When Dustin Lance Black won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for the movie “Milk,” the LGBTQ activist addressed gay and lesbian adolescents in his acceptance speech.
“If Harvey (Milk) had not been taken from us 30 years ago,” he said, “I think he’d want me to say to all of the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told that they are ‘less than’ by their churches, by the government or by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value, and that no matter what anyone tells you, God does love you.”
Volunteers for Lost-n-Found Youth, a nonprofit that serves Atlanta’s homeless lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and queer teens, see rejection’s pain. Twice a week, its crews walk city streets, offering assistance to homeless LGBTQ teens, estimated to be about 750 in our city on any given night. Woodruff Park, Underground Atlanta, Safehaven and the Peachtree-Pine shelter are regular stops, something I experienced one recent Friday night.
Kaitlin Commiskey, the crew leader, spotted two familiar 18-year-old transgendered teens at the Peachtree-Pine shelter. One left her Texas home because her family did not accept her gender identity. The other teen, an Atlantan, is unable to stay with family.
“These girls were concerned about staying with their group, including their boyfriends who are also homeless youth,” Commiskey wrote later in an email. “With a lot of youth on the street, and particularly transgendered youth, there is safety in finding a group of other kids to stay with. Going out on the street regularly allows you to really see some of what the youth are experiencing and get a sense of what their needs are.”
Founded four years ago, Lost-n-Found is the city’s sole nonprofit that works to get homeless LGBTQ youth off the streets. It operates an emergency shelter in the West End, a thrift store and a drop-in center to help kids get stable. The organization is in a $1 million fundraising campaign to renovate a house in Midtown that will replace the current shelter and increase the number of beds from six to 18.
“A lot of queer kids get robbed, beat up and raped,” said Rick Westbrook, a Lost-n-Found co-founder and its executive director. “Nationwide, we know that 40 percent of kids on the street are queer. But based on the past few years, about 52 percent of (homeless) kids here are queer, and it’s because of the Bible Belt.”
Last fall, the organization’s work and its capital campaign got a boost when it was featured in Rolling Stone magazine. It was right around that time a video clip surfaced of a gay Kennesaw teen being disowned by his family. Then 19, Daniel Ashley Pierce secretly recorded the exchange, and a friend posted it on YouTube, which garnered Daniel global emotional and financial support. (Read Daniel’s story Sunday in the AJC’s “Personal Journeys” feature.)
A GoFundMe campaign set up for Daniel raised about $93,000 before it was shuttered; Daniel requested that additional donations be sent to Lost-n-Found, which accepted about $10,000. Westbrook calls the timeliness of Daniel’s video “a godsend.”
“Miley Cyrus had sent a young homeless man to accept an award on her behalf that Sunday,” Westbrook said. “Monday, the Rolling Stone article came out, and then Daniel’s story started on Wednesday. By Friday, every phone at Lost-n-Found was ringing off the hook. Now that we get calls from all over, Atlanta is quickly becoming ground zero for the problem. Our house is always full, and we always have a wait list.”
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