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.”