The study found 10% of young people who made contact with Hove YMCA’s Housing Advice service identify as LGBT. Through subsequent contacts project workers estimate the figure is closer to a fifth of homeless young people.

One of the key findings of the study is the extent to which LGBT young people experienced problems at school. Over two thirds reported being bullied and this appeared to be linked to truanting and exclusion from school, and subsequent educational underachievement.

None of the young people had received sex or relationships education at school that was inclusive of LGBT lives.

There was also a high incidence of mental health problems with two thirds of young people having attempted suicide.

Commenting on the findings which were released last week, Mr Cull said: “The launch of the research report has been timely with the City currently developing the new Children and Young Peoples Trust and Youth Homeless Strategy.

“The report should raise awareness amongst service providers and help them identify how they can support LGBT young people more effectively. I particularly hope that schools will respond to the recommendations as we have found that schools generally are not inclusive or safe places for LGBT young people and that their negative experiences in schools are a contributory factor to their later homelessness”.

Numerous tragic situations I have encountered come to mind. There was the boy from rural Delaware who came out to his family at age 15 at a family picnic. His father first tried to strangle him and later that night kicked him out of his home. And the young woman from New York City whose mother discovered she is a lesbian. Her mother attacked her, ripping out a piece of her scalp. And the young man from Florida who told his father he is gay. His father put a gun to his head and told him to get out of the house, that he was no longer his son. I have heard hundreds of such stories and have known thousands of queer kids who have endured the terrors and degradations of homelessness as a result of rejection by their biological families.

But what kind of an environment are today’s youths coming out in? We live in a society that remains bitterly divided about whether or not to accept LGBT people. Far too many parents are not willing to embrace their gay, lesbian, or transgender children. In fact, a recent study indicated that 25% of teens who come out experience rejection by their families. And many of these rejected teens find themselves out on the street, homeless and vulnerable. Surveys of homeless youths in cities across our country consistently show LGBT teens making up 25% to 50% of the entire homeless youth population.

It is tragic that so many youths are forced to experience homelessness as a result of their honesty. But it is disgraceful that the larger LGBT community focuses so little attention and so few resources on the problem. On behalf of the thousands of LGBT youths on the streets of our nation, I call on community members and leaders to make the welfare of our youngest members a priority. We might not be their parents, but these are our kids. We must do more to protect them. And we must come up with strategies to reach out to the communities who are often most opposed to us—religious conservatives, immigrants, people of color—for it is among families in such communities that our LGBT youths are most in peril.

The Ali Forney Center is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization funded by private foundations, government grants and the generosity of individuals, local businesses and the community at large. If you would like to make a donation, please make checks payable to the Ali Forney Center and mail the following address. Your donation is tax deductible.

Ali Forney Center
527 West 22nd St., 1st Floor
New York, New York 10011

Items We Always Need:

* Non-perishable foods
* Toiletries
* Cleaning supplies
* Office supplies
* Twin sheet sets
* Towels and wash cloths
* Socks, underwear & T-shirts

New clothing and new or "gently" used linens are appreciated.

Reverend Ruben Diaz, Sr., a Bronx state Senator, has settled his 2003 lawsuit against the Harvey Milk High School. Diaz, who has publicly sparred with the gay community for more than a decade, launched his suit, in which Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Counsel represented him, when the New York Post trumpeted news of an increase in city funding for the school, which is operated by the Hetrick-Martin Institute that serves LGBT youth. The school, created in 1985 as a haven for New York City public school students harassed over sexual orientation, acknowledges in the settlement that it is not closed to non-gay students. Liberty Counsel pledged to track admissions to make sure the school is not discriminating against straight youth.

Last November, the Montrose Counseling Center, a stronghold in the center of the city's gay community, sent out a call for gay-friendly foster parents.

The not-for-profit got at least 12 volunteers, five of whom have registered with a private foster care agency working with the center. That agency will train the parents and help pair foster care kids with them, although none have been placed yet.

Unlike other, similar efforts in the nation, this gay-friendly recruitment is coming from outside the state's child protective agency.

Ann Robison, executive director of the counseling center, said the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services is aware of her organization's effort, but both sides need a face-to-face meeting to work out logistics. The agency oversees foster care for the state, but it outsources some parent training and recruitment to private organizations.

"This is very slow going," Robison said. "I hope we will have it worked out soon."

Right now state officials say they can't guarantee that teens referred by the center will be paired with the parents it recruits. But they welcome the fresh crop of foster parent volunteers.

