TOP STORY: Stalling Out: From the Closet to the Street (Denver Voice)
Tim CoviFebruary 9, 2009
“I remember one time I had this 80-year-old man tell me that it would serve me right if somebody gutted me in the middle of the night because of the kind of vermin that I was,” Laura said. She was 15-years-old at the time, living alone on the streets of Colorado Springs. “Down in Colorado Springs, it just isn’t even tolerated,” she added, explaining that to be a lesbian, gay, or embrace any alternative lifestyle is considered abhorrent.
Before becoming homeless, Laura Dalloway led the life of a suburban kid. She said her family liked to consider themselves the “better half of middle class.”
She came out of the closet in fifth grade. Her teacher reacted by sending her to the principal’s office for being disruptive, giving her detention. Ultimately, the school sent her to a counselor and put her through therapy for “attention seeking.” She said she had another friend that was given the same type of treatment. “They basically treated it as if it’s one giant game and we were just trying to get attention,” she said, “that we weren’t old enough to know that we’re like that yet.”
At home, during the same period, life got more difficult with her parents. “My dad was one of those, well, you know ‘if you’re gonna come out and say you’re gay, then I’m gonna rape you being gay out of you,’” she said. “My mom was one of those types—she just kinda stayed in the corner and didn’t say anything because she didn’t want to get involved.” By the time she was 14, Dalloway was using drugs heavily, including PCP, meth and heroin. “I was pretty much doing anything and everything that I could,” she said.
That was when she decided to leave, and became one of the many run-away kids casting their lot with the uncertainty of the streets rather than the certainty of abuse, rejection or neglect at home. “I had left first and foremost because of the problems with my dad,” Dalloway said, “and because I didn’t feel right” doing drugs at home. She spent the next two years of her adolescence finding warm places outdoors, occasionally couch surfing, and never touched public services except once when she ate at a food line.
Dalloway’s young life was a far cry from a stable, nurturing home-life, and sadly, isn’t dissimilar from many other street kids’ lives. The incidence of street youth in America is an enormous problem. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, which provides estimates of the street youth population, says that there are 1,682,900 homeless and runaway youth nationally, based on their most recent study from 2002. The National Runaway Switchboard, however, says the number could be as high as 2.8 million youth between the age of 12 and 17, or roughly 13 percent of that age group. The numbers change significantly depending on the ages considered as youth and the parameters of what is considered homeless.
Locally, according to the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative 2007 Point-In-Time survey, there are 1439 homeless youth and young adults aged 13 to 25 in the Denver area, or roughly 13% of the metro Denver homeless population. Approximately 470 of these kids are between the ages of 13 and 17.
Homeless youth are at high risk for drug abuse, dropping out of school, mental disturbances or disorders and risky behavior among other things. Homeless adolescents, according to multiple studies, often contend with low self-esteem, severe anxiety, depression and poor health. In one study conducted in Los Angeles in the late 1980s, the rates of severe depression, posttraumatic stress syndrome and conduct disorder were reportedly 3 times higher among runaway youth compared to youth who had not run away.
Particularly at risk are homeless youth that identify as sexual minorities—lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender youth (LGBT). “Any youth who ends up staying on the streets is going to face a certain level of instability, of uncertainty about safety, about how life is going to look, about having to make alliances based around needs,” Andie Lyons said, program manager at Rainbow Alley, an LGBT youth drop in center. “[For] queer youth in those situations,” she added, “all of that just gets compounded. If you can’t sleep in a shelter because you’re afraid that you’re going to get beat up, or they’ll make you sleep in the men’s section when really you’re identifying as a woman…all of these things just put one more barrier in place to services that can already be pretty challenging to navigate.”
A few studies indicate that as a result of the discrimination, violence and rejection LGBT street youth face, these kids tend to fall into drug abuse and survival sex—the sale of sex to meet subsistence needs, including the exchange of sex for shelter, food, drugs, or money—at higher rates than the general homeless youth population.
A 2001 study from the Seattle region indicated that homeless LGBT youth were sexually victimized by an average of seven more people than heterosexual youth. The same study demonstrated that these youth used crack, cocaine, and methamphetamines more often that their heterosexual peers. Research from 2004 cited in the Pride House Study says that transgender youth are three times more likely than their heterosexual peers to engage in sex work.
John Johnson’s life is like a living testament to these statistics, and to the ways in which appropriately placed guidance and services can lead kids from the violence and volatility of the streets, to a more stabile and independent living.
Johnson was 18 when he started sleeping under trees in Cheesman Park. He had been a ward to the state of Colorado since he was six, when his mother left him. Without any other family, Johnson was bounced around between foster homes and treatment centers until the last family he lived with kicked him out and emancipated him from their custody when he was 17 years old.
Homeless, Johnson couldn’t find a way back from the streets. “I didn’t have a birth certificate, I didn’t have a social security card, I didn’t have a state ID,” he said, “and I also didn’t have anybody. I couldn’t call anybody up and say, ‘hey, they kicked me out, can I come stay for a while until I get on my feet?’” After about six months, Johnson landed in the park selling sex to survive and to support a nascent meth addiction.
“Basically I prostituted myself for money,” he said. “There was about 10 or 12 people that did the same thing and that’s where I learned it. They taught me how to do it, where to do it, when to do it, what days of the week are the best. And I could make like $200 to $300 a day. And unfortunately I was hooked on methamphetamines and 98 percent of my money went to amphetamines,” Johnson said.
The shocking reality is that survival sex among street youth is so prevalent. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health in 1999 found, from a national sample of youth, that 27.5% of street youth, and 9.5% of shelter youth had engaged in survival sex before the age of 21. Further, the authors believe the results are low estimates due to the probability of participants “underreporting their participation in survival sex, a highly stigmatized behavior.”
To understand how this is possible is to consider where someone’s mind is after being rejected and alone for so long. “I didn’t really care about myself,” Johnson says, thinking back on it. “The only thing that was going through my head was ‘I need money.’ And that was it.”
In the same period of his life, Johnson had come out of the closet among some friends, and soon found the challenges of being openly gay and homeless. Johnson was put in the hospital six times in the three years he lived on the street from beatings for being gay. “You’re looked on worse than dirt.” he said, “You’re looked more down upon than anyone else that’s homeless. And then there are other people who think that you should be put in a treatment center and have treatment to make yourself better because they think it’s a sickness.”
The emotional toll of street life as a gay man was overwhelming. “I pretty much shut myself down,” he said, “I became very anti-social. And that’s one of the reasons I’m in therapy now is to learn to become a social person again. I didn’t talk to somebody unless I knew them. If I thought somebody was gonna hurt me I just basically fled. It was pretty much fight or flight for the 3 years that I was on the streets.”
Considering the psychological impact of feeling alone and rejected at such a critical developmental period of one’s life, Karen Yescavage, a Social Psychologist at CSU-Pueblo who has specialized in LGBT issues, says that “Internalizing a negative image can lead to two outcomes typically, or two paths. One is an external reaction where you get mad and angry and decide I’m going to take other people down with me,” she said. “Others implode, and they engage in behaviors that are self-destructive—excessive drug use, risky sexual behavior, sex work, looking to be cared for by an older individual.”
Yescavage says homeless LGBT youth can be particularly vulnerable to internalizing the stigma associated with being a sexual minority because they lack stability, guidance and safety. “As far as developing a positive identity, there can be a lot of personal growth that can happen if you have enough, one, coping mechanisms and, two, support. Finding just one person who acts as an authority figure or somebody who can watch over you can really be the lifeline that’s needed. And that’s why resource centers are so critical for kids, particularly in communities that are very anti-gay.”
In most major cities, resource centers have been becoming more readily available for LGBT street youth, and workers at these centers agree that the impact of having a safe place to go is paramount. Unlike the chronically homeless adult population, where housing has become recognized as the first step toward helping people improve their situations, safety and trust seem to be the most important among youth.
“I think the most important thing that I’ve noticed with this population is simply having people who they feel like care about them,” said Cassidy Higgins, the LGBTQ case manager at Urban Peak, Denver’s youth homeless shelter. “If they’re not there, there’s a possibility that there’s going to be resistance to being offered any other services. So once you’re able to create this caring and sometimes trusting relationship with them, they’re more open to other services.”
Robert Ham, Media Relations Manager at Urban Peak, said the organization conducted a telling survey of street youth when it was founded. During the survey, he said, “they thought that [youth] were going to say ‘we need some food, we need a job, we need a place to stay.’ And the number one answer that they got was ‘we need someone to talk to.’”
Although resource centers can certainly fill a gap and connect street youth with things like health care, mental health services, drug rehab centers and create a safe space, such spaces are still limited for LGBT youth, and are more limited to daytime hours. Urban Peak, the only overnight shelter for youth in Denver, for instance, only has a capacity of 40 people. They connect many kids to independent housing, but the fact remains that while 20 percent of the youth who use Urban Peak identify as LGBT, there is no dedicated shelter for LGBT youth in Denver, and not nearly enough beds for the city’s homeless youth population.
John Johnson, however, connected with Urban Peak after two years on the street, and spent his third year as a homeless teenager learning how to recover and make something positive with his life.
“I’m thankful that I didn’t die,” he says, “But I look back on that now and I think to myself, ‘why did I do it?’ And I now understand the reason I did it is because I didn’t have the knowledge that I do now to be able to obtain the help that I needed.” Johnson is in rehab 3 days a week now. He says he’s going to go back and get the 4 1/2 credits he needs to finish high school. He wants to get a job and go to college.
Laura Dalloway returned home after two years on the streets. She was 16-year-old. She said it was surreal, and everyone but her brother acted like nothing had happened.
“When I walked back home, I stood on the doorstep and I didn’t know…it felt kinda weird because I knew this was my home and my family, and I should be able to just walk right in, but at the same time I hadn’t been there for two years, so they were kinda like strangers. So I ended up deciding to knock. There was Christmas music playing. That was the first year that I ever remember a Christmas tree being at the house. Mom was actually baking sugar cookies and stuff like that. It was kind of like I had been gone for a week— away to a Christmas camp or something—and I had just got back home and they were like, ‘Oh we missed you.’”
About street life, Dalloway recalls, “I think the hardest part was probably finding any type of peace, you know. Even when you lay down to go to sleep, you can’t sleep because you’re always wondering if there’s somebody five feet away waiting to slit my throat and take what I have.”
Since being off the streets, she says she’s found that peace.
By Tim Covi
Reprinted from Denver Voice
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