A disproportionate number of homeless people were disowned by their families because of their sexual orientation.
That hits home really hard. Many years ago I babysat two little girls for a very long time and I loved them like they were my own daughters. Now one of them is 20 years old, she is LGBT, she is estranged from her parents and she is flunking out of school. She won’t allow me, her mom, her aunt, or any adult in her life to get close to her.
That’s not an LGBT issue; that’s a frightened child issue. Ariel lived in an orphanage until she was two and a half years old. One night she got sick and her caretakers took her to the emergency room, where an ER doctor who was working the graveyard shift noticed her. He was infertile and he and his wife had already adopted a baby and they planned to add one more. As soon as he met her he knew, and she went home with them within a few days.
I came into her life when she was five years old. She was healthy and athletic but she had angry outbursts and she could easily break away from anyone no matter how close their relationship was.
Both of her parents ignored her and her pediatrician mom habitually yelled at her, which was the extent of their relationship. And so I decided to be her mother. I gave her lots of hugs and kisses everyday, and for a long time I was the person she was closest to. She will always have a special place in my heart. She’s my baby. Her mom created a lot tension in the house and eventually she fired me. I waited until Ariel and Ashely were eighteen years old to contact them but by then it was too late, as they had forgotten our relationship.
Now Ariel is twenty years old and she still overreacts and has angry outbursts when she’s being ignored. She severed our relationship after I ignored her belligerent rants on her Facebook wall. She unfriended me and told me to remove her pictures from my albums, and I haven’t heard from her since.
In my opinion, the fact that she’s a lesbian is totally irrelevant. Her sexual orientation emerged many years after it became clear that she had an anger management problem and that her adopted parents were a bad match for her. The adoption agency would have expected them to be wonderful, as her mom is a pediatrician and her dad is an emergency room doctor, but they didn’t realize that the couple would never hug her or give her one-on-one attention. Her dad was warmer than her mom and he had the potential to be a great father but he didn’t embrace the role. I don’t see an LGBT issue; I see an adoption placement issue.
With that said, it becomes an LGBT issue when homeless shelter managers report that one third of San Francisco’s homeless teenagers are LGBT. The pattern is repeated among the adult homeless population. So, now the question is how the community should approach this. What will it take to help them? Based on my experience with Ariel, I know that it’s really important to give them a lot of love and attention and make them feel like they belong. I wouldn’t hesitate to give her a huge bear hug; that’s my baby. That’s how it should be. In that spirit, social workers are forced to acknowledge that their parents didn’t do that. Instead they drove them away. It means that reconciliation with their families is not the answer.
They need new families. This is a critical reason why LGBT people must be able to adopt children, or at least have foster parent licenses. Without them, who will adopt the LGBT minors at the shelter? What will these kids do, wander around alone? That is what is happening now.