Gwen Carter, Houston-area spokeswoman for Child Protective Services, said her agency has to consider a host of issues — everything from sexual orientation to drug use and religion — when matching a child to a foster home.

"If a child says, 'I want to be in a home that will accept my sexuality,' we will try our best to meet their needs," Carter said.

Handling homeless teenagers, a population the Montrose center wants to serve, can also be complicated. Those kicked out of their houses are declared wards of the state if they are considered abandoned by their parents; this means they are eligible for foster care. But teens who leave voluntarily are often deemed runaways, not foster kids, which means parents who take in these kids get no state assistance.

(Washington D.C., August 16, 2006) — Today, Lambda Legal and the Child Welfare League of America launched a new publication to serve as a guide for helping the child welfare system to better meet the needs of LGBTQ youth in care.

Out in the Margins: A Report on Regional Listening Forums Highlighting the Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning Youth in Care, is a compilation of the experiences of LGBTQ youth in care along with concrete solutions to end the problems they face in the foster care, juvenile justice, and homeless/transitional living systems. The information was gathered during 13 listening forums attended by over 500 people — including social workers, service providers, administrators, caregivers, and LGBTQ youth who are or were in care — from 22 states in 2003-2004. The publication is available free of charge upon request or downloadable at www.lambdalegal.org or www.cwla.org.

“We held listening forums in every region of the country and found that the needs of LGBTQ youth in care are by and large the same no matter where they live. From large urban cities to small rural towns — not enough is being done to keep these young people safe,” said Rudy Estrada, Staff Attorney for Lambda Legal’s Foster Care Project. “That kind of coast to coast consensus makes this book applicable to child welfare services everywhere.”

“This report offers concrete recommendations for policy makers and practitioners who want to make a difference in the lives of LGBTQ youth,” said Rob Woronoff, LGBTQ Program Director at the Child Welfare League of America. “The experiences and practical solutions in this report come directly from the people who are most affected — the youth and their advocates, caregivers, and service providers.”

This fall, the two groups will launch a free toolkit with a variety of handouts aimed at providing additional educational information specifically geared for the child welfare community, from foster parents, to LGBT youth in care, to social workers and beyond. In November, CWLA will host its annual Finding Better Ways Best Practices conference, and this year’s will be entirely devoted to addressing the needs of LGBTQ youth and families involved with the country’s foster care system. This conference, cosponsored by Lambda Legal, will take place in Nashville, TN. For more information on any of these resources go to www.lambdalegal.org or www.cwla.org.

# 25-40% of youth who become homeless each year are LGBT.
(Kruks G, Journal of Adolescent Health.)

# 50% of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ.
(Mallon, G, We Don’t Exactly Get the Welcome Wagon: The Experiences of Gay and Lesbian Adolescents in the Child Welfare Systems.)

# 26% of gay youth are forced to leave home because of conflicts with family members over sexual orientation.
(Rhode Island Task Force on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Youth.)

# 23% of GLB youth have been threatened with a weapon at school. 52% feel sad and hopeless. 48% have seriously considered suicide. 29% have attempted suicide. GLB youth are two-to-three times more likely to get pregnant or get someone pregnant than heterosexual youth.
(U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

# 30% of all completed adolescent suicides in the U.S. are by LGBT youth.
(U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.)

# 28% of LGBT youth drop out of school because of verbal or physical harassment by other students.
(Savin-Williams, RC, Journal of Consulting Clinical Psychology.

# 78% of youth report that young people who are gay or thought to be gay are teased or bullied in their schools and communities. 93% hear other youth at school or in their neighborhood use words like "fag," "homo," "dyke," "queer," or "gay" at least once in a while, with 51% hearing them every day.
(National Mental Health Association.)

# 50% of gay males report negative reactions from their parents when they disclosed their sexual orientation and 26% were forced to leave home as a result of disclosing their sexual orientation to their parents.
(U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.)

# 33% of gay men and 34% of lesbians report suffering physical violence from family members as a result of their sexual orientation.
(Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force.)

# 50% of transgendered youth trade sex for money or a place to live.
(Massachusetts Department of Public Health.)

# 30% of young, black gay men in America are infected with HIV disease.
(U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

# LGBT youth are twice as likely as heterosexual youth to abuse alcohol, and eight times as likely to use cocaine/crack.
(Garofalo, R, MD, et al, The American Association of Pediatrics.)

