent with other studies, the youths in Ryan’s study were on average under 11 years old when they first experienced a same-sex attraction, were just over 14 when they realized they were gay and came out to their families before they had turned 16.

Doctors, in a misguided attempt to comfort parents, may tell them a child who isn’t sexually active couldn’t know if he were gay or not, Ryan said.

“When providers and adults and family members think of gay people, they think of sex. They don’t think of emotional attraction or social interaction or spiritual connectedness or deep-rooted psychological feelings,” she said.

Sten Vermund, a Vanderbilt University pediatrician who became interested in Ryan’s work this summer when she presented her research at the international AIDS conference in Mexico City, agrees that doctors should be encouraged to talk with parents about responding to a child’s sexual orientation in a supportive way.

“So many families of children who are gay, bisexual or transgender, particularly families of gay male youth, think that if they are tough on the kid and tell him how unsatisfactory his gay lifestyle is to the family, he will have it knocked out of him,” Vermund said.

Vermund said he also was impressed by Ryan’s finding that a little bit of familial acceptance could go a long way in increasing a child’s chances for future happiness.

“The Southern Baptist doesn’t have to become a Unitarian,” he said. “Someone can still be uncomfortable with their child’s sexual orientation, but if they are somewhat more accepting and do the best the can, they will do the youth a lot of good. That to me is an important message.”

Family rejection is one of the top five issues that our 18,000 plus callers per year talk about on The Trevor Helpline. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) youth already face unique social challenges with their peers. When lacking supportive home environments as well, they often report feeling isolated, depressed, helpless and hopeless.

These feelings can lead to thoughts of suicide, which is why it is vital that organizations such as The Trevor Project exist.

The Trevor Project operates the only nationwide, around-the-clock crisis and suicide prevention helpline for LGBTQ youth. The helpline is free and confidential, and young people can speak with trained, volunteer counselors about anything at any time. Counselors can also connect callers with local community resources in order to help them find long-term support options and LGBTQ-oriented organizations.

Just this month, the Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC) released a new publication funded by Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) that addresses the special concerns related to suicide prevention among LGBTQ youth.

It remains disheartening that LGBTQ youth are up to four times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers, and as evidenced by Ms. Ryan’s study, those who come from a rejecting family are up to nine times more likely to do so. This is a preventable epidemic and the key to ensuring all young people are healthy and happy is to foster safe, accepting and inclusive environments for them, at home and at school.

This can be achieved at home when parents communicate with their children, love them unconditionally and embrace them regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. At school, educators can turn to The Trevor Project for essential tools to identify and help youth in crisis, and guidance on how to encourage students to create accepting environments for their peers.

Life is so valuable; yet in America alone, 32,000 people die by suicide each year.

Our young people today are the leaders of tomorrow; yet suicide is one of the top three causes of death among 15 to 24-year-olds and the second leading cause of death among college campuses. Thankfully, The Trevor Project offers young people hope and someone to talk to, 24/7.

We can all do our part to help combat suicide by recognizing warning signs, reaching out to people who might be at risk and helping them find resources.

Some warning signs of suicide include a tendency toward isolation and social withdrawal, substance abuse, expression of negative attitude toward self, expression of hopelessness or helplessness, loss of interest in usual activities, giving away valued possessions and expression of a lack of future orientation.

If a young person you know is exhibiting these signs, they can call The Trevor Helpline at 866-4-U-TREVOR.

To learn more about suicide warning signs and how you can help, visit our Web site at TheTrevorProject.org. Together, we can all create positive change and save young lives.

Charles Robbins is executive director and CEO of The Trevor Project.

This is one of the gifts of “Catherine Opie: American Photographer,” a show currently on exhibit at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum.

In the mid-1990s, when mainstream society started focusing on gay and lesbian culture (as opposed to gay men with AIDS or lesbian feminists as a political group), Opie was taking pictures of her community. Of our community.

The iconic portraits displayed at the Guggenheim are moving because they portray us as people worthy of having our pictures in a museum.

Catherine Opie

They are large-format and color-rich; the subjects are treated not as curiosities, but as vulnerable, fierce human beings who are saturated with dignity and self-respect.

To Opie, we are kings and queens, posed against jewel-colored backgrounds.

Here is Crystal Mason, her bald head gleaming, her eyes tired yet resolute. Here is Angela Scheirl in jacket and tie, a jaunty half-smile playing on her face. Here is Daddy Irwin and Mark, clinging to each other protectively, affection clear in their bodies.

Catherine Opie, 47, is a political artist, but not because her images are overtly political. She is a political artist because she treats her queer subjects as human beings instead of freaks – without downplaying how not-mainstream they are.

“It’s important for our own culture – the culture we created – to be represented as it is,” Opie said in a recent interview at the Guggenhiem.

That is the key, she said, to her notorious 1994 self-portrait, “Pervert,” which shows her in S&M gear: black leather hood hiding her face, needles sticking through her arms like decorative sleeves, “pervert” carved in blood on her naked chest.

As gay and lesbian culture started being perceived as mainstream, she started worrying about being seen as mainstream herself.

NEXT PAGE: Who are you calling normal?

Arizona: Tuscon
Eon’s Homeless Youth Project, http://www.eonyouth.org

California: Los Angeles
GLASS-LA (Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services), http://glassla.org/

L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, http://laglc.convio.net

Florida: Ft. Lauderdale
SunServe, http://www.SunServe.org/

Georgia: Atlanta
CHRIS KIDS, INC, Rainbow Program, http://www.chriskids.org/programsRainbow.htm

YouthPride, Home@YP, http://www.youthpride.org/programs.php

Illinois: Chicago
Howard Brown Broadway Youth Center, http://www.howardbrown.org/default.asp

Iowa: Des Moines
Iowa Homeless Youth Centers, http://www.yss.ames.ia.us/ihyc/

Massachusetts: Boston
Waltham House, http://www.thehome.org/site/PageServer?pagename=programs_waltham_house

Michigan: Highland Park
Ruth Ellis Center ~ Ruth’s House, http://www.ruthelliscenter.com

Ypsilanti
Queerzone at Ozone House, http://www.ozonehouse.org/services-lgbtq_support.shtml

Minnesota: Minneapolis
YouthLink: Project Offstreets, http://www.youthlinkmn.org/?q=programs/project_offstreets

North Carolina: Durham
North Carolina Lambda Youth Network, http://www.nclyn.org

New York: New York city

The Ali Forney Center, http://www.aliforneycenter.org

Carmen’s Place, http://www.carmensplace.org/

MCCNY Homeless Youth Services, http://www.homelessyouthservices.org/

Sylvia’s Place, http://www.homelessyouthservices.org/sylviasplace.html

Green Chimneys, Programs for LGBTQ Children, Youth and Families,
Agency Operated Boarding Home AOBH, http://www.greenchimneys.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=129:agency- operated-boarding-home&catid=111:nyc-programs&Itemid=174

Gramercy Residence at Ungar House,
 http://www.greenchimneys.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=99:gramercy-residence-at-ungar-house&catid=111:nyc-programs&Itemid=99

Triangle Tribe Apartment Program,
http://www.greenchimneys.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=131

Washington: Seattle
Isis House, http://www.youthcare.org/page.cfm?pagename=Shelter and Housing

Do you know of a resource that should be added to this list? Email  jennifer.vanasco@logostaff.com 

When a teen comes out, and their parents are able to accept them, it is a wonderful thing. However, recent studies have shown that as many as 25 percent of teens face rejection by their parents and families when they come out. Our nation’s homeless youth population is swollen with LGBT youth who have been thrown to the streets as a punishment for their honesty and integrity in coming out.

In last year’s report “An Epidemic of Homelessness,” the Task Force cited studies showing that up to 40 percent of all the homeless youth in the United States are LGBT.

It is upsetting and disturbing to hear the stories kids tell us when they seek help from the Ali Forney Center. We hear of kids being battered and beaten by their parents and family members. We hear of kids being told that they are damned and unloved by God by their religious leaders.

We hear of kids being gaybashed in youth shelters, most of which in our country are “faith-based.”

A common theme I hear in the stories our kids tell us is how, in the eyes of their families and communities, their being LGBT cancels out their human value. They become no longer worthy of love and protection in the eyes of their parents.

This is where the broader LGBT community must come to the table.

We need to show our kids that they are loved and cherished for who they are. We have an obligation to our youth to create and support structures that protect queer youth when their parents refuse to do so.

 In every city we need to be advocating that youth shelters be safe for LGBT youth, and that distinct programs be created and funded to meet the needs of LGBT youth. Paying closer attention to the needs of our kids needs to be a higher priority for us as a community on local and national levels.

I am proud of the Ali Forney Center’s trailblazing efforts in responding to the urgent needs of homeless LGBT youth. We opened in 2002 with six cots in a church basement. Since then, we have grown to offer eight seperate residential sites with the capacity to house 50 youth per night. We have a drop-in center that offers food, showers, medical and mental health care, HIV testing and prevention services, and vocational and educational assistance to over 500 youth per year.

We offer the kind of guidance, support, and protection that youth should be receiving from their families.

When Ali Forney, a homeless queer youth, was murdered on the streets of NYC in 1997, this kind of support for LGBT youth did not exist. Ali was faced with the choice of staying in a Roman Catholic-run youth shelter where gaybashing was notoriously prevelent, or of struggling to survive on the streets. Ali chose the streets, and was mudered on a cold December night.

It is wonderful now to see how our youth are able to thrive when given the kind of nurturing and support they need. We were so proud this past summer when one of our former clients, Lamont, was fearured in a New York Daily News article about his courageous efforts in founding the first LGBT student club at Medgar Evers College, where he became a student while living in our housing program.

