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Site observations were conducted at the following locations, identified as significant by research team members in consultation with community-based organizations: The Gathering Place, Mom’s (a volunteer-run food van), Grandview park, The (LGBT) Center, The Downtown Eastside Women’s Center, Boys-R-Us, the Salvation Army Van, Dusk Till Dawn, the Dufferin Hotel, the Ocean Star Video game arcade, Café de Soleil on Commercial Drive, Union Gospel Mission, and the strolls around Granville Street, Davie Street, East Hastings Street and Franklin Street. These locations included strolls where youth were involved in prostitution, meeting places for drugs and drug use, support centers for housing and recreational and social services, youth drop-ins, bars, and commercial and other “queer sites” in Vancouver. Informal participant observations were conducted by research team members at a range of community events, at bars, and at after hours parties and clubs.

Site observations were used to familiarize ourselves with the locations where street-involved youth tended to circulate and allowed us to contact participants for interviews and focus groups. These observations were also useful in determining the places where people might be more likely to need the services of the late night food van.

Finally, the site observations allowed the researchers to acclimatize themselves not only to their intended sites of research, but to their role as researchers and to the problems associated with this role. A central issue for the graduate student researchers, as recorded in the site observation reports, was overcoming or navigating around their “outsider” position.

The researchers discovered that everything which speaks of a different (more privileged) socio-economic status, from vocabulary, to hairstyle, to shoes, is indicative of this outsider position and often produces suspicion and a degree of discomfort at field sites. Conversely, for the community-involved researchers, the central concern in their acclimatization to their new role revolved around being taken seriously by their academic counterparts, and not being treated as part of the environment – assuming the role of researcher and not researched.

“I am seeing what I expected when I try to conduct research without a community-based partner: nothing” (Jax, university-based researcher)

“[We] sat and focused on me during this time, which I didn’t think was relevant” (Lesley, community-based researcher)

Focus groups were held with members of the research team, with service providers working with street-involved youth, with participants at GAB youth drop-in (The Center), and at the Downtown Eastside Women’s Center. The focus group with service providers allowed us to acquaint prominent service organizations with the research and solicit their cooperation, as well as to understand both how these organizations operated, and to learn about their experiences working with queer and questioning youth.

We heard their views on the viability of a youth-run housing project, the kind of housing most needed, how the needs of queer and questioning youth might differ from those of straight-identified youth, where we should run the late night food van, and other people and groups we should be in contact with.

Other focus groups allowed us to pursue the housing difficulties of street involved, primarily gay male youth, to explore with them, through activities, their conceptions of what ‘home’ means to them and to elicit their suggestions and recommendations for the kind of housing which would be most effective in meeting their particular needs.

These exchanges also asked about their experiences of the accessibility of social services for queer and questioning youth.

“Housing is a right not a privilege. Embracing equality, diversity, respect and mutual aid would help to address housing, sexuality, and race issues.” (Survey # 42)

A women-only meeting enabled us to see more clearly the ways in which the experiences and needs of women are shaped and constrained by systemic gender discrimination across lines of “sexual identity”. More particularly, it became clear that especially for women who are on the streets or street involved that an “out”/queer identity is not one which they readily name for themselves.

“I have yet to meet one [woman] who considered herself lesbian or bisexual while still on the street, yet I’ve met several who have come out, after exiting the street life. Even that little bit of gay dialogue that goes on with boys (regardless of the fact that its centered around prostitution) is not available to street girls because it works against them. All youth on the street who have the least are dependent on the material goods of the male consumer. Gay or not, men own the property” (Sacha)

A key element in the fieldwork was the late-night food-van run, re-named by the research team, the “Mobile Midnight Picnic” (MMP). Save the Children Canada, a partner in this study, permitted us to make use of their Van to run a weekly late-night outreach initiative which proved to be one of the most challenging but also one of the most informative aspects of the research.

The idea behind the MMP was, firstly, that very little research on disadvantaged populations ever brings any real benefit to anyone but the researchers. The researched themselves rarely experience or enjoy any direct benefits. By bringing hot food, fruit, coffee and other snacks out to youth on or working the streets, we could both offer some material support to youth in need, as well as hear from that sub-group of queer and questioning youth likely to be at greatest risk of violence, homelessness, illness and addictions. Being the group least likely to seek mainstream supports and services, these are also the youth whose voices and perspectives are least likely to be heard, and the people we most needed to hear from.

Originally scheduled to run 3 nights a week for three months, logistics proved extremely difficult to negotiate, as none of the research team except the principal investigator had access to a car, and the van had to be returned to Save the Children, located on Vancouver’s West side, a substantial distance from the fieldwork site, after the MMP ended, which was usually between 3 and 4 a.m. Moreover, with staff changes at Save the Children, the arrangements we had negotiated originally proved burdensome to the staff now administering the van, and we had to reduce our expectations accordingly. That meant cutting down to one van trip per week, on either a Friday or a Saturday night.

Despite this reduced street presence, we were able, over the period of the study, to make regular weekly trips out between midnight and 3 a.m. to feed and talk to youth, and to observe, first-hand, conditions on the street. The evening of each trip, we would arrange in advance for food preparation (hot soup, vegetarian stew, or chili, and home-baked bread or buns), then equip the van with fruit, snacks, and drinks coffee/tea/chocolate/bottled water/juice, as well as condoms and shelter information, and set out, usually beginning around Davie Street, about midnight. The procedure we followed was that one person would drive, another take notes and help set up and maintain food distribution, while two people would go out and invite people on or working the streets to come over to the van for food.

Researchers were provided with cell phones for safety. That also meant that we could phone for help for others as well. We did need to telephone for an ambulance on one occasion to assist a youth whose buddy had lapsed into unconsciousness. On a few occasions interviews were conducted in the back of the van on site, and surveys were filled out on the street, and in bar parking lots, but normally we simply gave information about the study, and made contacts for follow-up interviews.

It is difficult to encapsulate in one short paragraph the many valuable things we learned during the MMP trips. Most of all, we got a “feeling” for late night street life, and could more accurately comprehend what the youth we sought to study had to go through in their struggles to survive with inadequate family and state housing, service and support. An example of the various kinds of fieldnotes that were taken during these trips is available in Appendix 10, and this may help to give a better sense of what MMP trips involved and made clearer to us. Prominent among the reportable observations from these trips were the following:

“It just means you have to keep it [being a lesbian] more secret…you’re in survival mode all the time when you’re on the street, so you’re not gonna do anything that will get your ass kicked or get your ass killed. It’s not something you talk about, it’s not something I even thought a lot about, except with my street sister cause all I was thinking about was using and keeping my ass alive.” (Kitty Kat, Interview)

Perhaps the main “finding” of this part of the research is that the stocking and staffing of a dedicated, regularly scheduled, youth organized and operated food van is an excellent way to keep in touch with what is going on in the street, including bad drugs, violent and other crimes, police violence, detox, health, and other needs, and for understanding the real impacts of social policies and cuts to social services, and where these might most feasibly, responsibly and effectively be addressed. It would be the very strong recommendation of this study that HRDC or some comparable organization fund such an initiative on an ongoing basis. This program could be expected to be well-supported by donations, and would create an excellent ‘training ground’ for entry level social service/youth workers. This is a not inconsiderable contribution to street-involved and drug/alcohol addicted youth, given that so many of these youth seek, on recovery, to gain employment working in counseling and other peer support services. It would be a program well worth the investment of time and resources, and could in time become a cost-recovery (through donations, youth employment subsidies and volunteerism) initiative..

Full length (one-half to 2 hours) interviews were conducted with 8 young women and 12 young men, and fully transcribed and analyzed. In addition, full length interviews were conducted with six adults: two community activists, a teacher, four social workers (a front-line volunteer who takes out food to youth on the street and 3 experienced social workers with prominent shelter and support services, who engage in directly supporting queer street-involved youth). Adults [1] spoke about their experiences in working with this diverse group, and the ways in which inclusion can be undermined, whether through explicit policy, through omission, or through the “micropractices” of everyday institutional life.

“Sometimes schools will require that parents sign a contract stating that its OK for their child to participate in this club. The problem with a gay-straight alliance that most kids are, like, ‘Don’t tell my Mom!’, which is a drag…” Jerome, teacher

Youth spoke about home life and how and why they left, about sexual identifications, about being ‘out’, the role of drugs in their lives, school life, and what supports they did and didn’t get at school, about sources of and experiences of violence in their lives, about what has been good, has been most help to them, then about their health, housing and about where they see themselves headed.

They also spoke at length about the impacts of sex work on their emotional well-being, their personal relationships, and about drug use as a way to manage with the emotional and physical harms of the sex trade.

“Hustling is very degrading. I don’t think anybody should have to...Hustling does affect my intimate relations with people…Its almost like when you start hustling, you enter a state of mind… its very difficult to get out of... So if you met someone you like… you think, ok, how am I going to get money out of this person or how am I going to get what I want out of this person. Its very effective on the way you think.” (Tony)

“Going to the streets is easy money, not always safe, but its easy money…the government has such strict guidelines and rules to get on welfare and there’s no other choice unless you turn to the street” (Bob)

Interviews with service providers enriched our understanding of a central theme which arose in the surveys and youth interviews: the sense of isolation from which the GLBT street youth community suffers, not only from the general population, but from other minority groups.

Rodrigo, a Latino outreach youth, describes how the QQ Latino youth he’s dealt with feel ostracized from a largely homophobic Latino community. Similarly, Colleen, frontline worker in a large youth shelter, suggests that QQ youth are often suspicious of the gay community as whole, which they deem as predatory and exploitative.

“[It’s] hard to both stay in your community as a queer youth and stay away from predators at the same time, same people are in both places, such a small community” (Colleen)

Sexism, racism, ageism and homophobia are attitudes which are just as easily condoned among minority groups as they are among the general population, and as these discussions illustrate, these attitudes may be more destructive when they come from the communities in which one would expect and hope to find the most support.

While most of the service providers interviewed were social workers from charitable institutions, one was an individual deeply involved in the non-institutionalized, grass-roots “charity culture” of Vancouver. The interview with “Street Mom,” an elderly woman who prepares and distributes food for approximately 400 street-involved people, offers a more personal account of the issues and problems associated with providing services to street-involved individuals in general and QQ street youth in particular.

“I’ve tried to make these kids my family, I try to help them make changes in their life and I try to keep them alive so they can do that.” (Street Mom)

While the interview touches on many themes elsewhere explored at length in this report, it is important to note the emphasis which “Street Mom” places on bringing a non-judgmental attitude to her work. Furthermore, while her actions demonstrate the importance of providing the population with the basic material elements for survival, her words illustrate that the open-mindedness which she brings to her work is another crucial element to the overall well-being of QQ street youth.

“I think all of us have a share in the burden of these children. I think if everybody accepted a share and made these kids know they weren’t going to ostracize them, that it would change things a lot.” (Street Mom)

What full length and fully transcribed interviews allowed (and continues to allow) us to do, is gain a larger informational context for interpretation, as well as---and this was important us---make opportunities to be surprised, to hear unexpected things from participants and interviewees, to understand something more of the reasons and realities behind “gender identity”, “sexual exchange” or “addiction” that had been really not at all well understood at the start of the work.

“I wouldn’t think about this gross guy that’s touching me… Ya, you know, I wouldn’t think about his family cause sometimes I would think about like, what if he has a family? You know what if he has two kids at home, you know, he’s lying to them, his whole entire life, his whole entire marriage, his everything is one big fat lie… And that would actually bring me down as well… like I’ll just get really depressed so, like if some other guy is just, um, telling me a story about his family all this stuff, how he supports them but yet he still goes and picks up a boy, it just makes me amazingly depressed to think about how those kids would feel if they knew about what he was doing. Or if his wife knew about what he was doing, so I would kind of take all her, all the burden that she would have felt if she knew onto me, and, ah, that was hard to deal with, so that’s why I started meditation….or uh, I had my pills. I was a big pill popper, and that helped a lot.” (Tom)

Cultivating ‘surprise’ in research is fundamental to learning from its practice. For this reason we tried to create ways that people could express ideas not anticipated by our questions, and to enable representations and expressions which might not so readily emerge in face to face interviews with researchers, even researchers from the community, and we used these resources to enrich as well as to challenge our analysis of what the interview transcriptions could tell us.

One of the recurring themes in the ethnographic interviews is the sense that while many services for LGBT street-involved youth exist, they are often rendered ineffective because of ignorance on the part of both users and service providers. This trend, as brought out through the interviews, is not limited to one particular type of service: Anika and Eliza both reported a fundamental distrust of the health-care professionals and the health care system as a whole; Kitty Kat suggested that LGBT street-involved youth are less aware of housing services provided to them than their “normie” counterparts; Tony remarked on how employment services provide only the rudimentary resources, and not the actual knowledge, for job searching and acquisition; Jackie speaks about how her trans identity makes finding work impossible; in an “analytical fieldnote”, Gary’s interviewer expressed concern that his attempts at staying clean would fail without addiction professionals; and Speedy’s interview portrays a community which views the entire system of services offered to them as bureaucratic and manipulative. On the one hand, a lack of knowledge on the part of LGBT youth about the services provided to them devalues these services and constitutes a needless waste of resources. On the other hand, when knowledge of these services does exist, it is often accompanied by the perception or recognition that those providing the service do not understand that LGBT street-involved youth face a unique set of needs, issues, and dilemmas. Janice tells us that the youth shelter might be a way for her to get off the streets except that “…my parents would have to sign for me ‘cuz I’m only 18 and they won’t sign, there’s no fuckin’ way.”

Conversely, many interviewees expressed dissatisfaction or distrust of the services provided to them not because of any knowledge gap, but because the service plays too large a role in the interviewees’ lives. This applies particularly, but not solely, to government services: Aaron claims that he has “never been free from the Ministry,” while Bob states that the street is often a more desirable alternative than dealing with the government’s strict and non-negotiable guidelines for income assistance. The same goes for shelters, according to one ‘savvy’ informant who sees herself as having learned to ‘play the system’:

“…too much structure: they’re always telling you when to get up, when to go to bed, kick you out every day. I played them--- if you say you’re detoxing, you don’t have to go out every day, all day. The people there are too fake- they had this one counselor who was there for a work experience, for like 2 months. I ate that girl for lunch: I always quoted her own fake words back at her.” (Felix/Felicity)

Peter, similarly, painted a disturbing portrait of a relationship between service and client in which his ability to “work the angles” and manipulate the service into providing him with resources beyond those normally offered is creating a dangerous dependency. While Peter’s situation is unique, the overall sense of the interviews is that the instrumentalization which is occurring between service and client is common. Dependency on the part of the clients and manipulation on the part of the services deeply endangers the sense of personal agency so vital to this population, and so greatly lacking on the streets.

“…everything changes, you can go from good to bad in like seconds….it’s a roller coaster….you can be having the greatest time of your life, you know good friends, and the feeling of security, and then everything can just drop, just like that.” (Janice)

What does need to be stressed about agency, and what the ethnographic work so richly indicated, is that although these youth greatly value self-reliance and very typically characterize themselves as having plans, abilities and real prospects for improving their lives, it would be a mistake simply to conclude that they can provide us with “answers” to what they ‘need’.

“I just I knew that one day something better would happen. And then I just… I always put my thought onto that aspect that I will, my life would change, and then I’ll get better.” (Taz)

Because what we saw very often in our extended conversations was that plans and schemes, while abundant, were often ungrounded. When we asked youth about where they thought they would be, or hoped to be, a year and then 5 years from now, we heard bemused puzzlement, abject despair, cynical resignation, and frankly incredible optimism. We heard plans and schemes and strategies, but little plausible ideas about how these plans could be put into action. Taz, for example, answered confidently:

“Where do I see myself being in one year? Well hopefully holding a manager position in retail maybe le Chateau or Aldo, because I have, cause you know …if you’re going to apply at a place you need to wear what they’re selling, and I just finally got a whole new Aldo outfit except the shoes, but that’s ok.”

Jane, 18 years old and already a veteran of 7 years of life on the streets, told us:

“…within the next year I am planning on hitchhiking to either Banff or the Okanagan and getting a job out there. I am going to find one. I am determined. I am going to work my butt off and do what ever I have to do and, you know, and I am going to get a tattoo with my first paycheck in celebration, as in ‘I did it. This is myself. I accomplished it.’ I am half way through grade 11, I would like to finish that and start my grade 12, I want to have my own place I want to get back into the community and give back to the community yah, but I hope to be off the streets.”

At the opposite end of the spectrum are youth who have abandoned any such ambitions:

And while we may well wish street-involved youth were more “realistic”, working with youth who despair of any chances at a better life is surely just as difficult as working with those whose plans and aspirations are completely ungrounded.

“Street Mom” contends that service providers may often be as unrealistic as their clients:

“Sure we can they pick up our socks and keep going but if you have no address, no clothing, no telephone, no education, how can you get a job? How can you go to school without the basics behind you?” (Street Mom)

Negotiating an effective action plan which suffers neither from a romanticisation of youth’s abilities to direct their lives (“they know best what they need”), nor from a top-down managerial stance which patronizes, over-regulates and stifles autonomy, is an urgent need at both policy and service provision levels. In this study, youth were very clear about the limitations of ‘solutions’ for their benefit engineered by agencies and organizations remote from the everyday realities of street life, and they were adamant about the need to have youth seriously involved in the organizing and running of services for themselves. However it would be naïve and it would be in effect undermining to simply hand over the reins to young people who have not had the kind of stability and support needed to develop real competence in managing, along with the mundane tasks of shopping and self-care and budgeting and the like, the extreme challenges they face under the dual obstacles of both discrimination and deprivation.

“The ability to navigate services seems important to success, having peers to help with that might be useful and help break down power hierarchies.” (Darcie, reflecting on interview with Speedy)

Above all, what is needed is an approach to service provision which both supports youth organizing for themselves, and at the same time scaffolds and assists in the development of skills and abilities which most have not had real chances to master and so do not place in their hands responsibilities which they are incapable of shouldering. Lacking support of that kind, perhaps the most realistic assessment of future prospects for these youth is that they remain, quite simply, unimaginable.

Jackie: in a year I’d like to . . . um, don’t know just have a stable place to live and know that I can have food on my plate… I can’t even imagine it.

(A spreadsheet providing data summaries from these interviews is provided in appendix 8.)

Starting with an initial set of 90 questions devised at the outset of the study, after many team meeting discussions, trials and revisions of the survey, and a pilot testing of two versions of it, we were left with a 6 page, 45-question survey (see appendix 6).

Although the survey had been designed to be done in 20 minutes and self-administered (and so we gave respondents just $5 for doing one), it transpired that most of the time surveys were actually done individually and face-to-face with research assistants. Although this has limitations, it does ensure that we can be more than normally confident that these surveys were done earnestly. Rarely did it seem that responses were “flippant”, or simply a series of “ticks” on a form. People took the time to draw, and to add information and write extended comments. Full details of the survey form and the survey data are available in Appendix 9.

A few of the surveys were completed by people over 29, but these were withdrawn from the set, leaving us with the following age distribution:

The ethnicity of the respondents was primarily Caucasian, although it is important to note the relatively higher representation of Metis youth, and in particular, young Aboriginal women.

Here it is worth noting that whereas over half (56%) of males identified as queer or gay, less than a quarter (23%) of the females identified as queer or lesbian. As the qualitative aspects of the project illustrate, this difference may stem from the fact that, among the represented population, there seems to be more males involved in homosexual “survival sex” than females---this is, however, merely one interpretation of the figures.

To enrich the survey data and to create multiple kinds of opportunities to represent their experiences, we tried to create questions which were both fully “inclusive” in their categories and terms, and ‘interactive’, in the sense that we offered a mostly blank ‘rant page’ at the end, and had a ‘bubble dialogue cartooning task as another ‘interactive’ element.

One of the survey’s interactive elements was a stick figure drawing to create a “bubble-dialogue” question about the impacts of expressing a ‘queer’ identity. Interestingly, this relatively demanding question task was completed by 35 of the 60 respondents.

These drawings made apparent the fears, threats and harms that ‘coming out’ presented for queer/questioning youth, and portrayed their reasons for leaving home.

It was evident that respondents put significant thought into their responses, and a high degree of effort into representing the misconceptions, ignorance and homophobia they confronted.

The theme of finding oneself unable to communicate, to speak or to be listened to by parents, was a recurrent one, as was an undercurrent of abuse.

Youth from all socio-economic strata were represented, as the following chart based on parents’ employment indicates.

Although we have no wish to play into the stereotypes that seem often to define popular wisdom about street-involved youth, one of this project’s goals was to provide information which might serve to educate those responsible for the care and control of youth. First among these, the institution of primary socialization, is the home, and parents set the stage for their children’s conceptions and experiences of adults, and, in particular, whether adults are seen as trustworthy, or whether they are seen as unsupportive, even dangerous. Certainly, too, an unhappy home life is often identified in research studies as a critical “risk factor” for becoming street-involved.

Our survey asked youth, accordingly, “How was your home life growing up?”, and we asked, as well, a question about sources of violence in their lives, and included “parents” and “family” as two of the possible sources.

37 out of 60 youth explicitly reported violence at home. These are their characterizations of family life, answering, in their own words, the question “How was your home life growing up?”:

Home life…sucked/ shitty, parents dysfunctional/ very abusive/ very strict/ not good/ shaky/ fear of doing “girly” things/ terrible, oppressive controlling, verbal, physical, sexual abuse/ very chaotic/ very directive/ mother was drug addicted/ difficult, abusive/ difficult/ somewhat livable/ a blur, standard Christian/ crazy, abusive/ very bad/ awful/ confusing, I became secretive/ in and out of group homes all my life/ sucked/ messed up/ shitty/ abusive/ in and out of foster home/ abusive/ somewhat rough/ horrible/ crappy, abusive, kicked out at 13/ great until parents split up/ very secretive/ alcoholic mom, came out at 13, she flipped out/ “Black (eyes) Red (scar tissue) Blue (bruises) =Violence from both biological mother and in foster care/ violent/ My mom neglected me; my dad beat me, on the rare occasions I saw him/ parents had no affection for each other, dad rarely around/ not very open about sex/ awful, physical, emotional, mental.

The most influential institution of secondary socialization in this country is the school, and rejection, intimidation and harassment at school, from teachers as well as from students, is very often cited as a major “risk factor” for youth leaving home and becoming street-involved. So we asked a number of questions about life at school, about sources of support at school, and about whether or not youth were “out” at school.

“…in terms of being gay in high school, I think its wrong… um knowing that they are queer and putting them in that situation of hell.” ( P.J.)

Of the 58 people who responded to this latter question, 9 stated it did not apply to them (6 of these were straight identified, 2 bisexual, and one self-identified as a “open”.) Heterosexually identified youth did not see “coming out” as relevant to them, and this is surely because the presumption at school is that everyone is heterosexual, notwithstanding that it is public knowledge, and has been for many years now, that on average 10% of our population is LGBT. What matters here is that teachers and other educators know this, but that most typically there is no recognition of this at school. Teacher education programs typically ignore and avoid any discussion, let alone any educational intervention concerned with sexuality to guide teachers in dealing supportively with LGBT youth in their care, and homophobic jokes and remarks are, typically, both tolerated and even legitimized by some teachers, who engage in homophobic discourses and practices themselves, and model this for their students.

“… the kids would … follow me home with a carton of eggs and…they would wait until I was alone … and um they’d wait until I got home and just throw them at my window. They’d call me fag um like right outside the house and my mother would hear it…

I did not drop out of school...I didn’t want to leave school. I enjoyed it very much. I tried the hardest I could try at my abilities. The only reason I left is because my mother kicked me out.” (P.J.)

In the following chart which shows the sources of support at school, note that the support given to QQ youth by school counselors is no greater than that given to them by non-teaching staff—school secretaries, caretakers, etc.

So the results of our survey questions about school life should come as no surprise. Of the 49 QQ identified youth who responded to the question, 9 were “out at school”, 23 were NOT out at school, and 17 declared they were “partially out”, in some of these cases specifying “to one friend”. Of those 9 who were “out at school”, 4 self-identified as gay or queer men, 4 as bisexual women, and one as lesbian. All of the bisexual women were under 21. It may be that it is more acceptable for young women to identify as bisexual at school, and that it may be easier nowadays for women to do so than it has been in the past. Nevertheless, what we see here is a picture of schools as institutions which make little or no room for non-hegemonic sexualities.

This impression is reinforced if we take a closer look at the characterizations of their school experience by QQ youth. Because one goal of this project was to provide an informational basis for education, specifically to enable caregiving adults to understand the role they play in excluding and thereby endangering QQ youth, it seems useful to reproduce for educators’ benefit the kinds of comments youth made about their life at school. Note that not all youth responded to this question, and a few (6) characterized their school life as good, or fun, or OK. The rest had this to say. School life was…

rough/ shitty, hated school/ very hard/boring/ very upsetting, people making fun of me all the time/ hard and depressing/ lot of harassment from students teachers and vice principal/ shit. Just a lot of shit/ I was never there/ false, phony/ scary, hectic, lonely/ HORRIBLE, homophobic graffiti on locker, repeated sexual violence and hate, no-one in whole school was out/ classist and homophobic/ boring/ torments of being something I wasn’t/ I loved it before I came out/ not very good, a lot of problems/ stressful/ at some time very hard because I’m native/ no support/ had few friends/ sucked/ parents had hard time with me coming out/ hated it, homophobic/ 3 1/2 years of hell/ OK except once I came out/ hell: I hated every fucking minute of it/ ostracized, excluded, picked on/ not so good/ couldn’t read till I was 16 so it was very hard/ confusing, chaotic/ Hell. Almost life-threatening/ saved me from home/ bad.

Growing up, respondents experienced a wide array of housing situations, as evidenced by the following chart.

“A gay group home is sorely needed. Foster care sucks if you are gay (homophobic staff/residents).”

Firstly, it is important to note that among those who marked their current housing as “other,” the majority stated that they were currently living by themselves. This contributed to the difficulty in ascertaining the quality of current housing conditions and needs, and adds to the sense of the great diversity of living situations reported.

“…the living conditions at the hotel I stayed at were harsh. Umm…cockroaches everywhere, fuckin’ fridge that wouldn’t work, it had blankets at the bottom just to soak up the water that would leak from god knows where.” (P.J.)

It is significant, however, that 21% of male respondents reported being homeless, and 25% were living in hotel rooms. Young women report mostly living in shared apartments with friends, and 15% of female respondents claim still to be living with their parent(s), even though 69% of young women experienced violence from parents and 58% from family members.

Income was extremely difficult to calculate with any reliability, as a number of respondents gave figures (e.g. $12.00 per year) which made no sense, some said they didn’t know, some said NO income, and others simply said “assistance” or “welfare”. Because we could not know the values for these respondents we excluded their answers from our calculations. On that basis we were left with figures for 15 female and 23 male respondents, or just under 2/3 of those surveyed. The average incomes reported for males were 9,584, with the median being 10,000. The average incomes reported for females were 10,066, with the median income being 7,000 per annum. The female group included 2 very high salaries, which tends to skew the average annual income upward for females. Apart from that anomaly, the overall picture is one in which more males had higher annual incomes than the annual incomes for most females. In both cases, however, almost all these youth are living in poverty.

These last figures highlight the tragic realities which connect these charts. Violence among this population most often stems from those physical and emotional arenas which are traditionally held to be safest: parents (51% claim to have been abused by their parents), family (44%), school (44%), and relationships (36%). For whatever reason, these realities are particularly harsh for the female respondents, as evidenced by the higher percentages (parents: 68%, family: 56%, school: 58%, and relationships: 62%). For all kinds of violence, women reported greater levels than men. Bear in mind also that in this survey more males than females worked the streets, and also that it may be that males are less likely to judge experiences violent, or possibly to acknowledge to themselves or to report to others that they have suffered violent treatment, so it’s not clear to what extent this finding of greater violence may be a result of internalized gender norms of “toughness” (males) vs. “vulnerability” (females).

A pervasive sense of isolation, a need for “community” and a need for better supports and services for QQ youth has been stressed in much of the literature we reviewed, so it was important to ask questions about use of and experiences with the services available to, and in some cases specifically designed for them. In some of the surveys, the sense of isolation many youth feel from any and every support or service is palpable.

Even for those services specified for the LGBT community, the youth who responded to our survey didn’t necessarily feel those services to be “QQ positive”, and this was especially true among minority respondents. Users of the Youth center found it “queer positive”, while those who use aboriginal services, immigrant services, community centers and services, food services and legal aid services overwhelmingly reported that they were not LGBT positive. The most queer-positive places were identified as the LGBT center, community health center, and bars and clubs. Where people found they got the most support was, surprisingly, from service industry locations, such as bars and pubs perhaps because of the lack of authority and subsequent degree of freedom found therein. The following chart presents these findings.

As indicated by our qualitative data gathered from interviews and focus groups, there are serious problems associated with bars and clubs being seen as the most supportive locations for QQ youth. Sexual exploitation and drug/alcohol addiction play a mutually reinforcing role and both predispose youth to street-involvement. In our survey, many respondents indicated the prevalence and nature of drug use in this population: 39/60 used non-prescription drugs, described in their own words as:

Weed & down/ pot/ crystal meth/ mushrooms/ coke and heroin/ morphine/ pot/ weed, hard liquor/ pot/ pot/ alcohol, weed/ pot/ marijuana, mushrooms, acid/ pot, beer/ alcohol, some street drugs/ advil and tylenol / weed/ pot/ drinks/ pot/ dex/ booze, weed mushrooms/ weed, beer meth/ heroin, coke/ weed/ booze,pot/ rock/ meth/ pot,coke/ exheroin, smoke pot/ pot, heroin, booze, coke/ booze, pot/ pot, booze, mushrooms/ booze, coke/ heroin/ beer, pot, mushrooms, PCP/ pot, booze, down, mushroom/ pot, E, crystal/ meth.

Far fewer reported using prescription drugs, and the prescription drugs by far most often used were those prescribed for depression. Drug addiction was very frequently cited as a primary factor in street life, and drug use by their parents as well as by respondents themselves was often cited in stories of trouble at home. One youth indicated graphically the role drug use played in his own inability to communicate with his parents:

“Housing for queer youth should be an essential part of Vancouver street life. In other shelters you are at risk, street life is hard core, tough.” (Tim)

A primary aim of this study was to determine the kinds of housing arrangements that QQ youth would find most conducive to their support, stability and general well-being. So the last section of the survey asked a number of questions about what youth needed, wanted, and would most like to see if dedicated housing were to be designed for them. It is important to be very clear that many differences were apparent in what different groups wanted to see in a future Pridehouse: 80 % of women and 82% of trans respondents vs. 46% of males wanted a community kitchen. More women than men wanted books, internet access, computer access and employment services (77% of women compared with 46% of men); while more men than women wanted queer youth rehab and were far more adamant than women that they did NOT want to be mixed with regular housing a sentiment which echoes the statements of many male ethnographic interviewees.

There was strong agreement on the need for a queer drop in, drug-free house, queer staff, an on-site nurse, a clothing room, and drop in meals. The following chart documents these findings.

The survey indicated a clear need and use for a “Pridehouse”, seen as stabilizing, supportive and accessible housing dedicated to youth who are situated, identified, or positioned, as sexually marginalized. However this study’s central category was problematic for many respondents.

“I think it would be better to have a queer positive place rather than just for queer because you don’t want to single people out because that’s what people are doing to us, you know.” (Janice)

It was agreed that even among street youth, it is stigmatizing and dangerous to self-identify as “queer”, and this is particularly so for young women, for what appear to be largely economic survival reasons. As one young man we met during a midnight Van run told us:

“Queer” sexuality is in complex ways regulated by economics of sexual exploitation and sexual exchange. This may be why we saw relatively fewer women than men declaring themselves to be unequivocally ‘queer’.

“I have yet to meet one [woman] who considered herself lesbian or bisexual while still on the street, yet I’ve met several who have come out after exiting street life” (Sacha, fieldnotes)

Men by contrast were more likely to self-identify as ‘gay’, ‘queer’, ‘two-spirited’, trans, etc. In fact “queer” was interpreted by many people as “really about gay men”.

“A couple of women asked me what does ‘out’ mean? The fact that even the language around being gay or lesbian is foreign to them only further indicates that there is no room for it on the streets” (Sacha, fieldnotes)

“They [women] are prostituted and have sex with men…they have so many other things to deal with it’s unlikely they really get to put any attention to their sexuality.” (Darcie, fieldnotes)

“I feel that her being a queer female [working in the trade for 2 years] is much different than being a queer male. The pressure she has on her all day is so harsh that she has tried to commit suicide 4 times. It’s just the pressure of having to be this stereotypical woman is too much for her. Gay men don’t have that kind of pressure being put on them.” (P.J. fieldnotes)

Despite the complexities of navigating sexual identity categories, almost all respondents spoke of the need for housing designated for queer youth.

“ Most of the people I lived in group homes with were homophobic…I’d have to listen to them make all these gay jokes, and I just wouldn’t say anything…I’d have been the butt of every joke” (Sandra)

Nevertheless, a recurrent stress among respondents was the need for housing that recognized difference within the queer community, and that the category “queer” (including any expanded categories of “LGBT” or “Queer and Questioning”) did NOT refer to a uniform, compatible, integrated “community of difference” but indeed groups whose interests and therefore whose needs for housing would NOT necessarily be easily compatible. First among these was the need (62%) for separate housing for people living with addictions and those seeking to be away from that struggle.

“Life on the streets can be very dangerous for queer/trans youth. Life at ‘home’ can be very scary and very heartbreaking for queer/trans youth. Where can youth who identify as queer or trans feel safe, even if being ‘home’ can be scary? All people need to feel accepted and cared for, and if LGTB youth don’t feel either way, something’s wrong” (Jessie)

Because of the way sexuality creates risk of rejection, the places of greatest support and safety were also the places of greatest harm and danger. Respondents indicated that as children, families were for QQ youth the most frequent source of violence, and schools were frequently hostile (44% of the survey respondents, including 62% of the female portion, reported experiencing violence at school. The streets, bars, and community centers were characterized as being more predatory than protective to the young. A repeated theme was the need for ‘queer’ support beyond and outside of the rave/bar scene. Note that bars/clubs is the highest reported source of support for queer youth. This underscores expressed need for safe and supportive and stable housing in which one’s sexuality could be accepted.

“Around homophobia, there’s a lot of police violence on the streets, cops beating up young women…Sure, some of that has to do with homophobia…” (Service provider)

“I had my legs run over by their bikes after I had fallen asleep on the sidewalk” (Lisa)

Note also that for QQ youth, violence at the hands of the police exceeded for both males and females their experience of violence at the hands of Johns.

“The label I put on myself is I’m a people person. I like boys and girls. But the label society puts on me is that I’m bisexual. And the label everybody else puts on me is that I’m a bisexual drug addict.” (Ben)

Overall, in terms of sexual identification, youth themselves expressed far less concern about their sexuality than their survival, and voiced far less concern with their own sexual identification than with the inability of those around them to treat them with respect and acceptance.

“I don’t believe in labels because they are very degrading, how is anybody different from anybody else? They are all humans, all made up of the same matter…everybody deserves love.” (Tony)

In that way it might be fair to say that a house for QQ youth is less a response to the special needs of a particular group of youth, than to a generalized societal requirement for care, respect and compassion.

“Sexual orientation is sometimes just a practice, not a key part of an identity” (Speedy)

Nevertheless, whatever respondents’ personal views about sexual identification, most youths seemed to agree that, if not specifically housed and protected, queer youth will not be accepted, acknowledged or tolerated.

“I think awareness and publicity, and promotion to generate knowledge about a large, multi-function GLBT youth center/housing space (similar to one in Seattle) is an absolute necessity. There needs to be at least one large community housing space for youth to go who may have been forced to leave home.” (Survey#23)

The last section of the survey concerned wishes, wants and needs for a future Pridehouse. The respondents expressed a widespread desire (67%) to see a community kitchen, including drop in meals, as one of the central features of QQ-dedicated housing. Similarly, respondents expressed the desire for a safe and clean resource, as 58% and 60% chose a drug-free house and on-site nurse, respectively, as desirable features. This illustrates that the sense of community such an initiative would endeavour to create must not overlook the fundamental human necessities of food, health-care and safe shelter.

The population represented in this survey, and in this project as a whole, is often faced with impossible choices between economic stability and emotional or mental well-being, in the case of those involved in the sex trade; between social acceptance and physical or mental health, for those wishing to break free of drug addiction; and between the need for community and the need for privacy, in the case of the majority of respondents who long for a stable social milieu, yet value time alone in a safe environment as a rare and precious commodity. It is the challenge of a future Pridehouse to solve the dilemmas represented in these surveys, by providing basic and rudimentary resources for survival.

At the same time, a majority of respondents felt (57%) that Pridehouse should be staffed with queer social workers, and that it should be kept separate from regular housing (only 36% labeled mixed housing as a desirable feature); these findings suggest that the respondents see the initiative as a source of solidarity for the LGBT youth community. Lastly, respondents felt that Pridehouse should provide services to help integrate youths into the working world: 60% felt that it should provide employment services to its clients. