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Loading ...Coming out early: the fight to help LGBT youth
Siciliano also suggested that older generations of gay people may find it difficult to work with gay youth because they want to avoid being reminded of their own young years.
“For adults, being a teenager was a frightening time if you were aware that you were gay. Teenagers embody our worst fears,” said Siciliano. “It’s painful to look at; you don’t want to go back to that place.”Reid-Pharr says that there appears to be a disconnect between how people perceive growing up is in New York and what the actual experience is like.
“New York City is a very tough city. The reality is that it has a huge contingent of everybody,” he said. “There are a large number of gay and lesbian youth of color who are discriminated against.”
Reid-Pharr advises looking at the whole spectrum of gay people because it’s “not all Will and Grace.”
Angela’s Story
Several organizations within New York City, like the Ali Forney Center and the Hetrick Martin Institute, work to help the gay youth who have turned to crime or are living on the streets. Angela Louis, 21, a former homeless teenager, has been able to find a job and get off of the streets with the help of the Ali Forney Center.
Thanks to Ali Forney, Louis has worked at Sephora and Blockbuster, and is currently working at a Starbucks inside the Trump Tower. Louis, who is transgender, came out in May 2006 after her mother discovered she had stayed over at a sick boyfriend’s house one night.
“She said she couldn’t live with a gay child,” said Louis. “She said, ‘you have to move because I can’t allow this in my house.’”
After living with a friend for a while in Crown Heights, Louis moved between several homeless shelters, including a male-only house.
“I couldn’t be who I wanted to be there,” said Louis. “It was all straight males.”
After moving between several other homeless shelters, Louis moved to Atlanta with her then-boyfriend where she eventually ended up on the streets after they broke up. She soon turned to “crafting,” or shoplifting, and sex work to get by. She was able to get back to New York through Travelers Aid International.
“The morning I came back [to New York] my friend [in Atlanta] gave me $10 and a pack of cigarettes. He told me to model and to come back and visit him,” she said.
Louis now participates in Ali Forney Center programs and is currently living in one of their apartments in Brooklyn. Though she is comfortable with who she is, it has not always been easy for her.
“I’ve come a long ways. I used to be scared to walk around outside because I would wonder what people were going to say on the bus or the subway when they saw me,” she said. “But this is who I am. At the end of the day I’m still me and I have to live my life. If I’m going to wear stilettos, I’m going to wear four- or five-inch stilettos and storm.”
NEXT PAGE: More on Angela and how students in schools are being helped.
This is exactly the type of article that begs to be read. Thank you, Cory!
Although still difficult to come out, I am happy to see teens have a better support network than we did when we were that age.
This was a great article, but missing one big piece – how do we get involved? How about a list of groups with contact info? You make the point in the article about the gay community needing to get involved. It would have been great to see some options at the end on how to do that.
I’m curious myself as one of the luckier gay teens. I want to help others like me, I’m not sure how to go about doing it!
Here are some links, google for lgbt youth centers in your area. Every little help is adding up…
http://www.givethemhopenow.org/
http://www.aliforneycenter.org/
http://www.safeschoolscoalition.org/RG-homeless.html -
Do we not have an obligation & oputunity to be a safety net for our youth? Has not the our response to the pandemic proven we can rally when needed.
Here is a chance to keep the youngest amoung us healthy + hiv negative?
We need shelters to get them off the street & away from the tradgic chioce of putting themselfs in mortal danger either from murder,rape & hiv exposer.With high risk behavior such as drugs & unprotected sex. I know way to many of us have indured the same!
SO WHEN DOES THAT END????
I dream of the day were every child has a roof to sleep under & feel safe & loved!a very tall order.Yet we all can band together With all the apartment buidings facing forcloser cant we use that to are advantage? Or am I the only one who layes awake at night thinking of this crisis?????
I know what this is like, I came out to my mom and ant because I felt it was time to at the age of 16, (1995), I was still in high school then, need leis to say she told me I’m not and she wonted me to have kids so she can be a grandma, she cried and cried and ignored me for a long time until she was over it (1999 or 2000) after that we never real talked about it she just told me it was stupid and it was in the past and we should leave it there. I never told my dad, he’s not around any more nor do I talk to him.
“I know what this is like, I came out to my mom and ant because I felt it was time to at the age of 16, (1995), I was still in high school then, need leis to say she told me I’m not and she wonted me to have kids so she can be a grandma, she cried and cried and ignored me for a long time until she was over it (1999 or 2000) after that we never real talked about it she just told me it was stupid and it was in the past and we should leave it there.” Quote
A common result. Initial horror, what did I “do wrong”, bang head on wall, cry,etc. etc
You need to have friends as a back up to accept you, and support you especially if the worst happens.
But over time, if you can pry mom away from the clutches of the church, she will come around. PFLAG.ORG is a great group if there is a chapter near you.
Much of what you said is of course just embarrassment on your mom’s part. Embarrassment, from a life in the sales biz, is one of the greatest motivators of behavior. You need to over time get your mom to understand her emotions, as the final chapter in getting her “out of the closet” that so often happens when the kids come out.
Sri about your DAd, couldn’t tell if he has left the scene for other places or this life. But I guess it doesn’t matter.
So, here we have a long (and otherwise excellent) article about the problems of homeless “gay” youth, which uses a young trans woman as its only example and yet only mentions that she is transgender, NOT gay, once, thus erasing the identity of trans youth and the unique problems that they face, and the proud identity of this young girl as transgender. Gay and trans are *not* the same thing, although gay and trans youth face some of the same problems. The fact that the public conflates the two and, like this young girl’s mother, assumes she must be gay if she is trans, is no excuse for a publication supposedly written for the LGBT community to ignore the unique identity and problems of trans youth. Frankly, I am disgusted that 365gay.com can’t do better than this.
Eye/Heart opening article…we need to do more for our Gay Youth. I was really lucky to have really open parents…but a lot of kids out their need our support.