No House to Call My Home

Preface

There are more than 400,000 youth in the American foster care system today, roughly the same number as the population of Sacramento, California.3 Foster care, created to protect the welfare of children, is a broken system, hobbled by an outdated bureaucracy, underfunded agencies, and overburdened workers, that frequently produces dire outcomes. Research shows that children placed in foster care are more likely than veterans of war to develop post-traumatic stress disorder.4 In some states, youth are just as likely to be abused in foster care as they are in the homes from which they were removed. Foster care has also become a gateway to homelessness. Nearly half the youth experiencing homelessness today have had at least one placement in a foster home or group home.5

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth, in particular, face significant prejudice and discrimination in foster care. Many queer-identified young people, who are disproportionately represented in the system, report intolerance, physical and emotional mistreatment, or neglect by caregivers or peers. LGBTQ youth are more likely than their heterosexual counterparts to be placed in group homes. An overwhelming majority of those youth in group homes have been victims of violence. The Opening Doors project, which provides tools and resources for the legal and child welfare community, highlights the following statistics: 70 percent of LGBTQ youth in group homes reported violence based on LGBTQ status; 100 percent reported verbal harassment; and 78 percent of youth were removed or ran away from placement because of hostility toward their LGBTQ status.6 These pervasive negative experiences can have a significant impact on mental health and emotional growth. Until recent years, child welfare agencies neglected to provide accurate policy, best practices training, and guidance for workers or foster parents serving LGBTQ youth. Without cultural competency training around LGBTQ issues, the result has been retraumatization, continued abuse, and prolonged rejection for many young people.

Another pressing and consistent theme in foster care research is the overrepresentation of people of color. Race and class bias within the system leads to youth of color being removed from their homes at much higher rates.7 Studies have shown that African American youth are more likely than their white counterparts to be suspended or expelled from school or labeled "aggressive."8 African American youth are also more often given psychiatric medications for contentious behaviors, diagnosed with a mental illness, and sent to juvenile facilities; white youth with the same forceful behavior are more likely to be treated as outpatients and released. The disparities are everywhere, from the way doctors describe identical physical injuries—African American youth experience greater incidents of "abuse," while their white counterparts experience "accidents"—to the way police departments handle marijuana possession (black people are nearly four times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession, despite similar usage rates). Such actions prompt calls to Child Protective Services. As a result, many youth of color find their entry point into the school-to-prison pipeline through foster care.

The traumas of life in foster care can be compounded for young LGBTQ people of color as they struggle to reconcile their racial and sexual identities. As they "age out" of the system—a term used to describe a youth's departure from a formal system of care because of age limits—they face an indifferent world. Across the country, inequalities in housing, health, educational achievement, and rates of incarceration are staggering. Transgender women—individuals who identify as female but were assigned a male identity at birth—are at a particularly high risk of homelessness. The rate of suicidal ideation among transgender or gender-nonconforming people of color doubled for those encountering familial neglect, as did rates of sex work; rates of homelessness tripled.9 These problems will persist until we wake up—locally, nationally, and morally—and give a hard, steady look at what is causing them, and then take action to address them.

In early 2004 I began working as a residential counselor and subsequently as a caseworker for an LGBTQ foster care program in New York City. The program was made up of two group homes: what I call the 401, located in Queens, and Keap Street, in Brooklyn. For me, doing this work was a way to re-engage with the world, to give something back. I started as a residential counselor, an entry-level position requiring a high school diploma and a clean record. The job responsibilities included providing on-site direct care to the youth in the group home, prompting them to do chores like cooking and cleaning, helping manage conflicts, and engaging them in healthy activities. As a caseworker I was tasked with goal setting, coordinating services, and monitoring the progress of the youth in the program. The aim is to reunify them with family or provide them with the tools to live independently.

I found myself wholly unprepared for the myriad personal and social issues I would be forced to confront. Thrown headfirst into the work, I found my understanding of racial and economic justice, gender identity, crime, and poverty was challenged at every turn. Facing the realities of these youth on a daily basis deepened my understanding of privilege, social responsibility, and community, and ultimately altered my understanding of myself.

While doing this work I learned the statistics. The data point out a litany of troubling risk behaviors. LGBTQ youth are more likely to use and abuse substances, and they experience sexual abuse, violence, and clinical depression at greater rates than the general population. Research indicates that LGBTQ youth are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide as their straight peers. Risk-taking is typical in adolescence. Couple that with the isolation and rejection many LGBTQ youth face, and self-destruction becomes the modus operandi. Leaning on unhealthy ways to cope with trauma can become habitual, and youth with self-destructive tendencies are more likely to become adults with self-­destructive addictions. In trying to show the youth alternatives to sex work, attempting to break their cycles of drug and alcohol abuse, and help build their self-esteem, I was reminded of my own litany of risk behaviors, my own struggle as a young man grappling with identity, and my own tendency to seek solace in drugs, alcohol, and sex in order to mask the pain felt from micro-aggressions and internalized homophobia.

While the LGBTQ movement has made incredible strides in recent years, the neglect of LGBTQ youth issues is astounding. The mainstreaming of queer culture and the fight for marriage equality currently serves as the wheelhouse for the gay rights movement. Mainstreaming, some would argue, leads to greater understanding and empathy. Same-sex marriage affords equal rights under the law. This may all be good and true, but gay rights advocates' interest in blending in with the broader society and their narrow focus on marriage equality have resulted in the neglect of other pressing issues. The narrative of cultural acceptance developed by gay rights advocates and picked up by the media isn't entirely accurate. Yes, LGBTQ folks are less stigmatized, and more visible, but only when safely celibate, coupled off, and mirroring heteronormative values—standards that present heterosexuality as the preferred, or "normal," identity. It can be a false sense of acceptance, and social media access allows youth still grappling with who they are to step outside the limits of their communities, to exercise their identity while still being reliant financially on their families. As a result, many youth are coming out earlier, and some find themselves facing family rejection—and subsequently the streets. When 40 percent of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ yet make up only 8 percent of the population, it's clear the greatest struggles the queer community faces are not all oriented around marriage.

Audre Lorde taught us, "There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives."10 LGBTQ youth struggles are intrinsically tied to health care, racial justice, public safety, prison, immigration, employment, poverty, and homelessness. On any given night there are four thousand homeless young people on the streets of New York City. Nearly half of them identify as LGBTQ, but there are less than two hundred beds available to serve that specific population.11 The scarce funds and resources available to provide those beds are in jeopardy because of budget cuts and political pandering. On the whole, the mainstream LGBTQ movement does a poor job of addressing the needs of the most visible LGBTQ youth (white, middle-class), and often completely ignores the least visible (youth of color, poor, or transgender).

Sexual and gender identity statistics are not universally collected for national homeless research. Most data come from state and local studies conducted by service providers. Staff estimates are typically used to collect information. Given that many youth do not self-­identify as LGBTQ when talking to service providers, staff rely on their own assumptions of youths' identities. This imperfect measurement method leads many researchers to believe that the numbers may actually underestimate the percentage of LGBTQ youth who are experiencing homelessness.12

The stories in this book are my effort to allow readers a glimpse into an often-unseen world, to evoke change in the lives of youth left without a home because of systemic failures, abuse, neglect, or intolerance of their sexual orientation or gender identity. I attempted to help them through the hardships they faced, only to find their strength and resilience to be more humbling and edifying than anything I could offer in return. This isn't a story of a white man attempting to "save" or speak for young queer people of color. I do not claim their experiences as my own, but many of them allowed me into their lives, and for that I am grateful.

Facing the realities of these youth daily forced me to recognize how our systems fail our most vulnerable, and how much more needs to be done to provide support. The challenges I witnessed these youth confront would send most adults into a mental collapse. Yet they soldiered on, imbued with a belief that a better life was out there, no matter how bleak their pasts had been.

Introduction

Lady Fingers

"Bella inhaled the screen from her crack pipe," Gladyce says.

I laugh into the phone and wait for her to join in, thinking this is a joke, but there is only silence on the other end of the line.

