Profile
Photos
Comments
I keep on hearing how far gays have come--with the exception of "a
collaboration of organizations that work to nurture LGBT youth,
including services, counseling and advocacy." this story is no different
than a teenager in the 1940s/1950s
South Florida
Jamesly Louis, 22, became homeless when he was 16 years old. He was one of a growing number of LGBT homeless youth. Photo by Christiana
Lilly
LGBT Teen Homelessness in South Florida, Part 1
Jamesly Louis didn’t know what he was going to do, but bottled up with frustration, [...]
Jamesly Louis didn’t know what he was going to do, but bottled
up with frustration, anger and sadness, he knew if he went home after
school the way he was feeling, he was “going to do something stupid.”
He knew that his assigned counselor didn’t care. The other students
who bullied him didn’t care. The teachers who pretended over and over
again that it was a harmless scuffle between boys didn’t care. Somehow,
the gay 16-year-old boy found his way to his TRUST counselor at Miami
Beach Senior high School. Normally there to help students dealing with
drugs, she went into action and by midnight that evening, Louis called Covenant House in Fort Lauderdale his new home.
“I wrote a letter and gave it to the TRUST counselor and then she
managed to talk to me,” Louis remembers. “All I wanted was someone, some
type of connection to make me feel like I was not alone. I really felt
that deep down, well maybe I don’t’ belong here; if I’m the only one
that’s like that, then why am I here?”
Louis, now 22, lived in the shelter for homeless teens for two months
when he was 16 years old after he couldn’t handle living in a home
where he was ignored, his homosexuality an unspoken issue, and being
bullied at school. Unfortunately, Louis was a part of up to 40 percent
of homeless youth who identify as LGBT, even though they represent only
about 10 percent of the population, according to the National Coalition
for the Homeless.
Data has always shown that LGBT youth have more worries than their straight counterparts. According to a study by the Human Rights Campaign (https://bit.ly/16IYPqD),
of more than 10,000 LGBT youth ages 13 to 17 who were surveyed, their
top three concerns were their non-accepting families, bullying in
school, and fear of being outed. Their straight counterparts said it was
class/exams/grades, college/their future career, and financial
pressures.
“School is just not even an issue if you’re trying to survive,” Mandi Hawke said. “You shouldn’t be concerned about who you are and being accepted and fitting in and bullying and being afraid.”
Hawke serves as the director of youth services at SunServe in Fort Lauderdale, where she runs a teen-friendly space where
participants are free to be themselves and voice their concerns.
However, it’s not unheard of to receive multiple calls a week from
homeless gay teens who were kicked out of their homes or ran away.
Unfortunately, SunServe currently does not have a full-fledged homeless
program and can only refer homeless teens to Covenant House, where Louis
went, or give them provisions.
Louis was born and raised in Haiti, a country highly influenced by
its Catholic roots, until he moved to the United States at 14 with his
mother and four brothers when she married a Haitian man in South
Florida. He never discussed being gay with his family, although he knows
they knew. Back home, fellow congregants told church leaders that they
feared he was gay and priests had tried to “pray the gay away.” But from
a young age, Louis knew it was a part of him, even if he didn’t know
what being gay meant.
When his family moved to Florida, life got tougher as his family life
became a place of emotional abuse by his stepfather, who they
discovered had never filed for their visas. The five boys were shuffled
around to foster families.
“At that time I was 14 or 15. I really needed my parents for a lot of
things and I [didn’t have them], so that was emotional for me, it was
what really drained me,” Louis said.
Carla Silva, the executive director of the Alliance for GLBTQ Youth, a collaboration of organizations that work to nurture LGBT youth, including services, counseling and advocacy.
“Of all the young people that engage in our services, on average, 20
percent of them tell us that they’re not safe at home, that they need a
safe place to live, or that they have been thrown out or run away — and
that is youth that comes for service for any reason whatsoever,” Silva
explained.
However, for many organizations such as SunServe and The Alliance,
the biggest problem they are facing is a government who is too afraid to
take on the issue of LGBT homelessness. Due to anti-discrimination
laws, organizations who receive funding from the Department of Housing
and Urban Development are not allowed to ask for one’s sexual orientation at in take (https://bit.ly/15Awe3S).
Plus, agencies wanting to change their intake forms would have to
undergo a massive administration and legislative overhaul for
permission.
While HUD’s ban may be well meaning to prevent discrimination, Silva believes it’s another situation of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
“It’s short sighted. They really don’t understand that without having
this information, we don’t have the full scope of the problem,” Silva
said.
This past school year, Silva spoke with a staff member at Miami-Dade
Public Schools who said that there were 270 students who were
unaccompanied — not living with a parent or guardian, nor in the foster
system. When asked how many were LGBT. The staffer said “maybe” four or
six, but she wasn’t sure.
On the other hand, the teens themselves may not be honest when asked
their sexual orientation or identity — so many have heard horror stories
of homophobic staffers or religious organizations that won’t help LGBT
homeless youth that they’ve been taught to lie.
“They have very little trust in the system at play and with good
reason. This has been their experience — they’re not manifesting this,”
Silva said.
To add to the problem, even if agencies were aware of their clients’
sexual orientation, many don’t know what to do with that organization.
Silva and Hawke are both actively involved in training staffers at
different shelters and organizations on how to deal with LGBT people.
“There’s either people who don’t want anything to do with it, period,
and then there’s people who are very well meaning but they just don’t
know how to ask the question,” Hawke said.
In one case, a lesbian teen was accidentally placed in a home with a
homophobic foster parent who told her she wouldn’t have taken her if she
knew she was gay. In shelters, transgender clients are often placed by
their assigned gender — even if a biological man comes in dressed as a
woman, has a female name, and identifies as a woman, she would be placed
with the men. While staff can be trained, it’s difficult to protect
someone from other clients who may be homophobic and violent.
Silva remembers a case of a transgender girl at a Miami teen shelter
who kept returning to the shelter to the frustration of staff. Not only
was she housed with boys — where she didn’t feel safe — but she also was
only given male clothing and was referred to as a male.
“She definitely felt like her identity was under attack on a regular
basis, but also her parents would say, ‘Well as long as she dressed like
a boy… I would take her home,’” Silva said.
Staff encouraged her to dress like a boy and considered her to be
defiant when she wouldn’t do so. Every time her father picked her up,
she was kicked out of the car when she refused to act like a boy.
Finally, she left Miami and Silva does not know what happened to her — a
heartbreaking part of being in the field.
When Hawke refers teens to other organizations, due to privacy issues
she cannot follow up on the condition of the teen. It’s also nearly
impossible for the teen to update her since many end up borrowing phones
from friends or businesses. She referred one teen to Covenant House who
had moved to Florida to escape his homophobic home only to wind up
staying with a group of supposed friends who told him he couldn’t stay
with them unless he had sex with all of them.
“It’s awful,” Hawke says about not knowing what happens to the teens
she tries to help. “I hope and I send all the good energy that they have
made the connection necessary… most often I don’t hear what actually
happened, so that is what really fuels us to have our own program that
way I will know they got the care needed.”
For Louis, he did get the care that he needed from his school’s TRUST counselor. She called Pridelines Youth Services,
who referred the then-16-year-old boy to Covenant House. He went to his
empty home, threw everything he needed in a bag, and made the two-hour
bus ride from Miami to Fort Lauderdale. For much of the ride, it was
just him and the bus driver, watching city after city pass, miles
separating him from the home he couldn’t stand and a strange place he
could only have faith would help him. By midnight he arrived at the
shelter to go through paperwork and start a new life.
This is the first of a two-part series by South Florida Gay News on LGBT teen homelessness in South Florida.
