HIV and the problemm of homeless LGBTQ Youth
I was motivated by Rich Gulite's presentation to post the following about the health inequities faced by LGBTQ Youth. Take a look:
Young, Gay and Homeless: Fighting For Resources
Growing Up Young, Homeless, And Gay In New York
Chapter One
Just be cool, Manny's telling himself. Play it cool. At fourteen, he probably looks more shell-shocked than nonchalant, sitting here in the dead of night. But who cares? The guys stalking the Prospect Park benches understand it's all just a front anyway, that Manny's studied distraction is meant to say just the opposite about him: he's open, and ready to be approached. Manny gets this, too, or at least he does now. He's wiser than he was just a few weeks ago, aged immeasurably since that night Jason first brought him to this bizarre place. And Jason has changed an awful lot recently, too. Manny is doing his best to keep up.
The two boys had been palling around their central Brooklyn neighborhood for years before Manny's adolescent fantasies finally burst into reality. Jason lived in the same building, down on the first floor, and they'd bonded early on. Jason was tall, dark-skinned, and being a couple years older, seemed wise and seasoned to Manny. But Manny was bold for his age and thought himself to know a thing or two as well. So at around age twelve he made the first move. It was during one of their many sleepovers, and the boys were arranged side by side on the plush carpet of Jason's living room. Manny waited until they'd been lying there for long enough to have plausibly fallen asleep, then stretched out his hand and allowed it to haphazardly land in Jason's crotch. Jason neither protested nor acknowledged the maneuver, and Manny grew more brazen as a result. Their slow flirtations built and matured with age, and within a couple of years the boys were having full-on sex. They never used words like dating or boyfriend, but Manny didn't need those petty semantics anyway. This was love, plain and true.
One night not long after their affair had solidified, in the spring of Manny's ninth-grade year, they were doing their usual -lying around Jason's apartment playing video games-when Jason brought it up the first time. "Yo, let's go to the park." It was midnight.
"At night?" Manny had asked.
It was a strange idea. He had lived by the park since he was ten years old, and he'd never thought to go in the middle of the night. But love knows no bounds, shoves out all doubt, so Manny played it cool then too. The boys shuffled out of their building and onto the wide expanse of Eastern Parkway, a four-lane boulevard that serves as one of Brooklyn's main thoroughfares. Tree-lined esplanades flame the east- and westbound lanes, a well-placed touch of urban planning that quiets the street's hubbub and separates its workaday residential life from the incessant race of cars and trucks and gypsy cabs ferrying in and out of the borough. One side of the street is lined with squat, brick apartment buildings crammed side by side, with their block-deep warrens of rental units stretching back into the working-class neighborhood that the parkway borders. A couple of the buildings are stately and evoke the Manhattan blueblood lifestyle that developers have long hoped to recast this area of Brooklyn in the image off others are nothing more than boxy human warehouses for the Caribbean and African American families that have long dominated the neighborhood. Manny and Jason live in one of the midrange complexes, with enough fancy casting on the facade to make it feel more upscale than it is, and from their front door they can look westward and see some of Brooklyn's most celebrated cultural landmarks along the parkway's opposite street-side. So as they walked toward the park, they passed the magnificent Brooklyn Museum-one of the nation's oldest and largest art museums, then in mid-facelift to modernize its towering, white marble facade. They strolled by the entrance to the century-old, fifty-two-acre Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and by the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, in its curvaceous modern-art building. And at the parkway's far western end, just a few blocks from Manny and Jason's front door, they arrived at the giant triumphant arch of Grand Army Plaza, marking the entrance to Prospect Park.
That's the passageway most park visitors stream through during the day, but Jason led Manny past it-further confusing him about their adventure. They instead veered down Flatbush Avenue, another of Brooklyn's busiest roads, which intersects Eastern Parkway as its north-south sister. Flatbush starts at the borough's iconic bridge into lower Manhattan and plunges on a southeastern diagonal into its poorer and blacker sections. For those who live to its west, Flatbush has long stood as the line of demarcation for territory into which those with means aren't supposed to venture. Things have been changing as gentrification has slowly spread eastward, but the farther south down Flatbush you travel the more that old truth still holds. And that's the direction Jason led the boys, on a fifteen-minute walk down to Prospect Park's darker, less-than-welcoming southeastern entrance.
