Report Sheds New Light on Lives of Homeless Gay Youth

TIME U.S. LGBT Report Sheds New Light on Lives of Homeless Gay Youth Christoph HetzmannsederGetty Images Youth in New York share experiences selling their bodies in order to survive in new Urban Institute report

A new report paints a grim picture of homeless youths selling their bodies in order to survive on the streets.

In partnership with the New York-based Streetwise and Safe, the Urban Institute interviewed 283 youths who had engaged in sex work or so-called survival sex with people of the same gender, mostly while homeless, for its latest study.

The research built on several studies on homeless youth, including a survey out of New York that found that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth were seven times more likely to have traded sex for food or a place to stay.

Meredith Dank, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute and lead author of the study, said she realized during earlier research on sex work that there was not enough good information about why LGBT youths made these decisions, so the study focused on letting them tell their own stories.

I realized at that point that there was so much that we didnt know about this population, she tells TIME. And if we were really going to be able to serve the needs of these young people we needed to know exactly what their experiences were and the large breadth of their experiences.

Many of the stories detailed in the report are telling; and a great deal of those who engaged in the work didnt identify as gaybut they found themselves selling their bodies to people of the same sex in order to survive.

One 20-year-old straight male described his experience: He asked me like do you really need the money? At that moment I thought I did. I felt I did and . . . like it was just like he grabbed me by like my waist and he just started doing it. And it was like . . . and I just like, try to close my eyes. Just try to think about something else.

Another 19-year-old gay Latino said he felt he had no choice: If you have no food in your stomach, if you have no transportation, but you have a man in your face willing to give you money for a half hour. You put your pride to the side, you throw everything out the window and you forget who you are and you forget what youre doing and you learn to be someone else.

The exact number of homeless youth is hard to pin down. In 2014, the Department of Education reported that 1.3 million school children are homeless. The Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that a total of 578,424 people were homeless on a given night in 2014about 10% were between the ages of 18 and 24. According to some estimates, as many as 40% of homeless youths are LGBT.

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Report Sheds New Light on Lives of Homeless Gay Youth