Today is Luis Colon Castro’s 21st birthday and he’s been homeless twice in his life.
The other five people sitting around the table at Out Now, a Springfield advocacy group that provides a safe space for queer youth, listen empathetically as Luis, a thin man in fashionable thick-rimmed glasses, tells the story of how he first became homeless.
“I was obligated to live this double life,” says Colon Castro, who grew up in Puerto Rico. “Whenever I was with my parents, I was supposed to act like I was straight and when I was in school or with my friends I could be myself around everybody. And one day we got into an argument because [my mom] went through my phone and she saw a conversation with my boyfriend and she saw some pictures …”
After that, Colon Castro says, she threw him out, and lived next to an abandoned house until his aunt took him in. Shortly thereafter, Colon Castro was sent to live with his grandmother in the U.S., but that was short-lived, too. Now Colon Castro rents a room, month-to-month, in house with several other people, but says he still feels uneasy about his housing situation.
“I’m just trying to live as happy as I can,” Colon Castro says.
The people at the table have stories like Colon Castro, too. They’ve experienced homelessness and are sexual and/or gender minorities.
A report out this month from the Administration for Children and Families found that nearly 41 percent of youth served by street outreach programs across the country identified as LGBT. Additionally, a 2015 report released by the True Colors Fund determined that 29 percent of those under the age of 24 from around the country who utilized drop-in centers, street outreach programs, and housing centers for the homeless identified as something other than heterosexual, and 4 percent identified as transgender or genderqueer. The 2012 version of the same report found that 40 percent identified as LGBT. Notably, the 2015 report also found that 47 percent of LGBT clients were non-white.*
Though the figures in the state of Massachusetts are slightly more encouraging than the national ones, there’s not much reason for celebration.
A study published in 2011 by the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at Boston’s Children’s Hospital, based on Massachusetts Youth Risk Behavior Survey data crunched from 2005 and 2007, concluded that one in four gay or lesbian students was homeless at the time of the survey, compared with 15 percent of bisexual and 3 percent of heterosexual students in Massachusetts public high schools were homeless at the time of the survey.
Hannah Hussey is director of policy and research at the Massachusetts Commission on LGBT Youth, which recently released its FY2017 Annual Policy Recommendations for state agencies. She’s studied the reasons behind LGBT youth homelessness and has found that LGBTQ youth in particular face a complex web of challenges that lead to homelessness.
“We see instances of young people being kicked out of their homes because they’re LGBTQ or in some cases, taking a more complicated path,” Hussey says. “Maybe they got in a fight at school because they were being bullied, then their parents aren’t happy with that, there’s trouble at home, or maybe there are other issues related to substance abuse or poverty [or] they came up in the child welfare system or the juvenile justice system. They may face discrimination or harassment related to being LGBTQ there as well.”
All of this raises serious questions about the root causes of homelessness among LGBT youth and speaks to the importance of LGBT-friendly spaces for homeless youth, of which, Hussey says, there simply aren’t enough. The support systems in place to help the homeless often fall short as it is, but especially with regard to LGBTQ youth, she says.
In fact, Massachusetts lists only eight spaces for LGBT youth in the state; two are in Western Mass, Out Now on Main Street in Springfield and Community Action of the Franklin, Hampshire and North Quabbin Regions — Youth Programs on Main Street in Greenfield. The safe spaces are not homeless shelters, though.
“A lot of people say that they just don’t feel safe sleeping in an adult shelter and for LGBTQ youth that’s even more true,” Hussey says. “We hear from young people who say they’d rather sleep outside on a park bench than in the local adult shelter because they just don’t feel safe…. They might say that they don’t feel accepted by staff at different shelters. We hear stories of homeless youth that staff have said that the other kids shouldn’t be in the shower at the same time because they’re gay or things like that, or homeless youth who are LGBTQ who have been told that they need to sleep in a storage closet or in the reception area rather than in the sleeping area with all of the other guests.”
The burden of homelessness currently shouldered so heavily by LGBTQ youth could be addressed, at least in part, at home and at school. The 2015 True Colors report cited earlier found that family rejection is the leading causes of LGBTQ youth homelessness, having been experienced by 75 percent of LGB and 90 percent of transgender youth. The reality that the studies point to is all too apparent to those like Luis Colon Castro, who have lived it, and reconciliation will not come easy.
“I called her on her birthday,” Colon Castro says of his mother. “I started crying and saying, ‘Mom, I don’t know why you did this to me or anything. I’m still trying to understand why I’m such a problem to you…’ She couldn’t give me a good explanation. She still can’t.”•
Peter Vancini can be reached at pvancini@valleyadvocate.com.
Data Collection Challenge
As you can probably imagine, taking a census of homeless people is not easy — especially when researchers are out looking for specific populations within the homeless community.
So, it’s notable that the 2015 report examined sexual orientation and gender identity separately. Changes like this in methodology illustrate the push for better data that’s taken place over the last five to seven years, according to Gerry McCafferty, director of housing for the city of Springfield and a local organizer of the Massachusetts Youth Count. The count is a statewide collaboration between the Department of Health and Human Services and Continuum of Care organizations in gathering data on the homeless population under the age of 24. It’s the first program of its kind in the nation, piloted in 2014. In 2015, the Youth Count found that 22 percent of those surveyed identified as something other than straight, while the 2014 count, the first in the nation of its kind, settled on 14 percent.
But the challenges related to gathering reliable data about homeless youth, McCafferty says, are daunting. She points to the Youth Count, still in its infancy, as an example.
“We thought the data was terrible last year,” she says. “We thought the count instrument was bad and we had multiple blizzards the week of the count, which made doing real outreach very difficult, so we know last year’s count was an undercount, as well as [that it] didn’t tell us as much as we’d hoped.”
Researchers acknowledged issues with the 2014 Massachusetts Youth Count as well, pointing out that the discrepancy between its 14 percent figure and the national average suggests that “results may be an underestimate of the true extent of LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness here in Massachusetts.”
Adding to the problem of data collection is the fact that legal definitions of homelessness vary between various state and federal organizations. Homeless youth, unlike the older homeless population, also often have a social network to fall back on. They couch-surf, or hang out in places that the older population doesn’t. Many may not even identify as homeless. Others have a vested interest in not being found, since many are runaways from abuse at home or within a foster care system ill-equipped to provide safe housing for LGBT youth.
This year, the Youth Count will take place during the first two weeks of May, as opposed to January, marking a change in the approach to data collection and an evolution in the way that agencies address the problem of youth homelessness. This time, the count will attempt to take into consideration those couch-surfing and in other unstable housing arrangements.
— Peter Vancini
*Tues. May 3, 2016 — This story was updated from an earlier version.