Once inside the park, the boys wended their way up the path into a wooded area that by day hosted bird-watchers and urban hikers exploring the six-hundred-acre park's many nooks and crannies. At night, it turned into a tiny wonderland: a lively if cautious party of black and brown young men in which gender was effortlessly inverted; where normally out-of-place affectations were flaunted and young men considered grotesquely queer elsewhere became standards of beauty. The space demanded a modicum of discretion, of course, to avoid the attention of police and neighbors, but these woods had been known as gay cruising grounds for long enough that they'd been grudgingly ceded to this scene after dark.
Jason toured Manny around, greeting regulars and introducing his young beau. He was open, expansive, clearly in his element-a fact that confused Manny still further, since the two had been inseparable for months and, he thought, had shared everything about their lives. Jason knew lots of the guys, but he was particularly friendly with the young black ones; they lingered, seemed less urgent than the white men, who alighted only briefly before slipping away again.
Manny had long explored this park, but he had never imagined it hid this mysterious milieu. Still, he fancied himself worldly and experienced, so he tried hard not to show his wide-eyed amazement. He sat down with one of the regulars Jason had introduced him to, and as the two chatted they did some lines of coke. This, he figured, would settle his nerves, give him a chance to take it all in. But just as Manny was beginning to acclimate himself, he looked up to see Jason's tall, dark frame walk off into the woods with some white guy he'd been talking to.
"What the fuck?" Manny shouted. The guy he'd been snorting lines with burst into an all too knowing laughter.
Manny wasn't sure if it was the betrayal itself or Jason's casual attitude about it upon returning that so enraged him. Either way, he spurred the rage onward, let it gallop through his blood on the back of the speeding cocaine. "How can you just go off with this guy? Tell me what you did!"
Jason tried calming him.
"I got it. I got it," he pleaded, intending to reassure but only further confusing the situation and thereby fueling Manny's rise toward hysteria.
"I don't know what you're talking about! You think you can just go off with any nigga?"
With that, Manny knew he was crossing an unmarked but nonetheless clear boundary, that he was declaring ownership of something he had never been given to possess. But love had wounded him, and he hadn't figured out how to stay cool in the face of that particular sort of crisis.
Finally, Jason cut to the chase and flashed $200 in Manny's face. "Sometimes I have a part-time job," he began, pausing to let the idea sink into his young lover's head, then laying it plain when it became clear Manny wasn't going to sort it out on his own. "Sucking dick is what I do best, so I might as well put it to use."
And so here they are again, back in the park three weeks later, Manny determined to show Jason and himself that he, too, has useful skills. All he has to do is be cool, let the buyers take the lead. After all, he and Jason have the market cornered. He's easily the youngest hustler here, so they'll bag anybody with a fetish for little black boys. And this is a place for fetishes, to be sure, a place to fill the empty vessels of unknown faces and disembodied sex organs with quietly held dreams and desires.
Manny's not sitting at the chess tables long before Jason steers somebody his way. The man is prototypical of the tricks Manny will come to know in this park: a short, nondescript white guy, maybe in his thirties, maybe his forties-they're all pretty old, to his teen eyes anyway, and it's always dark. Manny follows the man down a path leading away from the main clearing until they find a spot that provides just enough privacy. The guy stops and leans against a tree.
"Can you take off your pants," he stage-whispers, his voice low and heavy.
Manny obliges, drops his trousers around his ankles and waits for further instructions. The man unzips his jeans and starts massaging his penis. He's wearing a loud plaid shirt, and Manny hates it, thinks it a particularly awful outfit.
"Can you turn around," the man asks, tempering his direction as a polite request.
Manny again takes his cues, and as he's rounding through his third, slow twirl he notices the man's head is reared back, that he's not even paying attention to the awkward dance he's requested. Manny watches the man moan and shake through the climax of whatever fantasy his lithe body has facilitated, and as he does so he quietly slips into his own reverie. This, he thinks, is easy money.
A couple of hours later, Jason and Manny sit on the park benches pooling the night's take. It's after two in the morning by now, and the park's furtive buzz has died down. They've pulled down a few hundred dollars between them, mostly owing to Jason's ability to make quick work of his tricks. Manny turned just three guys, himself. They weren't all as easy as the first; he even had to give one of them a blow job. But for a fourteen-year-old on the fast road from recreational to habitual coke use, this kind of hourly wage can't be easily dismissed. Plus, he and Jason will do this together, as an unstoppable team. So they resolve to come twice a week, consciously picking the days on which Manny doesn't have to be at school until later than usual the following morning. He's making it to school less and less often these days, but he's still enrolled and feels some need to respect that fact in idea if not in deed.
Not that Manny is one of those kids, one of the lost-from-the-start, nihilist children of the '90s caricatured in the era's popular media. As he sat plotting a career in sex work, Manny actually still had a good bit going for him, in all the obvious ways at least-access to a relatively good education; a ferociously dedicated mother; a wide network of engaged adults. And even as he'd spend the coming summer flailing about Prospect Park-selling his mouth, his ass, his youth, his mocha-brown skin-in a parallel world he'd remain the sort of boy adults deem to have "potential." That was the irony of Manny's rebellious posture. He managed a disaffection that steered around teen angst and arrived instead at precocious. And Manny was indeed a capable kid, which is why he was more certain than anyone of his own ability to chart a course through life. But he'd already come to the conclusion that there was no preexisting map out there for people like him. No, Manny knew even at fourteen that if he was going to make it to the other side of the rainbow, he'd have to find the way on his own. And in the spring of 2000, the road to Manny's happiness led through Prospect Park's eastern gates.
Prospect Park's history of place is long. The land was first developed by African slaves who built the homesteads of early European settlers, establishing Brooklyn as a sleepy agrarian outpost. In the early 1800s, the area's development hastened as New Yorkers sought a suburban retreat from Manhattan's increasingly dense and frenetic life, turning Brooklyn into the country's third largest city by the 1860s. Civic leaders quickly realized a need to offer their growing masses a respite inside Brooklyn, and in 1866 Central Park's famed design team of Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted answered the call with an ambitious plan for a sprawling nature reserve, including thick woods filled with exotic flora from around the world. Olmsted believed strongly that urban areas needed internal retreats so that all classes of people could escape the city's chaos and miasma, not just those with the resources to live on the rural outskirts; Prospect Park, like Central Park, was to be a place where poor and working-class folks could get away from it all and heal themselves. Manny and the men he cruised the park's woods with felt they were doing just that-even if it wasn't exactly what Olmsted had in mind.
But that's urban America. New York is a place where scarce space is jealously defined by whomever has most recently laid claim to it. Places bear names loaded with meaning-Harlem is steeped in the history of black arts and intelligentsia; Bensonhurst evokes rough-and-tumble Italian American neighborhoods; the Upper East Side oozes with old wealth; and the West Side from Greenwich Village through Chelsea explodes with gay pride. From Little Italy to Little Odessa, New Yorkers stake out their space and draw power and belonging from it. But here, in what is arguably the gay cultural capital of the world, adolescents who don't fit into heterosexual norms and grow up in neighborhoods like Manny's-working-class, largely black and Latino-look in vain for their own place to call home. Pride rallies rarely march down their blocks, and certainly don't linger when they do; the adult, largely transplanted, and almost entirely white and well-heeled world of gay Manhattan offers them no warmer welcome. And so, central Brooklyn's young black and Latino gay men mark Vaux and Olmsted's rambling woods as theirs-a place to hang out, meet friends and lovers, and, sure, maybe also pick up a few bucks from the older guys who drop in for a visit.
The young people who inhabit these sorts of spatial margins preoccupy the minds of social scientists. They are among the most worrisome in that social category that has come to be known as "at risk"-for Manny, Jason, and thousands of young people like them are indeed at the top of the list for a disturbing array of today's worst ills. Homeless-services providers have long estimated that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth account for anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of young people without homes. One study found that more than a quarter of gay youth surveyed had dropped out of school, citing harassment as a leading reason. Another study found a third of gay high school kids had attempted suicide in the previous year. Still more have found gay youth more likely to use drugs, alcohol, and tobacco. And among all of this bad news, HIV/AIDS looms largest, particularly for young black men. In the mid-1990s the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found HIV infection rates among fifteen- to twenty-two-year-old black gay and bisexual men to be as high as 14 percent-a number on par with the worst epidemics globally, and twice that of their white counterparts. In 2005 the CDC reported that new HIV infections among twenty- to twenty-four-year-old gay men of all races spiked a whopping 47 percent between 1999 and 2003; 60 percent of those infected were black.
So the question must be asked: What drives all this risk? Certainly Manny and his cohort have made a series of choices that leave them vulnerable to physical dangers. But what contexts are those choices made within? Risk is, after all, an entirely relative concept. And the physical vagrancy of Brooklyn's gay kids is indicative of a larger emotional reality: they are cultural refugees, wandering in search of an identity and a belonging. For some it begins in early childhood, for others not until adolescence, but the gap between themselves and the worlds they navigate too often defines them-and it is in that divide where the question of risk must be examined.
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LISTEN TO THESE SHORT PODCASTS on the subject:
How Homelessness Impacts LGBT Youth
Young, Gay and Homeless: Fighting For Resources
Growing Up Young, Homeless, And Gay In New York
Drifting toward love Kai Wright
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