We were also filled with pride last summer when Andre, another of our kids, was given a full scholoship to dance at the Alvin Ailey School.

Most recently we have exhaulted in the accomplishments of Isis, who came to us last year with a fierce determination to pursue a career in fashion, and moved from our housing program in June to become the first trans woman contentent on America’s Next Top Model!

However, the Ali Forney Center is a rarity. There are only a small handful of programs in our country dedicated to housing LGBT youth – there are tens of thousands of LGBT youth enduring the terrors and humiliations of homelessness on our streets.

 The protection and safety of our youth must become a central priority of our community. We need to show these kids, and ourselves, that they are valued. When a kid is thrown to the streets for being gay, it is an assault against each one of us.

We need to do a better job, so that when kids come out of the closet, they do not have to be thrown to the streets.

It’s a gorgeous mid-September Tuesday evening in New York City and the setting sun warmly glows over the streets of Midtown. Chelsea, New York’s gayest enclave, shifts into party mode just a few blocks south. To the northeast, the world is starting to queue up for Broadway hits. Meanwhile, commuters rush to the comforts of home.

But for thousands of gay youth in Gotham, there will be no partying, no theater, no playing tonight.

And once again, no home.

Estimates say that a staggering 20,000 young people are homeless every night in the city, – anywhere from a quarter to a third of those are LGBTQ kids. A lucky fraction of that number has found its way to Sylvia’s Place, tucked here on the city’s far west side, so near and so far from so much wealth.

Sylvia’s Place is the subject of a new documentary shot in 2006 which followed seven LGBT teens who frequented the shelter. To see what Sylvia’s place is like now, I step into this surreal and humbling world to meet with Kate Barnhart, director of Sylvia’s Place since 2004.

Tonight, like every Tuesday evening, dinner is being served by a small team of volunteers from the adjacent Metropolitan Community Church of New York. I take a seat on a metal folding chair next to Kate’s desk, not quite sure where to put my manpurse amidst the overflowing boxes, plastic bags, and just plain stuff that’s everywhere. She motions for me to throw it into the area behind her, with a dozen other backpacks and handbags.

“Behind my body is the safest place, so everyone stashes their stuff back here,” she says.

Sylvia’s takes its name from Sylvia Mae Rivera, a veteran of the 1969 Stonewall uprising who just a year later co-founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), an assistance group for the city’s young homeless trans community.

In the late 1990s Rev. Pat Bumgardner, senior pastor of the MCC, hired Rivera to run the church’s food pantry, only to be amazed by the crowds of young queer folk in need drawn by the charismatic activist. On Rivera’s deathbed (from liver cancer in 2002), Bumgardner promised that the church would create a safe space and night shelter for desperate LGBTQ youth who had nowhere else to go.

And so Sylvia’s Place was born in early 2003, and has ever since provided disenfranchised young gay people aged 16 to 23 with such simple necessities as dinner, bathroom facilities, somewhere to sleep for the night, breakfast in the morning, and – perhaps most important – a listening ear and an encouraging voice.

They do all this on a ridiculously small budget, with a shoestring staff of mostly volunteers, in one 2,500-square foot room, despite the (quite understandable) unpredictability of the clientele.

NEXT PAGE: ‘We take people until we can’t fit anymore.’

Ask anyone in the LGBTQ community about safe sex, STD prevention and risks of HIV/AIDS, and you’ll notice that the conversation usually shifts to gay male-to-male sex.

But what about lesbian safe sex? It’s true that STD rates are significantly lower for women who only sleep with women. But how many lesbians really only sleep with women? 

There are no hard numbers. But experts say it may be more common than anecdotal evidence suggests. Because you may not know whether your sexual partner ever has had unprotected sex with a man, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

 Women who have slept with men “puts them at risk for STDs,” said Jill Dispenza, Director, HIV/STD Hotline and HIV Testing & Prevention at Chicago’s LGBTQ Center on Halsted. “A lot of the issue, too, is that women who have sex with women, when they do have sex with a man, that partner is usually bisexual or even gay, just because of the circles they’re in—so that can put them at greater risk.” 

According to a 2003 study assessing the risk of perception of a sample of self-defined lesbians, “lesbians believe that if they are at no or low-risk for contracting HIV, the benefits of engaging in safer sex practices would be minimal.”

But because behavior of lesbian-identified women varies, a perceived low-risk for HIV infection may actually increase the risk, because women don’t take proper precautions. For example, does your sexual partner engage in unprotected sex with male partners, or have a problem with drugs or alcohol, which might lead to fewer sexual precautions (or HIV transmission, if they use intravenous drugs)? You might not know.

With this knowledge in mind, how can lesbians stay safe? And what STDs are we at risk for?

Next page: The STDs lesbians should be careful of