"You're serious?" I ask.

"You better believe I'm serious. That child gone and almost killed herself."

It seems absurd, the stuff of fiction. I didn't even know crack pipes had screens. I want to apologize for laughing, but I know Gladyce doesn't have patience for polite chitchat.

"She's OK?"

"She's at Woodhull Hospital. Took her last night and she don't look too good." Gladyce continues, "Her face was all sweaty, but that could of been the crack. Thought you should know." Gladyce is the senior residential counselor at the group home, and the bravado in her voice leaves no one wondering who's in charge. Sometimes she takes the initiative to call me with updates about the residents. "Update," I've learned, is synonymous with "crisis." Gladyce is fairly selective on what warrants a call: bodily harm, suicide attempts, hospitalization, physical assault on a resident or staff member.

I don't get calls about prostitution or drug use anymore. Those incidents are too frequent, and selectivity on Gladyce's part saves me from information overload. I have fourteen other adolescents on my caseload right now with similar issues, and she knows that I can read all about the typical debauchery in the incident reports. No need to bother me with the petty stuff.

Updates on Bella have become more and more frequent. In a month she will turn twenty-one. I was told that last year for her birthday she wanted a cake with lavender frosting and a Louis Vuitton purse. She got the cake and a gift certificate to the clothing store Jimmy Jazz, which she traded on the street for a few vials of crack. This year there is no question about what she wants. Bella knows what she is going to get on her twenty-first birthday. We've been trying to plan with her for this day for a while.

In the State of New York, at age twenty-one, youth placed in foster care must leave the system. State officials call it "aging out." I worry about all the youth as their twenty-first birthdays approach. The weeks prior to the aging-out date can produce the most stress they have experienced, even if they have a legitimate place to go. Typically, they act out. As their frustration mounts, so does their dangerous behavior. With Bella I am particularly concerned.

When we met less than a year ago Bella wanted little to do with me. She was polite but rarely engaged me past a smattering of small talk and pleasantries. I was the new caseworker, the fifth one in the three years since the program's inception. My social work experience up to this point consisted of eight months as a residential counselor at a sister group home in Queens called the 401. How I ended up doing this work, I really don't know. All I was sure of at the time I applied for the job was that I had recently received my bachelor's degree, I was about to turn thirty, and I was in need of a seismic shift in my life. I had effectively dwindled my days down to waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant and then, as a pastime, drinking scotch after scotch until the blue of morning broke through the night. Often while lying in bed, under the heavy weight of a hangover, I dreamed of being plucked from my life like a chess piece and placed somewhere new.

When I saw the online job listing for the residential counselor position at the 401 one night in March 2004, I saw it as an opportunity to push past the drudgery and seize something new for myself. I had wanted to work with kids, in what capacity I wasn't sure. It wasn't until I was hired that I realized how underqualified I was. Although I considered myself informed on social issues, I'd never worked with youth before, never paid close attention to social welfare concerns or seriously thought about the foster care system. When asked by friends who still clung tightly to aspirations of making it as artists why I wanted to work in a group home, I answered, "Because I need to serve something greater than myself." It sounded good, and I wanted to believe it was true. Really, I hadn't a clue why I wanted to work with marginalized youth in foster care, and neither did the residents. They dismissed me immediately.

"A white residential counselor?" I heard one resident say to another in the hallway as I entered the group home for the first time in May of that year. "I give him two months." They bumped knuckles and laughed.

The first day I met Bella she was sitting on the living room couch wearing tight jeans and a threadbare halter top. The TV she was watching sat on a lopsided entertainment stand with a missing wheel; the window blinds were bent; the bars on the window were bent; the floor sloped; two chairs against the wall sat unevenly. The "Home Sweet Home" plaque just over the kitchen doorway was intended to soften the institutional feel of the house; instead it seemed more like a reminder of what this place could never become. Bella's broad shoulders curled downward. She crossed her right leg over her left and tucked her foot behind her ankle as she clasped her hands in her lap.

