Author: BZ

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

While watching the film “Major!”, there were many new things I learned about the transgender community, especially transgender people of color. A generalized thing I learned was that the United Nations considers more than 15 days of solitary confinement to be torture, yet our prison system uses it in excess all the time. Solitary confinement is also used for a lot of transgender people in prison as a form of oppression but can be excused as a necessary safety measure for transgender people’s own safety. I thought that it was really sad to hear about how additionally horrible a lot of transgender people’s prison experiences are. Being the only transgender person in a prison, and having to deal with harassment, sexual abuse from inmates and guards, and being placed in solitary confinement are incredibly harsh experiences that many transgender people face.

Something that the film left me wondering was what can I be doing in my life to advocate more for transgender people? I fell like the film showed a lot of points where society is flawed and oppresses transgender people, and I have been trying to think about what I can be doing to help counter this oppression. The fact that it is still hard for transgender people to get jobs because they can be discriminated against or fired has led to the criminalization of transgender people because some end up having to resort to illegal means in order to survive. After thinking about it, I feel like the biggest thing to be done would be to try to make political change ensuring non-discrimination rights for transgender people in the workplace.

~BZ

I think that this poster relates to our LGBT experiences in history class because we have been learning a lot about the gay/transgender experiences in the 60’s and 70’s. There has been a lot of evidence in the readings that queer youths were having sex at an early age. A lot of transgender youths who used to hustle on the streets would become sex workers by the age of 18 or 19 because they couldn’t find any other work.  This poster is great because it informs the audience that people are having sex really young, and it is important that queer youths know about what HIV/AIDS is, and how to prevent it at a young age so that they can make sure that they don’t get infected. I find this poster interesting because it is very straightforward and isn’t hesitant to talk about sex. The entire point of this poster is that sex needs to be talked about and that moving past the uncomfortability some parents feel talking about sex is necessary in order to keep their children safe. This poster sends the message that AIDS has a huge effect on people’s lives and that it’s important to talk about.

Poster Creators: Country AIDS Awareness Campaign

~BZ

An object that stood out to me during our session at Special Collections was the “NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt” from 1994.  I think that this object should be included in the public exhibition because I believe that it is a very important piece of our LGBT history and that it is our duty to remember those who have passed away in our community. I also believe that this quilt will help bring awareness about how dangerous AIDS is, and how important it is to take action to prevent the transmission of AIDS. I think that this piece could also be a really good reason to collaborate with Trillium Health in Rochester, NY on their resources for HIV prevention.

When it comes to remembering the AIDS epidemic, the LGBT community is always the first people who come to mind because it was our people who were affected by this disease, and it is also our community that is still at a higher risk of being infected with AIDS. Due to this being a predominantly LGBT health issue, heterosexual people usually are not as concerned about this history because it didn’t affect them as much. I believe that this quilt would help to show the heterosexual community that AIDS was an issue that also concerned their community because so many people knew of someone who was affected by AIDS and signed the quilt to remember them.

 

An example of inclusion that has made me feel unsatisfied was in a psychology questionnaire for the psychology of human sexuality. There were questions regarding sexuality and sexual activity, and one of the questions was “Have you ever had vaginal sex?” This question was very hard to answer because it was not specific, and I wasn’t sure if this question was being asked in the heteronormative sense, in which vaginal sex was solely the penetration of the vagina by a male penis. If this were to be true, which I was pretty sure that it was being asked in a heteronormative sense, then it would be completely erasing/invalidating lesbian sex (which does not involve a penis). Having surveys that are supposed to be acquiring as much information from the general public as possible in order to collect data and understand society, that completely ignores lesbians and causes them to question whether their sex is valid or not because it is not heterosexual is an example of why the inclusion of all groups is very important.

 

~BZ

 

The images shown above are small corners of a quilt that was apart of the “NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt” which was displayed at the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY in 1994. The AIDS epidemic began in 1981 and so far about 675,000 people have died in the United States alone from an AIDS related illness. The reason why this project is relevant to the class is because homosexual and bisexual males are the most affected by this disease. This image is interesting to me because it shows how large of an epidemic AIDS was, and how it not only affected the LGBT community, but also the many heterosexual people who knew someone affected by AIDS.

Information from:

HIV.gov.com

Avert.org

Rochester.edu

 

~BZ

A new fact that I learned about the Stonewall rebellion was that it was not just a single event that took place. It was multiple days of rioting and was also publicized in newspapers & writing on the streets that were evoking emotions for more gay people to join in the revolution that was taking place and fight for their rights against the police. This fact is significant to contemporary LGBTQ organizing because the initial fight didn’t just die after one night, it ended up being a very tactical weapon of publicity to recruit others and make a difference that couldn’t be ignored. The way that people were talking about Stonewall in the newspapers and saying that it was going to be historic, aided in it actually becoming historical.

Prior to taking this class, I had no knowledge of who Sylvia Rivera was, and I had only heard the name Marsha Johnson in passing during a Pride Network meeting. Masha Johnson was a very intersection leader of the STAR organization. She was a “gender variant”(transgender) woman of color, who was poor, living on the streets, and a sex-worker. She spent the beginning part so her adult life, helping to take care of other “gender variant” youth who were living on the street, and worked towards advancing gay liberation and helping those who were oppressed, in jail, or in danger because of their sexuality/gender orientation. Though Masha was a huge activist for gay liberation, she left the movement when the many leaders in the gay liberation movement began to promote exclusion towards transgender people.

 

~BZ

Works Cited:

Armstrong, E. A., & Crage, S. M. (2006, October). Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth. American Sociological Review , 724-751.

Rivera, S. (Unknown ). Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries: Survival, Revolt, and Queer Antagonists Struggle . Unknown : Untorelli Press.

While watching the documentary “Shoulders to Stand on,” I learned how important the University of Rochester was to, not only to the LGBT community in Rochester, New York but also to the rest of the country. The documentary was an overall history of Rochester’s LGBT movement. In one part of the documentary, it talks about how the Todd Union building on campus was used for the University of Rochester Gay Liberation Front meetings. These meetings had many LGBTQ people from the all over the city of Rochester come together to try to find ways to decriminalize being gay, both politically and socially. A newspaper called “The Empty Closet” was also started as a source of information for many gay people, which included coming-out stories, health information, and news about the gay liberation movement. A radio show called “Lesbian Nation” aimed to reduce the isolation of gay people by allowing those who were either questioning their sexuality or not comfortable and “out of the closet” yet, to have access to hearing the gay radio program and helped them to know that there are other people like them all around the country.

 

“‘Perversity to Diversity’ Exhibit causes controversy at University of Rochester” was an article written by Susan Jordan and Michele Moore. The article explained how the on-campus gay art exhibit was shocking to most students and incredibly controversial. The research that I did to track down the date of when the article was written, was found by searching “University of Rochester Perversity to Diversity exhibit” in Google. The first thing to come up were those words in a section of a book (page 93) titled “Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates” by Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips. The line that helped me track down the date was when the author said “A few weeks before writing this…”, which I believe she was referring to the writing the book, so I looked to see when the book was published. It was published in 1992, so I assumed that exhibit must have come out in 1991, and that must have been when the “‘Perversity to Diversity’ Exhibit causes controversy at University of Rochester” article was written. 

 

 

“Destabilizing Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates” by Michèle Barrett and Anne Phillips can be found at the following link:

 https://books.google.com/booksid=NgGRGDxEdNoC&pg=PA93&dq=University+of+Rochester+Preversity+to+Diversity+exhibit&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjx9rqg9unYAhWnRt8KHdHCBL8Q6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=University%20of%20Rochester%20Preversity%20to%20Diversity%20exhibit&f=false 

~BZ