"We Won't Have a Faggot in Our House" - Child Abuse in the Name of God

Thanksgiving is supposed to be about giving thanks and spending time with family and friends.  Yet for a large number of LGBT youth, today is a day of loneliness and fending to survive on the streets.  LGBT youth make up up to 40% of homeless youths.  What drives them to the streets?  Their "godly Christian" parents - conservative Jews and Muslims also throw away their children - who prefer to cling to the myths authored by ignorant herders from two millennia ago rather than accept and love their own children.  In my view, such parents should be prosecuted for criminal child abuse.  They certainly deserve no respect or even civil treatment.  Carl Siciliano who runs the Ali Forney Center in New York City has a guest post at Joe Jervis' blog that is worth a read on the dire predicament of so many of these discarded youths. Here are highlights:

"We won't have a faggot in our house."

Those are the words M heard after his mother died of cancer. He was 16. His mom had loved and accepted him. But not his aunt and uncle. They took in his little brother, but left M to fend for himself in the streets.

M lived in a town in Florida that had no youth shelter. He and about 20 other homeless kids slept on the floor of an unlocked building in the town park. He used his knapsack with his school books and his toothbrush and deodorant inside as his pillow. Those were the good nights. The bad nights were when the police chased them out. On those nights he tried to sleep in an abandoned lot, hidden in the weeds. Those nights his allergies tormented him; his eyes and throat swelled, and he struggled to breath.

No matter what kind of night he had, M went to school every day. He did it to honor the memory of his mom, who said she would kick his butt in the afterlife if he didn't get an education. Despite the soul-shattering hardships he endured, he graduated at 18.

"As soon as I get the chance, I'm going to kill you, you fucking faggot."

Those are the words one of M's friends heard when he walked through the courtyard into the youth shelter where most of the beds for New York City's homeless youths are located. Despite local and federal regulations that mandate that youth shelters be in homelike environments with no more than 20 beds, NYC has crowded hundreds of kids into that shelter. Many LGBT kids report being bashed and harassed by the numerous gang members who stay there. M came to New York City after he graduated from high school, and tried to stay at there. But after being attacked too many times he ended up sleeping in the subways.

I met M the day he moved into one of the Ali Forney Center's homelike shelters after sleeping in the subways for six months. That was a really good day for M. He has had some wonderful days since; like the day he was accepted into college, and the day he got hired for his job counseling other teens. Those were good days for the Ali Forney Center as well, as have the been the joyful days in recent months when over 40 of our youths in our new job training program have been hired.

But we have had some really bad days. Since the federal sequestration and it's vast cuts we have lost about $1 Million in government funding. I have been struggling to pay our rents and our food bills, and keep our programs going. I don't sleep in a vacant lot, but I have had more than my share of sleepless nights worrying about the future of the Ali Forney Center.

But in the end I trust we will go forward. Our work of housing and protecting homeless LGBT youths must survive and grow. Too many of the LGBT kids we care for have endured cruelty, violence and contempt in their homes and in other shelters. Over 1,300 kids a year from across our country rely on the Ali Forney Center to provide a home where they are protected and accepted for who they are. I trust that our work will go on, because I trust in the goodness of our community.

If you want to give donations to charities this time of year, think about making a donation to the Ali Forney Center.   You can do that here. You can also make donations on PayPal by using this email: mramos@aliforneycenter.org.  Another charity dear to my heart is the George D. and Marion Phelps Hamar HRBOR Scholarship that I started to help LGBT students needing assistance for a college education.  You can make a donation here.  Please do NOT give you donations to "charities" or churches that promote discrimination and bigotry. 

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