"I hear that you're back in a GED program. That's great," I said as I sat down beside her, hoping she would be impressed that I'd done my homework. She moved away from me to the edge of the couch and rolled her eyes. I was speaking first with Bella because her situation was dire. We had seven months to set her up with the resources she needed. I was to work with her closely in hopes of establishing a discharge plan, which would include getting her set up with employment, monitoring her performance in school, and finding her a place to live after her twenty-first birthday.

Everything I knew about Bella I learned from my supervisor, Jessica, and the case file. She had come into foster care as an adolescent; her only family was a grandmother who lived in Puerto Rico. Bella was intelligent, having taught herself to be fluent in English during her brief time in New York. Of all the residents, she kept to herself the most. As the oldest inhabitant in the house, she claimed to want nothing to do with "these children." I'd soon find out that it was common for her to sit alone on the couch watching a bootleg DVD of Beauty Shop, feeding her dream of stardom as the other residents played handball across the street or flirted with neighborhood chulos while smoking a blunt on the stoop of the Dominican church. She'd sit with her face swathed in Noxzema, sipping fruit punch and voicing her exasperation to the characters on TV. "You stupid," she'd snap at the screen. "Why you play yourself?"

"Well, I'm excited to work with you, Bella," I continued. "I really want to make it a goal that you get a job. How does that sound?" As the words left my mouth I shuddered at their banality.

Bella chipped away her nail polish for a while, then looked up. "You finished?" she asked. Before I could answer she stood up and walked out the door.

The group home is called Keap Street. It houses gay, lesbian, and transgender youth in foster care and is one of only a handful of such programs in New York City. The kids are anywhere from fourteen to twenty-one years old. All of them are black or Latino. They've been placed in care because they were either neglected or abused by their parents or because their behavior was unmanageable in their homes. Most of them are here because when their sexual orientation or gender identity was discovered, they were again abused by someone at a former group home or thrown out by a foster parent.

There are twelve residents. I read all of their files prior to meeting them. When we met I tried to connect their faces to their stories. Maite is sixteen, with long black hair. She styles herself in a tough way that is contradicted by her eyes. Her heroin-addicted mother died of AIDS when she was nine, and her father was murdered in a gang dispute when she was eight. Junior (his birth name is Sheadon) is a nineteen-year-old immigrant from Jamaica. He was placed in care by the courts because he's been deemed a thief and a liar. He was raised with five siblings in a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx, and he tells people he's a doctor with houses in Long Island and Florida. Diana, called Crush because she crushes so hard on girls, was placed at the home after a stint in juvenile detention for lifting some sneakers for "a shorty I was crushing on." In detention she got into trouble for flirting with another girl whose boyfriend found out and hit Crush in the head with a brick. Now she has periodic epileptic seizures. Nothing happened to the boy, but Crush was labeled a sexual predator and removed from the facility. Now she's in love with Fasheema, who has a trusting face and a dimpled smile. Fasheema has had to rely on sex to survive in the streets, and she uses her body in the group home to manipulate the other residents, namely Crush.

Pimple-faced and slinky, Christina is a cocoa-colored sixteen-year-old transgender Latina from the Bronx who thinks she's a white girl from the suburbs. Her Britney Spears infatuation is all-consuming. Nineteen-year-old Raheem—thin and attractive, with full, pouty lips—was put into care because he was being sexually abused by his father and then by his foster parents. Both his mother and father have since died. He has threatened to kill other residents, and himself, on more than one occasion. Caridad is squat and stout. She prides herself on not "being ghetto." She rejects the other kids' fashion style—Sean Johns, Timberlands, and Akademiks—and instead goes for anything black and adorned with skulls. Her hair changes color as often as her mood ring. On the day I met her she had a four-inch nail jutting out from beneath her bottom lip. I had read in her file that she's a cutter, and as we talked I saw that her arms were dotted with tiny sliver-scars.

And there's Bella. I'm at the residence the day she returns from Woodhull. When she invites me to see how she's arranged her room, I accept.

