Homeless LGBTQ Youth Often Forced to Trade Sex for Food/Shelter

As numerous posts on this blog have noted in the past, LGBT youth are disproportionately represented among the number of homeless youth across America.  And the number one reason for the homeless status of these LGBT youth is family rejection, most often due to parental rejection of the youth's sexual orientation or gender identity.   What fuels this rejection?  The conscious embracing of ignorance and bigotry based on the writings and myths of ignorant herders 2500 years ago.  An ignorance and bigotry that is prompted constantly by charlatans and shysters in pulpits across the country that are little better than the imam who promote Islamic extremism.  What is even more sad is that because of the lack of resources available to such homeless youth, far too many are forced to trade sex for food and shelter.  A piece in The Raw Story looks at the sad phenomenon which is in truth brought about by the "godly folk" for whom I hold nothing but contempt.  Here are some highlights:

Homelessness is one of the main reasons youth in New York City and across the country engage in “survival sex”—national estimates range from 10 to 50 percent. One 2013 study on the city’s homeless youth found that some 25 percent had traded sex, and a 2008 study indicates these youth routinely trade sex for shelter. But lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and questioning (LGBTQ) youth are dramatically more likely to trade sex for a place to stay, according to a new study that analyzes their experiences.

At around 17, Andy wound up in New York City. Clients raped and robbed him during his years on the streets. But he was wary of seeking help, —even in as LGBTQ-friendly a city as New York. Andy says he felt child protective services and law enforcement agencies wouldn’t be sympathetic. If he went to a shelter as a minor, he would wind up on its radar. If that happened, they would place him in foster care or, worse, send him back home, he feared. He was able to leave the world of survival sex, but hundreds of children in New York City alone still sell their bodies to live.

Prior research has shown homeless LGBTQ youth were “seven times more likely” to trade sex than their heterosexual counterparts, notes “Surviving the Streets of New York,” a study conducted by the Urban Institute and Streetwise & Safe (SAS), released Wednesday.

LGBTQ youth make up 5 to 7 percent of the overall youth population but 20 to 40 percent of the homeless youth population. There are some 350 youth shelter beds in New York City, so scores spend their nights on the streets, in parks and in subway stations or, as the study emphasizes, engage in survival sex just for a roof over their head and maybe a hot meal.

Worth noting is that many of these youths also worked outside of the sex industry. More than half of those surveyed had sources of income other than survival sex, but employment options were limited, largely due to discrimination, according to the study.

Importantly, “almost all” of these youths—93 percent—did not want to trade sex. Those surveyed said that employment, housing and education opportunities were integral to leaving the trade. . . . . “There’s no social safety support net,” she tells Newsweek. “Without that in their lives, immediately upon leaving home, they do what they have to do to survive.”

Carl Siciliano, founder of the Ali Forney Center, “the largest agency dedicated to LGBTQ homeless youth in the country,” says these allotments are insufficient. Every night, there are 200 to 250 youths who want to get into a bed at the center, but there aren’t any available. This means some may wait months for a slot.

“We see every single day that the lack of safe shelter for LGBT youth are driving them into situations where they are forced to do survival sex,” he says. “The report is confirming something that we see every single day.”

Note the reference to employment discrimination as on cause of limited employment opportunities.  Here in Virginia, thanks to The Family Foundation and its political whores in the Virginia GOP, there are ZERO employment protections for LGBT individuals.  Meanwhile, around the country, Republicans are striving to broaden anti-gay discrimination or to rescind non-discrimination protections - all ultimately because of the "godly Christian" crowd.  Like fundamentalist Islam, conservative Christianity is a pervasive cancer on mankind that needs to be eradicated.  

Coming Out: When Parents Are the Enemy

I have several younger friends who has not come out to their parents.  Why?  Because of fear about how their parents - most of whom are described as "deeply religious" - will react.  Meanwhile, as more and more LGBT individuals come out and refuse to live in the closet, especially in their private lives, these individuals face an increasingly daunting prospect of finding enduring relationships because fewer and fewer of us are willing to be someone's "dirty secret."   The suicide death of Leelah Alcorn has focused a spot light on the deadly results of parents becoming the enemy of their child, usually as they cling to ignorance embracing religion or their own concerns over how people will perceive them for having an gay child.  To me, it's the height of parental selfishness.  An op-ed in The Advocate looks at the problem faced by those whose parents are their enemies and the failure of the justice system to protect LGBT youth.  Here are highlights:

A couple of weeks ago, Leelah Alcorn, a 17-year-old transgender girl, walked in front of a tractor-trailer on an Ohio interstate in the middle of the night. She left behind a prescheduled-to-post suicide note on her Tumblr page (which has since been deleted, presumably by her family) that explained in explicit detail the abuse she had experienced at the hands of her parents. 

I don't think I will ever forget how it felt to be surrounded by adults who told 17-year-old me that I was "wrong" and that the most important thing was that I be "normal." These adults were the usual suspects — my mother, the adult friends I spent six months living with after I ran away from home — but most disturbingly, I was told I was wrong by the adults put in place by the system to protect me. My "victim's advocate" assigned to me by the court after my mother pled guilty to felony assault, explicitly blamed me for the violence in childhood home.