# LGBT homeless youth are physically or sexually victimized on average by seven more people than heterosexual homeless youth; leave home an average of 12 times compared to seven times for heterosexual homeless youth; had nearly twice as many sexual partners in their lives than did heterosexual homeless youth; and used 11 of 12 substances more frequently during the previous six months.
(University of Washington.)

# The following have adopted policies against discrimination based on sexual orientation:

The American Psychiatric Association (APA)
The American Psychological Association (APA)
The National Association of Social Workers (NASW)
The American Medical Association (AMA)
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)
The American Counseling Association (ACA)
The American School Health Association (ASHA)
The Child Welfare League of America (CWLA)

# The following have issued statements condemning attempts by child welfare and mental health professionals to alter a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity through so called reparative or conversion therapies:

The American Psychiatric Association (APA)
The American Psychological Association (APA)
The National Association of Social Workers (NASW)
The American Counseling Association (ACA)

Up to 42 percent of the 575,000 to 1.6 million youths who are considered homeless or runaway are lesbian, gay or transgender, according to the report, "An Epidemic of Homelessness."

In New York, no one knows how many homeless youths there are let alone how many of them are LGBT, city officials acknowledged. But the estimate is that there are 30,000 homeless youths, of whom 8,400 are LGBT.

"Now that we have a report that sadly documents how big a problem the issue of homelessness among young LGBT people is," City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said, "it will make it much more difficult for government to ignore or walk away from that problem."

Solutions mentioned at the announcement included increasing the number of shelter beds for LGBT young people and expanding services designed for them to help them become self-sufficient.

Quinn and Councilmen Lewis Fidler and Alan Gerson noted that $1.2 million of the $2.6 million set aside in the budget passed this year for beds for at-risk, runaway and homeless youth is for LGBT homeless youth services.

The budget also calls for $50,000 for an independent count and demographic breakdown of the city’s homeless youth population. That count will be conducted in the spring, city officials said.

According to statistics cited by the federally funded National Runaway Switchboard, 42 percent of homeless youth identify as gay or lesbian, which is grossly disproportionate given that approximately 3 to 5 percent of the U.S. population identifies as gay or lesbian. (Additional research has found that homeless youth also disproportionately identify as bisexual or transgender.) Based on these estimates, up to 8,400 of the 15,000 to 20,000 homeless youth estimated to live in New York City are LGBT. Nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, each year between 570,000 and 1.6 million youth are homeless or run away. This means that up to 672,000 of these youth are LGBT.
...
The report was released today at City Hall in acknowledgment of the New York City Council’s leadership in addressing this issue. Since 2005, more than $2 million has been granted to organizations in the city that provide a variety of vital services to homeless LGBT youth.

These organizations have developed model practice programs that can be replicated at shelters around the country. For example, the report includes a chapter written by Theresa Nolan, division director of the New York-based Green Chimneys, detailing the organization’s model transitional living program. New York City has also funded two additional providers that work exclusively with LGBT homeless youth: the Ali Forney Center, headed by Executive Director Carl Siciliano, and Sylvia’s Place, where Kate Barnhart is program director. This unprecedented level of funding specifically for helping to house and serve LGBT homeless youth came about through the determined leadership of Councilmembers Lew Fidler, Alan Gerson and Speaker Christine Quinn.

Having a good knowledge of the risk factors that LGBT youth face, in addition to the factors that compound risk and lack of safety for LGBT youth in out-of-home care, we expected that upon opening Waltham House, the program would be flooded with referrals. What happened in the fall of 2002 was quite the opposite. The program opened with the arrival of four teens, and the remaining eight beds went unoccupied for several months. Three of these four youth were referred by a single social worker. This lack of referrals baffled the program and agency staff, especially when we considered stories we heard from former clients who had moved on to other programs and subsequently come out.

These former clients recounted stories of being kicked out by other agencies or care providers when they revealed their sexual orientation or gender identity. Worse still, too many of them said that the risks inherent in living in any space that was not protecting them as an LGBT person meant that they were better off having unsafe sex and contracting HIV because they would then be eligible for specific housing funds reserved for that community. This is a frightening thought, but also clearly a painful reality for some of our youth.

After numerous attempts at outreach to the program’s referral sources (primarily DSS), we started asking social workers about their impression of the situation and learned that professionals in the field did not have the language to initiate discussions with their clients about sexual orientation and gender identity, and therefore were not sure what an appropriate referral to Waltham House would entail. Furthermore, they had not had much, if any, training about LGBT identity and did not know how to identify clients on their caseloads who might be struggling with issues of sexual orientation or gender identity.

...

One of the outcomes of the training initiative was an increase in the number and types of referrals that Waltham House received. After suffering from a dearth of referrals due to the lack of awareness of LGBT youth within the system, Waltham House saw a spike in referrals as more and more DSS workers participated in LGBT training. Social workers were better able to identify LGBT young people on their caseloads and better equipped to have conversations with their clients about sexual orientation and gender identity/expression.

But this is hardly a new problem and should come as a surprise to no one. Banished and homeless gay teens have been selling their asses on street corners for as long as anyone can remember. And there have certainly been enough movies on this subject. The "surprise" is the lack of will and interest in the gay community to muster its resources and ample forces to publicize and provide safe havens for these kids.

What the fuck is the matter with us? Our own queer City Council Speaker Christine Quinn was quoted as saying,"Now that we have a report that sadly documents how big a problem the issue of homelessness among young LGBT people is...it will make it much more difficult for government to ignore or walk away from that problem."

Sure. As I said, this problem is only news to the deaf, dumb and blind. I doubt a "report" will make a difference and Christine Quinn's polite comment is way too little and way too late for the thousands of kids we've allowed to suffer, sicken and die over the past decades.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that the number of homeless and runaway youth ranges from 575,000 to 1.6 million per year. And, according to the National Runaway Switchboard, up to 42 percent identify as lesbian or gay.

There is, and has been, so much talk (by str8s) of how depraved we are, and how we're all just pederasts at heart, that the idea of associating with anyone under 18 sends a cold streak racing up our backs. And it's no idle fear: one disgruntled 'house-guest' willing to lie is all it takes to put you in a US prison-- and have you registering with the police as a 'sexual predator' for the rest of your life.

This is an incredibly important facet of the current anti-gay pogrom and one of which so very few people will speak.

An appalling number of young people -- as many as 1.6 million, the federal government estimates -- are homeless or runaways. And even though a small fraction of teens are gay, more than 40 percent of homeless youth are gay, the National Runaway Switchboard finds.

The new report is a wakeup call for lawmakers and social service agencies: So much hostility and violence are directed at gay teens in foster care, homeless shelters or correctional facilities that many conclude they're safer living on a sidewalk. Our nation is failing these kids.

The federal Runaway and Homeless Youth Act needs to be renewed and better funded, as the report suggests, and Uncle Sam needs to focus on the reasons gay teens are at much higher risk for homelessness.

But this isn't just a government problem. Every American adult ought to hear the horrifying numbers in this report as a wakeup call to work harder to make our society more tolerant of diversity. One-quarter of homeless gay youth are throwaways -- teenagers thrown out of their homes because of their sexual orientation. As James, another teen profiled in the report, was told by his mother, "You're going to be straight or you're not going to live here anymore."

Plenty of kids living on the streets ran away from home to escape being beaten for being gay. Helping to create a society that teaches parents that every child deserves a loving home is up to every adult, not just those of us who're gay.

They're fuss, fuss, fussing over their right to adopt infants, among other things... and of course they ought to have the same rights as everyone else. Meanwhile, they're stealing gay resources from gay children who have nothing but the kindness of straight people (which is to say they have nothing at all).

It's realy not like this that we as a people have a problem with meager ressources, but rather with their mobilization.

You are certainly right to suggest that the money could have been used for a better purpose -- but would these moneys also be actually donated if you have asked the donors for any other purpose than the equal marriage battle?

Gay people go on and on asking other people to support them, but do they support other gay people? No. Gay people are much too self-obsessed and much too paranoid to support anyone.

We're all very caught up in measuring and comparing and creating authority figures and it's all bullshit. You have to be a light for yourself and young gay people should not look to me as a role model. I'm as fucked up and twisted and freaked as they are. You have to forge your own way and understand for yourself what's going on, which means you have to keep your brain alive and open. As soon as you have a role model, you're closing yourself off. It's all fucked, and it all has to do with money in the end.

It is not like the gay folks have never heard of the homeless gay teens and the facilities trying to help them. No, they had -- but preferred to donate to different issues.

It's funny you should mention that... I was just reading Rupert Everett saying:

Yes. They think this is not their problem. Worse... they think that because 3 in 4 gays do not end up homeless that there is no problem. I have heard quite well-meaning 'mos say just this. "My parents didn't mistreat me. My parents didn't throw anyone out of the house. Things aren't as bad as you say."