"Staff says I should be an interior decorator," she whispers, her Puerto Rican accent rolling her R's like pastries. She smoothes out her comforter with large, calloused fingers that end in French tips. She shows me her Hello Kitty ornaments and porcelain cat figurines with real fur. The room is tidy and feminine. She has an eye for detail.

"Touch it, it's like real," she says, pointing to a fake cat. She giggles and covers her mouth with her hand.

Bella wants to pass, but she doesn't. With a quick glance you might not see what a closer inspection reveals. She's constantly plucking, cinching, stuffing, bleaching, and erasing, but she can't hide her Adam's apple, her broad shoulders, her large hands. She fills her bra with socks, tucks and secures her penis between her legs, and tapes maxi pads together and stuffs them down the sides of her pants to create the illusion of hips. On the street she finds someone to supply her with feminizing hormones. Her regimen is uneven; only when she strolls enough can she afford it. The effects are evident: her body softens, her skin blanches. She works hard to align how she feels on the inside with her outward appearance and when a man pays her, I imagine, she feels the warmth of success.

"He likes my hands," she once confessed to me, "he told me so. He said I got lady fingers."

When she disappears from the home, we don't hear from her until we get her call asking to be picked up from central booking. The charge is usually loitering with the intent to prostitute or purchasing narcotics. I'll go get her and she'll walk out of the men's holding area without makeup, clutching her belongings to her chest. She won't speak on the way home.

For months I've been trying to formulate a discharge plan for Bella, scrambling to find anything that could work. She has no family members in New York, no appropriate visiting resources. The waitlists for LGBTQ youth emergency housing programs are through the roof. Plus, Bella's behavior has been so erratic lately, I'm not even sure I could get her to show up. She has no adult figures in her life except for her caretakers in the system and, of course, her tricks. Her addiction makes it impossible to keep a job. In any case, during a good stretch she can earn double, maybe triple a menial income strolling the streets.

I pat the fake cat. It's eerie, feels dead. I'm anxious because Bella and I need to have a discussion. Time is running out, and she acts as if the impending date is just another day, as if nothing is about to change. If my job is to prepare her and provide her with basic tools of survival, I've failed. She isn't ready for anything. The world will greet her on her birthday with indifference. When everything falls away, she'll have no place to go.

"Bella," I say, "we need to talk." She freezes, doesn't look up. Now that I've started, I have no clue what to say. I'm lost. What option does she have other than calling her grandmother and letting her know the situation?

"I'm not going back to Puerto Rico," Bella quips, flicking her finger in my face. "Abuelita don't want me."

"You don't have to go back," I say, "but maybe you should try to get in touch with her."

Bella won't look at me. She smoothes the same spot on her comforter over and over. I know the parts of this story that I've read in psychiatric evaluations and in psychological assessments. I've read lists of events loosely threaded together that lead to a diagnosis. In my head I've reworked those events and rubbed them smooth, like Bella does her bedspread, to find something more, in the hope that not only the victim but also the person will be revealed. I've thought about the numerous case histories in her file, the facts strung together so many times that I've begun to see her life as if I were there.

"I'm not going to Puerto Rico," she says and suddenly pushes me out into the hallway, slamming the door in my face.

The name was Baldomero. He remembers his mother running past him like a crazy woman as he played in the island dirt. She was running, he remembers, her eyes shiny with tears. He remembers her screaming, and Abuelita chasing behind her, a rock over her head.

"How can you do this to your child?" Abuelita bawled and hurled the stone at his mother's back. "You beast!" Baldomero dug his hands into the wet earth as his mother escaped into the thicket of pineapples. "I hope you die," Abuelita screamed. "I pray that New York swallows you."

That is all Baldomero remembers of his mother leaving. He stayed on the island with Abuelita; there was no one else with whom he could live. His father had disappeared a year earlier to San Juan and was jailed on drug charges. Baldomero didn't remember anything about him.

Abuelita's drinking was always bad, but when Baldomero was ten years old it worsened. The smell of rum reminded him of browning butter splattering in a pan as she barked in his face.

"You are such a maricón," she said. "It's because your parents abandoned you and you have no man to look up to. Now it is my job to make you a man."