Even today, nearly 15 years later, queer youth are being told the same damaging messages about themselves that I heard, and those words are killing them.

For LGBTQ people, our parents are often the enemy. This is particularly true for LGBTQ youth, who are generally legally dependent upon their abusers for food, shelter, and other basic needs. Domestic violence survivors and advocates have done incredible work educating about how damaging and dangerous it is to encourage survivors to maintain relationships with or stay living with their abusers, it's past time for us to share the same messages about LGBTQ youth and abusive parents.  It has been refreshing amid the sadness of the last week, to hear queer activists and advocates publicly acknowledge that parents are the problem and not the answer, and that transgender youth should be removed from homes where they are unsafe due to unaccepting and abusive parents. But where will they go?

It is impossible for us to truly understand Leelah's suicide, the dangers of reparative therapy on the lives of LGBTQ youth, unless we understand the intersectionality of child/adolescent abuse, reparative therapy, dysfunctional foster care systems where LGBTQ youth aren't safe, and the epidemic of LGBTQ youth homelessness. It is one thing for us to demand that transgender youth be removed from unaccepting and abusive homes, it's another to provide the services they need not only to survive, but to thrive.

[W]e must remember that 40 percent of all homeless youth across the country identify as LGBTQ. LGBTQ youth homelessness is not just a problem in large urban environments. Although LGBTQ youth run away and are pushed out of homes in every region in this country, many cities and communities (like the county I'm from) don't have any youth shelter beds, let alone any that are culturally appropriate for LGBTQ youth. 

It is not enough to ban conversion therapy and to pay lip service by saying that transgender youth shouldn't live in homes where they are abused. We must open our hearts, our homes, and our wallets. We must work in partnership with youth to create LGBTQ youth centered programs that will care for them, and we ourselves must care about them too — while they are still alive.

We must make Leelah's final haunting words were a heartbreaking call to action.

There is much work to be done, including making adherents of conservative, anti-gay religious belief utterly unacceptable in society.  

"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. 

click image to enlarge

The Christian Right's Vile PR Game

Thankfully, the younger generations are walking away from religion in record numbers and Christian denominations are shrinking over all despite the mega church phenomenon in some areas which, in fact, simply represents a reshuffling of existing believers from one church to another.  But this decline doesn't mean that the far right will get in touch with objective reality anytime soon.  Thinking for one's self and realizing that one's life has been lived based on myths and fairy tales is too terrifying for these people. Hence the continued effort by Christofascists to browbeat others - especially waffling believers - into accepting their sick and toxic religious beliefs.  A piece in Salon looks at how the effort may actually be backfiring.  Here are highlights:

[C]onservative American Christians have not learned an important childhood lesson: You can’t threaten, vilify or bully someone into liking you. In simpler times, stories of persecution and Christian supremacy were delivered in sermons and badly written books, but a recent batch of films has hit theaters with the net effect of corralling American fundamentalists into an ever-shrinking intellectual ghetto. I watched not only “Left Behind,” but also a sampling of some other recent Christian films in an attempt to understand what messages they convey to this ever-more-insular community.

By way of background, I have lived both irrational religion and right-wing politics. . . . As years passed, I grew uncomfortable with the theocratic right and became a libertarian, but even that wasn’t far enough from the religious right for me. Today it is impossible to separate religion from right-wing politics, creating a community rooted in dueling fantasies of persecution and righteousness with a pasty, white Jesus at the helm. Christianity expressed in culture and in religious movies has nothing to do with faith, decency or alleviating suffering. It’s a bizarre American offshoot best expressed by second-amendment Jesus and cutting food stamps for hungry children.

You can’t judge Christian films like other movies. Any casual examination shows them to be conventionally terrible without exception. But they are not meant to be good, but rather they are designed to deliver pointed messages, spurring audiences to promote and support established political and religious powers. They are vehicles that carry naked threats for people who believe differently and are threatening reminders to keep believers in line. For those opposed to reactionary religion and coercion, it’s important to examine these films to understand the stories this slice of America is telling itself and foisting on the rest of us.

“Left Behind” is the most ambitious and mainstream of recent Christian film offerings. The plot is simple: All “good Christians” and young children (but not teens) are whisked up to Heaven, leaving the vast majority of the planet to riot, panic and self destruct. . . . . Like so much of white America, the film comically fumbles with American diversity. There is an African American woman, a journalist, a junkie, a little person and a devout Muslim. It’s a juvenile and clumsy attempt to reflect real America that only serves to highlight the insular, monochromatic and artificial makeup of conservative America.

Christians make up 2.5 billion out of a total of just over 7 billion of the earth’s population at this moment (estimates vary). This emphasis on mass punishment of non-Christians makes “Left Behind” nothing more than a planetary-sized snuff film.  The most offensive part of the show by far is the Muslim who is “left behind” despite his faith and love for god. The character is the kind of moderate Muslim that even American Christians could accept. 

In “God’s Not Dead” released in March, the core message is that education is both evil and dangerous and that all answers are contained in the Bible. This is a common theme for fundamentalists, one that does a great deal to keep people uninformed and afraid. I found God’s Not Dead to be the most unbelievable, two-dimensional and downright offensive of all the films I reviewed . . 

