Day: April 25, 2018

Did you know that LGBTQ youth make up 40% of youth homelessness in the United States? The graphs above are from TrueColorsFund, which is an organization that works to end homelessness amongst lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth.

There are a lot of intersecting issues that can lead to youth homelessness, such as race, socio-economic class, and education level. Youth of color make up 65% of young people experiencing homelessness.

One reason why LGBTQ people find themselves more easily homeless compared to their heterosexual counterparts is because of job discrimination. Harrasment, firing or not hiring LGBTQ people can lead them to becoming economically unstable and end up homeless.

Having unaccepting family members can also lead to being kicked out of your home with no money and no where to go. When people are placed in this situation, sometime they are forced to trade sex for housing  (survival sex), and can become involved in the legal system as juveniles.

The awareness that has grown regarding LGBTQ youth homelessness has allowed more shelters to be opened that are welcoming to these youths. If you would like to volunteer to help work at a homeless shelter for LGBT youth, you can sign up at nationhomeless.org/issues/lgbt/

Sources:

Coco Wheeler, Christa Price, and Ian Ellasante, “Pathways Into and Out of Homelessness for LGBTQ2S Youth,” in Where Am I Going to Go? Intersectional Approaches to Ending LGBTQ2S Youth Homelessness in Canada & the U.S., eds. Alex Abramovich and Jama Shelton (Toronto: Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, 2017), 49-61

Bridges, E. (2007). The impact of homophobia and racism on GLBTQ youth of color. District of Columbia: Advocates for Youth. Retrieved from: http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/storage/advfy/documents/fsglbtq_yoc.pdf

truecolorsfund.org

 

~BZ

For my last post for class, I want to focus on the German Jewish physician and sexologist named Magnus Hirschfeld. He is known as the “Einstein of Sex,” because of the amount of work he did to prove, scientifically, that homosexuality was rooted in biology to help liberate gay men and lesbians from oppressive German laws. He founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee) to campaign for LGBT individuals to be recognized in society and against their legal persecution and is known as the first ever LGBT organization in history. He also created and ran the Institute of Sex Research (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft), which as a non-profit foundation that served as a research library and had medical, psychological, and ethnological divisions, and a marriage and sex counseling office. The institute advocated for sex education, contraception, the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, and women’s emancipation, and was a pioneer worldwide in the call for civil rights and social acceptance for the LGBT Community. Magnus Hirschfeld started advocating for gay rights, because many of his LGBT patients started to commit suicide, because of the way that society viewed them. Sadly, most of his work was either destroyed or ended up in the wrong hands during the Hitler reign on Germany. He was a true pioneer that paved the way for others to continue advocating for the acceptance of LGBT individuals within society.
#LGBTQExperiencesUSA #LGBTQFiguresinHistory #LGBTQOrganizingwithinHistory