A haven for
homeless youths

"Get out of our town, Satan!" That's what Kimy's peers said to her when she came out as a teenager in Utah. "They felt being gay was the same as being a child molester," 20-year-old Kimy, who eschews sexual identity labels but refers to herself as transgender, calmly explains. The hostility and intolerance Kimy endured from her family and hometown forced her to leave Utah at age 18 with few options. She ended up living on the streets of New York City.

That's where Tony Aguilar, a gay 20-year-old, ended up as well. When he came out to his mom in their Paterson, N.J., home at age 17, their relationship immediately changed. "We were best friends; we could've talked about anything," he recalls. "After I came out her attitude changed completely. Everything went bad." Then one day when he was 18, she told him to get his things and leave.

Many abandoned queer youths find their way to urban centers, where they believe their chances of survival will be good. Once in the city, however, they quickly find out that making it is not as easy as they had hoped. Without support and resources, many are forced to live on the streets. According to a 2003 New York City task force report, numerous studies over the past decade have found that a whopping 25% to 40% of the homeless youth population in New York and other large American cities identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.

Services have been slow to address this population. According to the Interfaith Task Force for LGBTQ Homeless Youth, there are only about 70 beds available for over 7,000 homeless LGBT youths in New York. For every homeless youth who has a bed, 99 others are spending their nights wandering the streets or sleeping on park benches, in subways, or on friends' couches. To survive, many resort to sex work, which sometimes gets them a bed at least for the night.

Everyone interviewed for this article reported having experienced long bouts of depression, and many have even attempted suicide in response to neglect. "I was tired all the time, and I wasn't eating either because I was depressed," says Tony. "I thought I wasn't gonna get nowhere."

To cope, many numb themselves to their situation. "I just block out my feelings," says Kristen Lovell, 24, a transgender woman from Yonkers, N.Y., whose mother kicked her out after reading her diary. "I just don't allow myself to feel anything."

Kimy eventually found herself at New York's Covenant House, which says it's the nation's largest shelter for homeless youth; it is the only one to receive New York City government funding. But once there, Kimy's situation didn't get better. "Covenant House doesn't like gay people, let me tell you," says Kimy, adding that her time there was "hell." She wasn't abused, something other LGBT youths who've stayed there have asserted, but fights occurred frequently. "The other kids would come into my room all the time and beat up my roommates," Kimy claims. When she complained, she says, the staff kicked her out.

"[The Covenant staff] would call me 'he/she' and 'faggot,' " says Michele Carver, a 19-year-old transgender woman from Georgia, who was kicked out of her home. "A friend told me about Ali Forney, so I went there."

The Ali Forney Center is one of only a handful of shelters, along with Sylvia's Place, Green Chimneys, Carmen's Place, and most recently, Trinity Place, offering beds to LGBT homeless youths in New York City; these agencies together shelter only about 1% of the city's homeless queer youth population. Rather than turn youths away, agencies such as Ali Forney try to provide them with options. "We try to find where there are vacancies at other shelters and to let the youths know they might not be safe at some of them," says Carl Siciliano, Ali Forney's executive director. "Given these choices some kids will choose to ride the subway trains all night rather than go to a shelter where they're likely to be harassed."

To increase awareness of the issue, Ali Forney has released a citywide ad campaign promoting its family counseling programs to help parents cope with having LGBT children. Each ad shows a child and parent with a tagline below them, "Would you stop loving [him/her] if you know [he's gay/she's lesbian]?" The Interfaith Task Force for LGBTQ Homeless Youth raised over $3,000 at a recent event.

These agencies also help homeless youth find work. "Where I'm from, you can't get a job being who I am," says Kimy. Michele agrees. "If I go to an interview as a woman, they say, 'We can't help you,' or 'The position is filled,' or 'Call back another time,' " she says. "And it's also hard to find a doctor who can take care of my medical needs."

Unable to find a job, the lure of sex work can be strong. Kristen, who was a messenger and waiter before her transition, is looking for regular work but continues to escort on the side. "It's hard because the streets have been good to me," she admits. "But now that I'm getting older, I need to stop."

Kimy is trying to get out of the cycle of being one step from the streets. "I have two hands and I have a brain, so I can do things for myself," she says.

However, the struggle continues. Kimy recently got an apartment with roommates and says she has even reconnected with her family back in Utah, noting that they speak to her regularly and plan to visit her in New York sometime. But when she tried to go back to Utah to live on her own, it didn't work out, so she had to return to Sylvia's Place. She has two jobs: one as a tour guide in Times Square and the other as an intern with a fashion designer, a position she got through Sylvia's Place. Despite her recent hardships, "a lot of people in New York really believe in me, and that makes me feel really good about myself," she says.

Kimy can be considered lucky: Tony and Kristen have little or no relationship with their respective families, although they would like to. For now they are focused on other goals. Kristen, who spends nights at Sylvia's Place, plans to save money and find a place to live, go through with her transition, and get a college degree. Tony, who's at the Ali Forney Center, says he wants to go to college to become a pediatrician. Michele, who talks with her grandmother almost daily, considered joining Job Corps, a federally funded job training and educational program, but changed her mind. At press time she had left her housing to strike out on her own.

"It's hard, but I've not given up hope, because there's still faith for all [homeless queer youth] out there," Michele says. "It'll get a whole lot better. This is only the beginning."