Researchers have found that LGBTQ youth make up a large number of youth engaged in survival sex in New York City, nationally, and across the continent. LGBTQ youth are estimated to make up only 5 to 7% of the youth population but 20 to 40% of the homeless youth population. Authors of a multiphase, multiyear, multimethod transnational study estimate that 25 to 35% of young men in the sex trade identify as gay, bisexual, or transgender. Youth reported experiences of social and familial discrimination and rejection, familial dysfunction, familial poverty, physical abuse, sexual abuse and exploitation, and emotional and mental trauma.
Author’s note: One of the things I found most interesting about this study was the rather bizarre lumping together of reported reasons for transgender youths leaving home and then falling into sex work; for the most part, they are extremely divergent; for example, there is a great deal of difference between the emotional and physical trauma experienced by someone who has been sexually abused or raped and someone, who, perhaps, had family members that may or may have not supported their decision to be gay or transgendered. This effort, mainly originating in the gay media, to equate non-acceptance of homosexuality with physical and sexual abuse recently reached an apogee when some gay commentators recommended that the parents of a transgender boy be brought up on charges after he killed himself; the consternation primarily originated with the fact that the parents had taken the boy to a Christina-based therapist. In reality, they are related, but not in the way they think: first of all, there is the trauma, this consequently causes the child to seek healing within homosexuality; oftentimes, then, there is a reaction from family members – sometimes a negative one; becoming defensive, especially in the current political and pop-culture climate which perceives homosexuality as an inborn trait, the child reacts and subsequently leaves home; on the streets – they are exploited, become diseased, or worst of all – killed.
Link to original study: