Homeless for the Holidays: Bring a gift of hope to our LGBT youth

[theHandpuppet]

The holidays are fast approaching and thousands of our LGBTQ youth will be spending them on the streets -- lonely, hungry, cold, lost. Please remember them this holiday season by supporting organizations like the Ali Forney Center in NYC.

http://www.aliforneycenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=cms.page&id=1015

In the USA, there is no adequate safety net for homeless youth. Last year over 500,000 youths experienced homelessness. Fewer than 50,000 of them were able to access shelter. At least 40% were LGBT, because so many teens are rejected by families who cannot accept them.

Homeless for the Holidays is a project created by Ali Forney Center Executive Director Carl Siciliano, allowing brave homeless LGBT youths from across our Country to describe how they survive without shelter. Each week between Thanksgiving and Christmas we will post several survival stories. We hope this will inspire others to work to protect homeless youths by supporting the few programs across the country that provide housing, and by demanding that our country become a place where every homeless teen can have a safe place to sleep at night


**Ali He’shun Forney (April 12, 1975 – December 5, 1997) was an African-American gay and transgender youth who also used the name Luscious.[1] He was a peer counselor of and advocate for homeless lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth and was killed on the street in Harlem. The Ali Forney Center for homeless LGBT youth was named after him when it opened in June 2002.

If you know of a shelter that needs our support to help homeless LGBTQ youth, could you add that information to this thread? Thanks!!

[joeybee12]

1. KNR!

[nightscanner59]

2. Hear! Hear!

This is why I'm glad for the likes of Apple's CEO coming-out making the headlines. There is grumbling throughout the bigot brigade everywhere "I'm tired of these damn gay's all over mah teevee... grumble, gripe, grouch." Hooray. It's finally beginning to flood out the hateful condescending rhetoric, off color jibes and dilute the degrading undertone to "gay" they've kept up for decades.
I was homeless from 16 on due to mass rejection, banishment. I'll never forget how I looked hungrily on through a family's window sitting down to a thanksgiving feast as I made my way to a freeway overpass to eat the Lorna Doone cookies I'd salvaged from a dumpster. I was made to feel a total freak-a-zoid who didn't deserve to live besides have any fun, shelter or normal life as I had been taunted by parents and peers alike. I truly wanted to die. It was only when I made my way to the rough, filthy streets of the city, and an old man eventually took me in and under his wing who taught me I wasn't alone... by any long shot.
So PHUCK these bastards who want to sterilize the youth's environment from any notion their difference can be acceptable. I want to drop pamphlets from aircraft onto the redneck communities everywhere that direct youth who feel disenfranchised that there is a place to go, if I had the resources. Now I do know there are some LGBT youth-rescue organizations here in California, don't have the information readily handy, but most LGBT centers everywhere would likely have such information to their urban area.
Here is one that pops up on a Google of LBGT homeless youth rescue, which appears to have a runaway hotline.
http://nationalhomeless.org/references/need-help/
Now, frankly I wasn't inclined to trust anything that I felt might just provide enforcement for me to return home, this was mid-70's, and I'd have faced death before returning there. I did eat at a homeless outreach church once, and with the coal oil I kept my peach fuzz colored with, was able to avoid "truant scrutiny".

[Joe Magarac]

3. Something that needs to be pointed out again and again about gay homeless youth ...

It's mentioned in the article but I think it needs more emphasis, over and over.

It's not just gay youth being homeless, such as might happen to anyone for various reasons.

These kids were kicked out by their families for being gay.