My Christmas at an LGBT Homeless Youth Shelter

I’ll start off by wishing you a great 2009! Most of us won’t miss 2008, I know.

A variation of this updated post will be running on the New York Press website (www.nypress.com) and in print via the Chelsea Clinton News, at around the same time, beginning Thursday, January 8th. A different piece I pitched out to the world, to Advocate.com, will be running next week, on their website. I will detail that more in the next post. Make sure to subscribe to this blog via email if you like it, as I’ll be posting once a week and promise not to tangle your hair (beneath the Blogroll on the right, very easy).

Here you go:

I’m not a stranger to dire circumstances. In fact, I consider my life lucky and charmed, since there was always someone I knew confronting more severe challenges, such as my recently-departed father, who struggled with chronic drug-addiction for most of his life. My second boyfriend, an HIV+ artist and drug addict, hung himself. I saw a man get stabbed in Times Square when I was nine, have been shot at by a pistol-wielding meth addict in Portland, Oregon, and have seen a man plummet to his death from a bridge. I suppose that my neutral perspective on such tragedies stems from my having grown up in the disinvested Bronx neighborhoods of the bleak 1970s and desperate 1980s. Still, I’m an optimist.

My friend Mona Rae Mason of the Transgender Project (a New York City-based transgender study conducted by National Development and Research Institutes) volunteered me this past fall to help with the serving of a traditional Christmas dinner at Sylvia’s Place. Sylvia’s Place is a street-level recreation room-turned-LGBT homeless youth shelter on West 36th Street, beneath the Metropolitan Community Church, which serves the LGBT Christian community. I didn’t blink an eye and agreed to help. Other friends also volunteered and even my mother applauded the humanitarian gesture, accepting my absence on Christmas night for such a touching cause.

As I ascended the subway stairs onto Herald Square, I was transported to the magical Christmases of my childhood. I remembered how my family stood in impossibly long lines at Macy’s, so that my sister and I could have our pictures taken with Santa Claus (as hysterically recanted from the perspective of an elf by David Sedaris, in Holidays on Ice). Passing Macy’s, I saw the futuristic lights of Times Square glowing and flashing, further up 7th Avenue. Thirty-fourth Street was quiet and The Empire State Building was lit with blue, red and green lights, like a giant toy.

There were a few youngsters outside when I arrived at the shelter. One stylish girl wished me Merry Christmas, as I opened the heavy metal door and made my way in. I was riveted. There were about twenty-five youths in the scantily furnished room. Most were African American, some Latino. Some were lost in deep contemplation, others despaired. A couple argued with each other. I noticed a few kids sleeping on the floor, on yoga mats. Others were crashed on a countertop. A few had donated laptops and kept busy playing games and writing emails. One girl braided the hair of a young Latina who was eight-and-a-half months pregnant. Another jubilant boy danced on rollerblades. More than a few of the youngsters broke out into fevered, improvised dance, skipping from Beyoncé to hardcore rap. It was reminiscent of the raw tribal energy captured in Jennie Livingston’s now-classic 1990 ballroom culture documentary, Paris is Burning.

There was a noticeable chasm dividing the mostly distanced youngsters (who were never rude, but had mastered neutrality) from the “tribal elders”. The dozen-plus elders in attendance included the aforementioned Mona Mason of the Transgender Project, an NYPD Community Affairs liaison (who drove in from Pennsylvania) and Nancy Lamar of Crossdressers International. The East of Eden restaurant donated food and my partner, John Williams, coordinated the majority of the cooking with his brother. The rest of us washed dishes, served food and mingled with the more receptive youths. The social ice was shattered when drag queen comedienne Hedda Lettuce arrived in her trademark green and blond wig, her funny charisma warming the room over instantly.

It was hard not to wonder about the circumstances that had forced these kids to seek shelter there. Each had his or her own story. Most had been expelled from their homes for being queer or ran away due to abuse. They have to sign in by ten every night and the single-room shelter has a forty-person capacity. They’re provided with donated, used clothes, a washer/dryer setup, canned/dry foods, and company. With few work options in the present economy, many are forced to hustle. I spoke to several of them about their dreams and aspirations. Three boys were organizing an open mike talent show. Another serpentine boy and a dreadlocked girl named Star were natural, agile dancers. Others expressed interest in social work, fashion design, and makeup and hair artistry.

Homophobia, the most tragic of our many American traditions, is fueled by religious dogma and ill-educated hysteria. It inspires violence against gentle people. It devalues those who have individuated spiritual compositions; those who do not comply with either extreme of the antiquated, anal-retentive, masculine/feminine polarity model. Queer people are different from the norm and it is estimated that there are thousands of similar homeless queer youngsters living on the streets of New York City alone. What was once revered as a shamanistic class of individuals, in societies the world over, has been stripped of its spiritual value and condemned by the very institutions that the LGBT community is seeking marriage visibility from. The current and bigoted pope recently said that relations beyond the heterosexual ‘norm’ are “the destruction of God’s work”. It’s obvious that the pope hasn’t read Father Donald Cozzens’ book The Changing Face of the Priesthood, published in 2000. Cozzens, a psychologist and Catholic seminary president, suggests that up to 50% of the Catholic priests he’d encountered had homosexual orientations. Other estimates range from 10%-60%.

As gay marriage dominates LGBT politics, more pressing issues get kicked into the ditch. I agree that same-sex couples should have the right to marry, period. I know many such couples who married when they could and applauded them. But seeking acceptance from religious institutions that tortured us and burned us at the stake is horrifying to me. As a queer person, it’s even insulting. Churches and fevered religious leaders are the sources of the fear and hatred that lands beautiful kids, such as the kids at Sylvia’s Place, onto the streets of New York City and elsewhere, just for being gay, transgendered or lesbian.

Many LGBT folk have become so impassioned by bourgeois equality values that they’ve turned their backs on the needy in their own “community”. An annual pride parade, activists, public services, DVD stores, websites and bars do not comprise a community. AIDS claimed untold numbers of mentors, teachers, artists and role models, and current generations need to assume these roles. Sure some mentors exist, but more are needed. The fight for queer equality, which is broader than “gay equality”, needs to redefine itself, if the LGBT “community” expects to change the way in which it’s perceived by others. Gay marriage only represents the ‘L’ and ‘G’ of LGBT. Gay, privileged exclusivity isn’t enough, as many of us don’t care about Queer as Folk or Britney Spears—such as those amazing kids who inspired me this past Christmas. They can always use money donations, clothes, bottled water, dry/canned foods, and oh yeah, mentors.

Homeless Youth Services
c/o MCCNY
446 W. 36th St.
New York, NY 10018
http://www.homelessyouthservices.org/

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