In the United States today there are 1.6 to 2.8 million homeless people under the age of 18 and 20 to 40 percent of them are members of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer Intersex Asexual (LGBTQIA) community. Society has begun to open up to the idea of being transgender, gay, lesbian, or bisexual with role models such as Lavern Cox, Caitlyn Jenner, Jane Lynch, and Neil Patrick Harris. When kids see people in the media being accepted, it allows them to identify with these role models and they begin to accept their feelings of sexual attraction or sexuality. The issue is parents can be far less accepting than the media leading to young kids running away at earlier ages. Younger coming out ages, coupled with parental rejection, lead to
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Parents are from a different generation they did not grow up in an accepting world. Taught to judge the different parents are having a hard time tolerating their children who identify as LGBTQIA. According to the LGBT Homeless Youth Provider Survey, forty-six percent of youth run away because of family rejection while forty-three percent cited being forced out of their homes by parents (Cray, 11). This environment of an intolerant family causes youth to make the decision of living on the street or dealing with the hostility of an intolerant home life. There are also parents who will support them up until the point of legal adulthood (age 18) and then cut them off financially (Nolan, …show more content…
They see it as being accepted in society yet not in their home. With legislation protecting the rights of members of the LGBTQIA community being passed each year it appears that America is making progress. However, to look in the face of 350,000 youth living on the street it is hard to recognize the progress taking place. New groups such as The Zebra Coalition and National Coalition for the Homeless have recognized this problem and began to take steps to improve it. This provides hope for those rejected teens that one-day they will find a loving home regardless of
Parents are from a different generation they did not grow up in an accepting world. Taught to judge the different parents are having a hard time tolerating their children who identify as LGBTQIA. According to the LGBT Homeless Youth Provider Survey, forty-six percent of youth run away because of family rejection while forty-three percent cited being forced out of their homes by parents (Cray, 11). This environment of an intolerant family causes youth to make the decision of living on the street or dealing with the hostility of an intolerant home life. There are also parents who will support them up until the point of legal adulthood (age 18) and then cut them off financially (Nolan, …show more content…
They see it as being accepted in society yet not in their home. With legislation protecting the rights of members of the LGBTQIA community being passed each year it appears that America is making progress. However, to look in the face of 350,000 youth living on the street it is hard to recognize the progress taking place. New groups such as The Zebra Coalition and National Coalition for the Homeless have recognized this problem and began to take steps to improve it. This provides hope for those rejected teens that one-day they will find a loving home regardless of