Every single film I reviewed features some variation of the Christian persecution complex. No serious person can argue Christians are really persecuted in America. It is anti-factual. . . . . The “war on Christianity narrative” is a wholesale fabrication that injects religious strife into a country founded on actual religious freedom.

The danger with this recurring and false persecution narrative is that it takes away from the real suffering of actual people. An excellent (but depressing) essay by Alex Morris in Rolling Stone details the suffering of homeless gay youths who, because of their sexuality, are shunned and cast out of religious families.  . . . .  Discarding your children over sexuality is what persecution really looks like. I have never heard a case of a liberal family throwing a born-again Christian teenager into the street.

It is important to note that not all Christians believe the warped ideology or hostility expressed in Christian moviemaking.

The people who create and consume Christian film are neither mature nor reflective. They are at their core superstitious, afraid and tribal. They self-identify overwhelmingly Republican and shout about “moochers” while vilifying the poor. They violate the teachings and very essence of their own “savior” while deriving almost sexual pleasure from the fictional suffering of atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, Wiccans, Hindus, and even liberal Christians. To top it all off, the stories they tell themselves are borderline psychotic.

Christian film with its cardboard characters and heavy-handed messages will only drive an increasingly diverse and media-savvy populace away. Failing a profound change of heart, the best this community can hope for are films so bad no one will bother to watch them.

As I have continually said, conservative Christians are not nice or decent people. They suffer from what to me is a form of mental illness that mixes masochism and sadism.  They need to be shunned by decent society.

Promises From a Christian Pastor/Parent

My dad at about age 20

Friday was the eight anniversary of the day I lost my father after he had battled a lingering illness.  It is always a strange day for me since September 26th is also my son's birthday.  I guess bitter sweet is the best way to describe the feelings I experience: sadness about my dad and joy about my wonderful son.  Coincidentally, on Friday, one of the staff from the Hampton Roads Community Foundation - which administers the George D. and Marion Phelps Hamar/HRBOR scholarship I endowed in my parents memory - called me because the Foundation is updating its website and adding more history/details about the various scholarships that it administers.  Among the questions that were ask was what motivated me to use a chunk of my inheritance to create the scholarship which benefits LGBT graduating high school seniors from the seven cities of Hampton Roads.  In a nutshell, I said I wanted to (i) honor my parents for how they embraced and supported me when I came out, and (ii) help LGBT youth who might not have as supportive of parents (this area still have far to many Bible thumpers).   My father was not the easiest of parents, but when the challenge came to accepting me, he met the test.  A piece in Huffington Post by a pastor and parent (he has two young children) summarizes to me what moved my father - and my mother to do the right thing.  Here are excerpts:

Sometimes I wonder if I'll have gay children.  I'm not sure if other parents think about this, but I do -- quite often.  Maybe it's because I have many gay people in my family and circle of friends. It's in my genes and in my tribe.

Maybe it's because, as a pastor of students, I've seen and heard the horror stories of gay Christian kids -- from both inside and outside of the closet -- trying to be part of the Church.

Maybe it's because, as a Christian, I interact with so many people who find homosexuality to be the most repulsive thing imaginable, and who make that abundantly clear at every conceivable opportunity.

He then goes on to expound on how he will love and support his children shoud they be LGBT.  He then says this to the horrid Christofascist and homophobes who might be motivated to reject their children:

Many of you may be offended by all of this, I fully realize. I know this may be especially true if you are a religious person -- one who finds the whole topic disgusting or unpleasant.
As you've been reading, you may have been rolling your eyes, or clicking the roof of your mouth, or drafting familiar Scriptures to send me, or praying for me to repent, or preparing to Unfriend me, or writing me off as a sinful, evil, Hell-bound heretic... but with as much gentleness and understanding as I can muster; I really couldn't care less.
This isn't about you. This is a whole lot bigger than you.

You're not the one I waited on breathlessly for nine months.

You're not the one I wept with joy for when you were born.

You're not the one I bathed, and fed, and rocked to sleep through a hundred intimate, midnight snuggle sessions.

You're not the one I taught to ride a bike, and whose scraped knee I kissed, and whose tiny, trembling hand I held, while getting stitches.

You're not the one whose head I love to smell, and whose face lights-up when I come home at night, and whose laughter is like music to my weary soul.

You're not the one who gives my days meaning and purpose, and who I adore more than I ever thought I could adore anything.

And you're not the one who I'll hopefully be with, when I take my last precious breaths on this planet; gratefully looking back on a lifetime of shared treasures, and resting in the knowledge that I loved you well.

If you're a parent, I don't know how you'll respond if you find out your children are gay, but I pray you consider it.

One day, despite your perceptions of your kids or how you've parented, you may need to respond in real-time, to a frightened, frantic, hurting child -- one whose sense of peace, and identity and acceptance, whose very heart, may be placed in your hands in a way you never imagined -- and you'll need to respond.

If that day should ever come for me -- if my children should ever come out to me -- this is the Dad I hope I'll be to them.

