A friend on Facebook alerted me to a truly powerful Op-ed at the Advocate.com, linked below. The bolded emphasis is mine:

Our progressive organizations are certainly fervent in their pursuit of marriage equality and anti-bullying, but the majority of them seem to be appallingly silent on this issue, which currently affects thousands of teens. It’s a combination of issues, relating to sexual orientation, gender identity, class, and race. It’s complicated, but couldn’t we all acknowledge that there’s more to social justice for the LGBT community than just marriage equality?

It’s not that I want to put issues against issues. All these issues are extremely important. It is totally possible to care about more than one issue at once and to fight for all without losing one. I promise. This is coming from a person who was once a homeless LGBT youth and has hopes of someday marrying and starting a family with her girlfriend. But it is time to prioritize LGBT youth. We can do better. We can expand our efforts and reach out. It’s time to stop treating these children like an invisible population. Their lives depend on it.

I remember a few years ago, going to a meeting regarding youth and anti-gay bullying.  I sat in the meeting feeling stupid as I became aware of how much I had ignored the issue of bullying. Like many other men of my generation, it had been drummed into our  heads to stay away from youth lest we get accused of molesting. but there, as I sat listening to the conversation, I realized how that was internalized homophobia, and the whole of the LGBTQ community had to start to care about our queer youth immediately since they were on the front lines more than perhaps ever before.

The issue of the homeless is similar, albeit far more complicated. Not only are queer homeless youth an invisible part of our whole community, but the homeless in general are mostly invisible to the whole of our society. And perhaps you see things differently- but I don’t see any real effort within our country to even begin to deal with the issue of homelessness. Where do you even start? With the whole of homelessness or the specifics of queer homelessness?

I like Hannah’s statement which I emphasized: It is time to prioritize LGBT youth. This requires a broader dialogue about how we understand the LGBTQ community, and what it means to work to support all the various elements of that rainbow mix of people. For Hannah, that means getting LGBTQ organizations to see Social Justice as including queer youth issues. It also means beginning to form questions and actions surrounding our queer youth. It is one thing to say that we care about queer youth, but what does that look  like? How do we act upon it, and how do we measure our efforts and our success or lack of it?

The answers must start from the largest and most powerful LGBTQ organizations and include all of the others. Some have become especially good at fund raising, and at times the amount raised seems to push their agenda forward. We need to maintain the ability t raise money and also find ways to funnel some of it into the smaller and more focused organizations who are working on youth issues already.

via Op-ed: Young, Queer, and Homeless | Advocate.com.

Photo  Some rights reserved by larrybobs