Gay homeless men

Homeless gay men (the most affected demographic) are using saunas, sex work and hook-up apps like Grindr to survive, and they aren’t talking about it because of shame. This is how I survived. Regarding gender identity among sexual minorities, 22% of genderqueer or nonbinary people, 17% of cis women, and 15% of cis men experienced homelessness.

At homeless shelters, we can place transgender youth and adults in safe and appropriate shelter and housing programs based upon both their gender identity and an individualized assessment. Schools should be a safe haven for all youth, including LGBTQ youth. In recent weeks, a Times reporter and a photographer spent time with several gay homeless men in their early 20s.

The men agreed to speak openly about their lives, including illegal drug use and. The author, a straight male, became homeless a year ago and met a gay man at the shelter. The two quickly became best friends, beat homelessness together, and now share a nice apartment. Using data collected from the Generations Study and the U. Transgender Population Health Survey, this study is the first to provide estimates of the percentage of sexual and gender minority adults experiencing homelessness compared to cisgender straight adults using a nationally representative sample.

This study is the first to provide estimates of the percentage of sexual and gender minority adults experiencing homelessness compared to cisgender straight adults using representative national data. We provide estimates of homelessness both recent experiences and lifetime prevalence from three nationally representative surveys of U. We examined the proportion of people who had recent experiences with homelessness in the form of living temporarily with friends or family, living in a shelter or group home, or living in a place not intended for housing such as on the street, park, car, or abandoned building in the 12 months prior to being surveyed.

We found that:.

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We also assessed the proportion of people who had experienced homelessness at any time in their life measured only among cisgender and genderqueer sexual minority adults. The study findings support concerns that homelessness is experienced at disproportional rates among sexual and gender minority people. The assumption of overrepresentation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender LGBT people among those experiencing homelessness is widely discussed by policymakers and advocates, but very few studies have documented this using methods that reliably produce population estimates.

There is no singular definition of homelessness guiding a federal response to this problem. Ideally, we would know how many adults who are unstably housed are LGBT because this would help us understand the relevance of sexual orientation and gender identity for those who currently need services. However, another way to understand whether sexual orientation and gender identity matter in efforts to reduce homelessness is to examine whether sexual and gender minority people experience housing instability at different rates than cisgender heterosexual people.

We provide data on homelessness both recent experiences and lifetime prevalence from three nationally representative surveys of U. These three surveys conducted through the Generations Study and TransPop Study provide estimates of homelessness among transgender people of all sexual orientations , sexual minorities who are cisgender and genderqueer, but not transgender-identified , and cisgender heterosexual straight people.

See the Methods Note for details regarding the studies from which the data were drawn. Looking at the confidence intervals from these separate samples, it appears that a significantly higher proportion of transgender people reported recent housing instability compared to both sexual minority and cis straight people see Table 1. Racial and ethnic differences in recent experiences with homelessness among sexual minorities were significant, indicating disproportionately higher rates of recent experiences with homelessness among Black sexual minority people Figure 2.

Due to small sample sizes, we could not conduct statistical tests among subgroups of transgender and cis straight people these values are provided in shaded text in Appendix A. There were no significant differences see Appendix A. We also assessed prevalence of lifetime homelessness in our population-based sample of sexual minority adults this question was not asked in our surveys of transgender adults and cis straight people.

We examined whether there were any subgroup differences in experiences with lifetime homelessness in terms of race and ethnicity, gender identity, and level of gender conformity See Appendix A for Tables with estimates and confidence intervals. However, these differences were not statistically significant. This study is the first to provide estimates of the proportion of sexual and gender minority people in the United States experiencing homelessness compared to cis straight people using a representative national sample.

In this case, we have data for both recent and lifetime prevalence of homelessness among sexual minority people and only recent homelessness for transgender people. We see a significantly higher proportion of transgender people across sexual orientations reported recent housing instability compared to both cis and genderqueer sexual minority and cis straight people.

The reason for the lack of differences in rates of recent homelessness between cis and genderqueer sexual minorities and cis straight people is unclear, especially given the large differences in rates of lifetime homelessness. One possible explanation is that sexual minority people who are more economically secure may be more likely to volunteer for a survey than those who are not.

It is plausible that unstably housed people have more difficulties maintaining a phone which was our sampling frame and thus were missed.

Even if reached for sampling, it requires some form of stability to have a functioning phone, tablet, or computer and internet connectivity, or a mailing address, to respond to the self-administered online or mailed questionnaire. Both subgroup differences and similarities in rates of homelessness point to important issues that could inform public policies and services.

Among cis and genderqueer LGB people, African Americans had particularly high rates of recent experiences of homelessness. Although the sample sizes did not allow for racial and ethnic comparisons among transgender and cis straight people, the data suggest this may be a pattern across all groups. Given the high rates of poverty among people of color, whether LGBT or not, 13 it is not surprising that we would also see high rates of recent housing insecurity.