My dad wasn't a church goer, but when it came to honesty, integrity and supporting his children, he was far more Christian in his behavior that the hate merchants of the professional Christian class - where lying is the norm - and the leadership of falsely named "family values" organizations. 

The Ugly Fruits of Conservative Religion: A Rising Number of Homeless Gay Teens

One of the very first post I wrote on this blog addressed what I see as a form of child abuse: LGBT youth being raised in conservative Christian homes (the same, of course, holds true for conservative Muslim and Jewish homes).  The enemies of LGBT rights and equality time and time again claim that gays make unfit parents when the truth is that it is they, the Christofascists and other religious fundamentalists who are unfit.  Sadly, even as gays are find increased societal acceptance, religious conservatives continue to disown their gay children and throw them out literally on the streets.  Indeed, some reports indicate that the number of homeless LGBT youth is growing.  For children under age 18, I believe that such parental behavior ought to result in criminal prosecution of the parents, but unfortunately this almost never happens.  A piece in Rolling Stone looks at the moral bankruptcy of religious conservatives and the toll it is taking on literally hundreds of thousands of LGBT youth.  Here are highlights:

[Jackie] she got a call from her older brother. "He said, 'Mom and Dad don't want to talk to you, but I'm supposed to tell you what's going to happen,'" Jackie recalls. "And he's like, 'All your cards are going to be shut off, and Mom and Dad want you to take the car and drop it off at this specific location. Your phone's going to last for this much longer. They don't want you coming to the house, and you're not to contact them. You're not going to get any money from them. Nothing. And if you don't return the car, they're going to report it stolen.'

Jackie's story may be distinctive in its particulars, but across America, it is hardly unique. Research done by San Francisco State University's Family Acceptance Project, which studies and works to prevent health and mental­health risks facing LGBT youth, empirically confirms what common sense would imply to be true: Highly religious parents are significantly more likely than their less-religious counterparts to reject their children for being gay – a finding that social-service workers believe goes a long way toward explaining why LGBT people make up roughly five percent of the youth population overall, but an estimated 40 percent of the homeless-youth population. The Center for American Progress has reported that there are between 320,000 and 400,000 homeless LGBT youths in the United States. Meanwhile, as societal advancements have made being gay less stigmatized and gay people more visible – and as the Internet now allows kids to reach beyond their circumscribed social groups for acceptance and support – the average coming-out age has dropped from post-college age in the 1990s to around 16 today, which means that more and more kids are coming out while they're still economically reliant on their families. The resulting flood of kids who end up on the street, kicked out by parents whose religious beliefs often make them feel compelled to cast out their own offspring (one study estimates that up to 40 percent of LGBT homeless youth leave home due to family rejection), has been called a "hidden epidemic." Tragically, every step forward for the gay-rights movement creates a false hope of acceptance for certain youth, and therefore a swelling of the homeless-youth population.

[N]ot only were more kids showing up, they were also disappearing. "Every couple of months one of our kids would get killed," Siciliano says. "And it would always be a gay kid." In 2002, he founded the Ali Forney Center, naming it after a homeless 22-year-old who'd been shot in the head on the street in Harlem, not far from where the organization's drop-in center currently resides. Siciliano had been close with Forney and felt that had he had a safe place to go, he might be alive today.

In one survey, approximately one in five LGBT youth were unable to secure short-term shelter, and 16 percent could not get assistance with longer-term housing – figures that were almost double those of their non-LGBT peers. However, it's clear that funding is also a problem.

Currently, Lewis tells me, "there are no legal federal protections in place to bar discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity in RHYA programs." At one residential placement facility in Michigan, LGBT teens were made to wear orange jumpsuits to "warn" other residents about their sexuality. 

Since 2002, when President George W. Bush issued an executive order that permitted faith-based organizations to receive federal support for social services, an increased amount of federal funding has gone to churches and religion­affiliated organizations where LGBT youth may not feel welcome.

In New York, a city with nearly 4,000 homeless youth, there are only around 350 spots in youth shelters, and less than a third of those spots are designated for LGBT kids, despite their disproportionate share of the homeless-youth population. (And considering that many homeless youth may not openly identify themselves as LGBT when seeking services, many providers believe that the estimate of 40 percent may be far too low.) Across the country, there are only 4,000 youth-shelter beds overall, while an estimate derived from the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Thrownaway Children put the number of homeless minors at 1.7 million. 

For LGBT kids who remain homeless, the stakes are clearly life and death. They are seven times more likely than their straight counterparts to be the victims of a crime, often a violent one. Studies have shown they are more than three times more likely to engage in survival sex – for which shelter is the payment more often than cash. They are more likely to lack access to medical care, more likely to attempt suicide, more likely to use hard drugs and more likely to be arrested for survival crimes. According to the Equity Project, leaving home because of family­ rejection is the single greatest predictor of involvement with the juvenile-justice system for LGBT youth.

In America, we lose six queer kids a day to the street. That's every four hours a queer kid dies, whether it be from freezing to death or getting the shit beat out of them or a drug overdose. This is our next real plague."

"LGBT­advocacy groups don't want to talk about religion," says Mitchell Gold, founder of Faith in America. "One, they don't want to come across as anti-religion. And two, they just aren't familiar with it. But the number-one hurdle to LGBT equality is religious­based bigotry. The face of the gay-rights movement shouldn't be what I call '40-year-old well-moisturized couples.' The face of the gay-rights movement should be a 15-year-old kid that's been thrown out of his house and taught that he's a sinner."

There's more that will make your blood boil.  As readers know, I am not afraid to talk about religion or hide the fact that I hold open contempt for "godly Christian" parents who disown their children.  Being gay is not a choice.  Adhering to hate-filled, bigoted religious beliefs based on what is being increasingly demonstrated to be pure myth and fiction, however, IS A CHOICE. Religious conservatives truly need to become societal outcasts and subject to child abuse prosecution for mistreatment of their LGBT children.   They are NOT nice or decent people. The rest of us need to fully open our eyes to this reality.

An Open Letter to Pope Francis for Homeless LGBT Youth

Religion is the underlying cause for anti-gay bigotry.  Likewise, religious based bigotry is the leading cause of homelessness for LGBT youth who are estimated to make up 40% of homeless teens even though gays make up a far smaller portion of the overall population.  Sadly, too many churches still cling to ignorance and selective parsing of Bible passages to continue to fuel anti-gay animus while ignoring countless other inconvenient passages that show the true hypocrisy of the "godly folk."  Today, Faith In America  published a full-page open letter to Pope Francis in the New York Times. The letter was written by Ali Forney Center director Carl Siciliano.  Financial assistance to pay for the cost of the publication was provided by furniture maker Mitchell Gold and Bob Williams.  Here are excerpts from the letter:

Your Holiness, I write to you as a Roman Catholic, a former Benedictine monk and as a gay man who has spent over 30 years serving the homeless, first as a member of the Catholic Worker Movement, and now as the founder and Executive Director of the Ali Forney Center, America’s largest center for homeless lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth based in New York City. I write on behalf of the homeless LGBT youths I serve. 

I ask you to take urgent action to protect them from the devastating consequences of religious rejection, which is the most common reason LGBT youths are driven from their homes. At the heart of the problem is that the church still teaches that homosexual conduct is a sin, and that being gay is disordered. 

I hope that if you understand how this teaching tears families apart and brings suffering to innocent youths, you will end this teaching and prevent your bishops from fighting against the acceptance of LGBT people as equal members of society.

I hope that you will open your heart to the suffering of our youths. As LGBT youths are finding the courage to speak the truths of their hearts at younger ages, epidemic numbers are being rejected by their families, and driven to homelessness. The number of youths enduring this cruel fate is staggering; last year at least 200,000 LGBT youths experienced homelessness in the United States. LGBT youths make up 40% of the homeless youth population in this country, despite comprising only about 5% of the overall youth population

What these youths endure is horrific. They endure the torment of being unloved and unwanted by their parents, combined with the ordeals of hunger, cold and sexual exploitation while homeless. LGBT youths who are rejected by their families are eight times more likely to attempt suicide than LGBT youths whose parents accept them.

 

The Roman Catholic Church is the largest and most influential Christian organization in the world. By teaching that homosexual conduct is a sin, and that the homosexual orientation is disordered, it influences countless parents and families in societies across the globe to reject their children. In the name of these children, and in light of the love and compassion at the heart of the message of Jesus, I ask that you end this teaching.

I encourage readers to read the entire letter.  Will Pope Francis get the message?  I'd like to think that anyone who is a decent follower of Christ would do so, but I will not be holding my breath.  I increasingly see religion - especially fundamentalist religion - to be a pervasive evil that causes far more harm and suffering than it cures.  

Hate Group Leader Says Homeless LGBT Teens HaveOnly Themselves to bBame

Linda Harvey - the face of hate

Mission America - Linda Harvey's (Harvey is pictured at left) cottage industry hate group - is among the foulest of the stridently anti-gay groups one will find.  Harvey herself pontificates on topics about which she knows nothing and for which she has absolutely ZERO credentials.  To say that the woman is a douche bag would be unduly gracious.  Hate, bigotry and fear mongering are her stock in trade and she and Renew America are proof as to why there needs to be much closer scrutiny by the IRS of supposed "ministries" and far right "charitable" organizations.  No taxpayer should have to indirectly subsidize the lies and filth these groups disseminate.   As noted before on this blog, some 40% of homeless youth are from the LGBT community, may thrown out by their "godly Christian" parents.   Now, Harvey is maintaining that homeless youth have no one but themselves to blame for their homelessness;  Here are details from Gay Star News:

Mission America anti-gay author has made the extraordinary claim that homeless young LGBTI people only have themselves to blame for their homelessness – blaming them for running away from homophobic parents.

‘”Kids are kicked out of their homes just for being who they are,” is how the saying goes,’ Harvey said in a radio clip uncovered by RightWingWatch.org.

‘Well let me offer another possibility that I’ve heard far too often: a parent learns that a son or daughter is claiming to be gay but an underage child still lives at home, so the now-heartbroken parent puts new restrictions on some of the activities like for instance, the teen is no longer going to be having sleepovers with that same-sex friend, or if the friend is a college student or has an apartment, visits over there will not be permitted.

‘What does the teen do? It may become a fight where the teen storms out by choice and leaves voluntarily because the homosexual relationship is more important than that of his or her parents. And when that all-important relationship ends, the teen is too stubborn or already too-involved in alcohol or drugs or the premature independence of the homosexual life and he or she would rather drift than return home.’

Harvey has in the past said that gay people are just heterosexuals who are in denial, that they are not people, that they try to absorb other people’s personalities and that anti-bullying programs aimed at protecting LGBTI young people turn kids gay. 

Note how Harvey throws in the line about gays being hooked on drugs and alcohol in keeping with her past efforts to depict gays as promiscuous alcoholics and drug addicts.  The woman is worse than excrement.  I truly wonder at times what a detailed psychological profile of Harvey would reveal.  Mental illness is about the only explanation I can arrive at for her batshitery.

Judge Rules for LGBT Youths Living in Jamaican Sewers

Sewer in Jamaica

By most accounts, some 40% of homeless youths in America are LGBT and are homeless in many cases because their "godly" parents threw them out for being gay.   The problem of homeless LGBT youth is hardly unique to America - especially because of the efforts of American Christofascists to export anti-gay hatred and discrimination overseas.  Uganda and Nigeria are but two examples.  But closer to home Jamaica has a similar track record and homeless LGBT youth in that country are often living in desperate situations.  Even living in sewers.  But even that was too good for them in the eyes of Jamaican police who sought to evict homeless youth from the sewers.  Thankfully, a judge ruled that the youths could remain.  Here are highlights from Erasing 76 Crimes:

A New Kingston court ruling is the latest news for LGBT youths in Jamaica, who have been thrown out of their homes by their families, chased out of abandoned houses by police, and arrested when they found shelter in sewers and gullies. This account is from activist  Yvonne McCalla-Sobers, who is chair of Dwayne’s House, the initiative seeking to provide a home for the LGBT youths.

Jamaican police tried again last week to evict homeless LGBT youth from the sewers in New Kingston where they have been forced to take refuge.

The police have previously tried to burn the youth out of the gullies on the pretext that they attract criminals.

The latest incident took the form of a day-time raid on March 5, Ash Wednesday (ironically, a religious holiday marking the beginning of the Christian sacrificial season of Lent). Officers from the New Kingston police post swooped down on the gutters running beneath the commercial district and demanded that the several youth who lived there had to leave immediately. The youngsters were understandably upset and some put up quite a struggle as they literally have nowhere else to go.
Police had already chased them from every abandoned building they previously occupied and the buildings were then torn down.

The kids are afraid of going to the few government shelters because of the abuse they experience there.

Some of the youth were arrested for resisting their forcible eviction. They were also charged with using swear words (which is still an offense under Jamaican law).

When the youngsters were brought before the court on Friday, March 7, the judge fined them for their so-called “calumnious language” but also advised the police that the sewers are a public space. Hence the youngsters have every right to be there. With no other options, the kids have simply returned to living in the sewers.

Dwayne’s House, a Jamaican organization established to feed and clothe the youngsters living in the sewers, paid the small fines for some of the arrested youth. See the Web page of Dwayne’s House for more information or to contribute (in the United States or in Canada).

Please consider making a contribution.  The fruits of Christianity are foul indeed.   A contribution would aid those persecuted in the name of God.

Happy Thanksgiving - Please Be Mindful of the Less Fortunate

The boyfriend (we plan to marry in the Spring) and I will have dinner today with his dad, one of his brothers, my youngest daughter, her husband, and my granddaughter and step-granddaughter at a restaurant located at the former officers' club at Fort Monroe, now a National Monument.  It's a cold but beautiful day and the view across Chesapeake Bay to the Atlantic Ocean should be spectacular.  We decided to foregoing dinner at home after last years extravaganza with over 25 guests.  We have much to be thankful for and plan to enjoy the day.

Sadly, many in the LGBT community are not as lucky and I recall depression filled Thanksgiving in the first years after coming out.  My message to those in the dark place I was once in, please stay positive and know that time is on your side and that things will get better.  That said, there are some who are truly in need: homeless LGBT youth who have been discarded by the selfish, self-centered families which cannot deal with the "embarrassment" of having a gay child or family members.  Many of these toxic parents and families cloak themselves in feigned piety and "godliness" as justification for their despicable actions.  A guest post at Joe My God reminds of the needs of these homeless LGBT youth.  Here's the post:

We deal with a twofold tragedy every day at the Ali Forney Center. The first part is that hundreds of thousands of parents drive their children from their homes because they cannot accept having an LGBT child. The second part is that fewer than one tenth of homeless kids in this country can access a youth shelter bed. Hundreds of thousands of terrified, devastated kids are out on the streets tonight with nowhere safe to lay their heads.

Recently I met a girl in Minneapolis who told me about being out on the streets at 16 in the frozen Minnesota winter. She found a bus driver who would allow her to ride the city bus all night. But one night when he was off duty and she didn't have the bus fare, she shivered in the snow, fearing she would die in the cold. Another boy told me of being thrown out of his home in a suburb of Atlanta by a homophobic aunt. Having nowhere to go, he spent three days and nights in the woods near his house, with no food or water, crying and terrified and wanting to die. Finally he staggered out onto a sidewalk and collapsed of dehydration and was hospitalized.

Many kids turn to prostitution, having no other way to support themselves. Deon became homeless in Houston when he was 15. He also rode the buses all night, and would shower in the morning at a friend's house before heading to school. One night he was propositioned while waiting for the bus, and was offered money for sex. Deeply exhausted from his long nights on the bus, he reluctantly accepted. He told me that he felt so ashamed and humiliated by the experience, that he spent over an hour in the shower at his friends house that morning. He was weeping uncontrollably and didn't want anyone to see him like that. Deon lives with us now. Yesterday he told me that at his job at H&M clothing store, he has a portion of his income taken out of each paycheck. He uses this money to sponsor an orphan in Zimbabwe. He was beaming with pride when he told me this. I am more proud of him than I know how to say.

At the Ali Forney Center we respond to LGBT kids in the most horrifying situations imaginable. We respond with food and shelter, with job training and medical care. We work with kids from all over the country. Last year we cared for over 1,000 kids. As important as it is to house and feed these kids, it is just as important to affirm their basic human worth as LGBT people. It is important to show that they belong to our community, that they are valued and loved.

This Thanksgiving I am thankful for the kids who live with us, that they can have the opportunity to be healed of their terrible wounds. And I am thankful for the community of support that allows us to do this beautiful work. I am especially thankful to Joe and the JoeMyGod community for standing by us year after year. I am especially thankful for the amazing support we received last year when Hurricane Sandy destroyed our drop-in center.

I ask you to consider supporting our kids at this time. We have 200 kids on the waiting list for our shelters tonight, and have to rely on the support of the community in this time of sequestration and government cutbacks. Donations can be sent to us by mail at: Ali Forney Center, 224 West 35th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10001. Donations can be made online here.

Facilities at Ali Forney Center

Father Disowns Daughter in Epic Letter After She Disowns Gay Son

I was lucky when I came out to my parents a little over 11 years ago. They accepted me without qualification - as did my entire extended family.  Sadly, not everyone is as lucky and statistics show that roughly 40% of homeless youths are LGBT.   Many are thrown out by "godly Christian" parents who value the writing ignorant herders from over 2500 years ago over their own children.  In my view, it doesn't get much more disgusting or do more to prove that conservative Christianity is an evil to be stamped out and defeated.  But I digress.  Fortunately, not all family members always agree with the "godly folk."  A case in point is a father who disowned his daughter after she threw her son out of her home when he came out as gay.  An image of the letter is set out above.  Raw Story has more details.  Here are excerpts:

The pro-LGBT advocacy group FCKH8 released a letter from an irate father to his daughter on Wednesday in which the father and grandfather disowned his daughter for kicking her son Chad out of the house. According to Yahoo News, the boy had just told his mother that he is gay.

“Dear Christine,” he wrote. “I’m disappointed in you as a daughter. You’re correct that we have a ‘shame in the family,’ but mistaken about what it is. Kicking Chad out of your home simply because he told you he was gay is the real ‘abomination’ here.”

“He was born this way and didn’t choose it more than he being left-handed,” he wrote. “You, however, have made a choice of being hurtful, narrow-minded and backward. So while we are in the business of disowning children, I think I’ll take this moment to say goodbye to you. I now have a fabulous (as the gay [sic] put it) grandson to raise…”

The man announced his intention to take Chad in and care for him since his mother has rejected him on the basis of his orientation.

Kudos to this wonderful grandfather.  As for the daughter, she needs to be shunned and treated like the hateful person she is.  She, not her gay son is the abomination.

Is the Mormon Church About to Abandon Its Crusade Against Gay Marriage?

With the millennial generation leaving organized religion in droves and lingering negative publicity from the Proposition 8 initiative in 2008, some would argue that the Mormon Church has learned a harsh lesson and decided to abandon its crusade against gay marriage.  That's not to say that the Mormon Church has suddenly become gay friendly.  It's anything but gay friendly and recently launched a fraudulent "ex-gay" site which continues to claim that gays can "change."  Anyone who believes or promotes that lie is anything but a friend to LGBT individuals.  That said, the Mormon Church has apparently decided that being on the front lines of the anti-gay jihad ranks is no longer helpful to the Church's cause and it was noticeably absent in any official capacity from the gatherings of hate merchants and puppets of the child rapist protectors of the Catholic hierarchy who protested before the U. S. Supreme Court during the oral arguments in the Prop 8 and DOMA cases.  A piece in Mother Jones looks at the hopefully shifting position of the Mormon Church leadership.  Here are highlights:

Last month, hundreds of boisterous protesters converged in Washington, DC, as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of California's anti-gay marriage initiative, Proposition 8. Faith-based groups were on prominent display: the Methodists supporting marriage equality, the Westboro Baptists suggesting (per usual) that "God hates fags," the Catholics both for and against gay marriage, clergy of all stripes. But one group that wasn't there in any official capacity was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—a.k.a. the Mormons—which perhaps more than any other religious group was responsible for getting Prop. 8 passed in the first place.

In the five years since the LDS church sent busloads of the faithful to California to canvass neighborhoods, and contributed more than $20 million via its members to support the initiative, it has all but dropped the rope in the public policy tug of war over marriage equality. The change stems from an even more remarkable if somewhat invisible transformation happening within the church, prompted by the ugly fight over Prop. 8 and the ensuing backlash from the flock.

Although the LDS's prophet hasn't described a holy revelation directing a revision in church doctrine on same-sex marriage or gay rights in general, the church has shown a rare capacity for introspection and humane cultural change unusual for a large conservative religious organization.

"It seems like the [Mormon] hierarchy has pulled the plug and is no longer taking the lead in the fight to stop same-sex marriage," says Fred Karger, the LGBT activist who first exposed the church's major role in the passage of Prop. 8. "The Mormon Church has lost so many members and suffered such a black eye because of all its anti-gay activities that they really had no choice. I am hopeful that the Catholic Church cannot be far behind."

The LDS church has been a driving force against gay-marriage initiatives since at least 1995. It was instrumental in fending off same-sex marriage in Hawaii and Alaska and, in 2000, it helped pass California's Proposition 22 (the Prop. 8 precursor known as the Knight Initiative), which defined marriage as solely between a man and woman. (Prop. 22 was struck down by the California Supreme Court in 2008.)

The church's anti-gay positions and lobbying on gay marriage have always been divisive. In 2000, during the fight over the Knight Initiative, a young gay Mormon named Stuart Matis killed himself on the steps of a Mormon ward in Los Altos, California. In a letter to his cousin shortly before his suicide, he despaired over the impact of the church's political activities on Mormon families: "On the night of March 7th, many California couples will retire to their beds thrilled that they helped pass the Knight Initiative. What they don't realize is that in the next room, their son or daughter is lying in bed crying and could very well one day be the victim of society's homophobia. The Knight Initiative will certainly save no family. It is codified hatred. It is anti-family, anti-love and it is wrong."

Prop. 8 was a Pyrrhic victory for the Mormons, however. Their role, which the church sought to keep under wraps, was exposed by Karger, who tracked the individual donations pouring into the Yes on 8 campaign back to church members. LGBT activists responded by publicizing the church's involvement, running an ad, for example, showing fake Mormon missionaries knocking on the door of a lesbian couple and then rifling through their drawers and tearing up their marriage license.

The negative exposure prompted protests, and many Mormons publicly renounced their church membership. One of them was then 28-year-old Matthew Lawrence, the son of official LDS pollster Gary Lawrence, who had led the Prop. 8 fight. "I love my family so much, but it's hard to not take this personally. We had a brief falling-out over Prop. 22, but that got mended. But two anti-gay initiatives in eight years, it's impossible not to feel attacked," Matthew, who is gay, wrote in 2008.

In response to the anger within Mormon ranks over Prop. 8, the president of the Oakland, California, stake (a stake is akin to a Catholic diocese) began organizing gatherings of gay and straight members to try to bridge the differences. In September 2010, the disgruntled church members received a private audience with one of the church's top officials, Marlin Jensen, who serves as the LDS's historian. The church members tearfully told Jensen their stories—of being shunned by their families, and the homophobia generated by the Prop. 8 campaign. "We explained that [the church had] pitted father against son, mother against daughter, exactly the opposite of what we stand for," says Mayne, who attended the meeting.

The apology from a high church official turned out to be just the beginning of a cultural shift toward greater acceptance of gays and lesbians within LDS ranks. In 2011, Mayne was called to serve as an official of his local San Francisco ward, as an openly gay man. It was a historic appointment in an institution with a long history of excommunicating openly gay members, which it referred to as people who were "afflicted" with same-sex attraction.

Perhaps most significantly, the church has made a concerted effort to bring LGBT kids back into the fold. Mayne points out that gay Mormon kids have significantly higher suicide rates than gay non-Mormon ones—a problem that has been attributed to the church's longtime policy of forcing parents of gay kids to choose between their church and their children. It also has long been common practice for Mormon parents to kick LGBT adolescents out of their homes because of their sexual orientation. 

The church has worked with the Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State University to craft an educational booklet aimed specifically at helping Mormons parent their gay kids, to keep them safe at home and to prevent suicide. It's a remarkably humane document instructing church members on how to embrace their gay kids even when they're uncomfortable with their purple hair and transgendered friends. The pamphlet is now being used in lots of Mormon wards.  Meanwhile, in Salt Lake City, where the church is headquartered, the church has teamed up with the LGBT community to open a shelter for young homeless people there, about 40 percent of whom are known to be LGBT

The LGBT community's best evidence of change within the church is that last year, in the only four states ever to pass marriage equality laws, the church "did not provide one dime or one volunteer," Dabakis says. He adds that in Maryland, when one local Mormon leader tried to organize to oppose a pro-marriage-equality initiative, the church shut her down.

It does appear to be progress.  However, things will not truly improve until the Mormon Church - like the Catholic Church - lets go of the ignorant writings of nomadic herders and wanderers found in Leviticus and reiterated by the Pharisee, St. Paul.  Almost everything else in the Leviticus is ignored nowadays.   The purported anti-gay passages need to be added to the list of those no longer given any credence by decent, rational people

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