Keeping LGBT youth alive

The year-end holidays bring joy to many—and depression and thoughts of suicide to others. When those at risk are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning youth, the Trevor Project is there to help every day of the year, including Christmas. The organization runs a toll-free national suicide hotline—(866) 4-U-TREVOR—as well as suicide-education programs for LGBT youth. Jorge Valencia, executive director of the Trevor Project, spoke with Advocate.com by telephone.

How is the Trevor Project different from other national suicide-prevention hotlines?
The Trevor Project runs the only nationwide hotline for gay and lesbian teenagers. It is open 365 days of the year. The thing that makes us different than everyone else is our focus is the highest-risk group, LGBT youth—that is, 15–to–24-year-olds. Suicide is the number 1 killer of teens today, and every hour and 45 minutes, a gay teenager is lost to suicide. That’s a Columbine every single day of the year. That definitely justifies why we’re around.

How many young people do you help in a year?
We get approximately 1,000 calls a month from teenagers all around the nation. However, when awareness of our help line is raised we get four times as many calls. For example, last year, after we were mentioned after an episode on the WB’s One Tree Hill, calls increased fourfold. That’s one reason why we’re so adamant about raising awareness, because 95% of all youth suicides are preventable. That means more lives being saved if we can talk to them. That’s a statistic that we can speak to.

Is the Trevor Project hotline just for gay teens?
Forty percent of our callers are people who don’t define their sexuality—and we don’t advertise our hotline that way either. For instance, one of our posters advertising the hotline asks the question “Who?” as in, Who are you? Who can you turn to for help? The thing we’re trying to avoid by having open-ended posters like this is a situation where a kid who’s still confused about his sexuality [doesn’t want] to stop and look at the poster because of fear of being harassed.

What other projects besides the national hotline does the Trevor Project run?
We just opened the “Dear Trevor” section on our Web site [http://www.thetrevorproject.org]. It started because we would have teens asking our webmaster over the Internet, “I’m confused, I think I might be gay. Can you help me?” We created this section on our Web site so they can e-mail us, and we have our counselors respond to them. We keep those letters and their answers online so others can get comfort from the letters. Of course, if someone needs help immediately, we ask them to call the hotline so we can help them directly.

Where did the name “Trevor Project” come from?
Trevor came out of James Lecesne’s [play] Word of Mouth. The show had a segment about a 13-year-old boy who develops feelings for a friend of his, and he’s ostracized. This segment was made into a short film and in 1994 it won the Oscar [for best live-action short]. It wasn’t until ’98 that HBO decided it wanted to air the film, and when HBO approached the film’s creators, [the creators] thought that they should set up a hotline for any teens who saw the short and were going through the same thing. Since then over 35,000 youth have been helped by the hotline.