me standing in front of the Longworth building with the Capitol in the background
Last Friday I left my house at 4:20am to go to Washington DC for the annual meeting of the national advisory council to end LGBTQ youth homelessness. I’ve been on the council for just shy of a year now and have participated in conference calls but had never met the other members face to face, and to be honest I was a little nervous about it…
Waiting for my 6am train at NYC’s Penn Station, I watched as NYPD officers beat walls with their billy clubs to wake the people sleeping hunched against them. I watched on as groggy faced people struggled to their feet and shuffled away. The irony of this scene playing out before my eyes was not lost on me as I stood waiting for my track number to be announced so that I could go to DC to sit with a group of people to discuss these very issues. Witnessing this really reminded me how important this meeting was, and how urgently we need practical solutions.
For me, there was something emotional about the meeting being in DC. I haven’t been there since May 2002 when I was presenting at NYAC’s national conference just months after having been Kicked Out and still being very much struggling emotionally to figure out what was going to happen with my life. To be back there now, seven and a half years later, as an adult, working with a group committed to ending homelessness amongst queer youth was overwhelming and it was one of the most powerful organizing experiences I’ve had since beginning to work on Kicked Out nearly two years ago.
I was so honored to be in a room with so many direct providers from across the country who impact the lives of lives of homeless youth daily. As an author and artist it was so powerful to be part of this group and have the work that I do which is much more abstract be viewed as just as valuable.
The morning was filled with difficult conversations, especially with concerns about funding, the reality of having to turn youth away on a nightly basis, because there are not enough beds to go around, and the difficulty of needing to do more with less in a funding stream not designed to meet the specific needs of homeless queer youth.
There were exciting discussions of youth creating programs for themselves, teaching “life skills” to one another in a youth driven system, one which reminded me a lot of the informal kinship networks that became chosen family for me after I was kicked out.
We had a networking lunch and I had the opportunity to have really great conversations with others in attendance that had grown up in rural or semi- rural environments. It was so comforting to bond with folks who really understood the ways that queer youth homelessness in rural environments differed from that of urban centers, and how for so many of us there was simply not an understanding that this was a broader issue impacting thousands of youth, rather just that it was the norm if you were going to be out.
The day ended with visits to Capital Hill to meet with congressional staff. The purpose of the visit was to introduce ourselves and our work, and to talk about the importance of increasing funding through the Federal Runaway and Homeless Youth Act. To be honest I was a bit nervous about the visit because I wasn’t coming representing any program, and the work that I do is so much less cut and dry, however again I needn’t have worried. The Congressional Staffer I met with was very excited about the anthology, and because my work isn’t tied to a specific area I was able to speak more broadly about the impacts of this epidemic not just in her district, but the state as a whole, and the country.
I got back home to Brooklyn at about 10pm completely exhausted but also energized. I feel so privileged to be a member of the advisory council and to have been given the opportunity to spend a day in DC with such incredible people. We are all doing different work, in different areas, with different communities, our reasons for doing the work are different, for some of us who were forced to leave home as teens it’s personal, others saw a problem and stepped up to the plate to try to solve it. The reason we’re here matters little, what matters is that we are here and working to create a community where homelessness amongst LGBTQ youth is talked about, and ultimately where it ends.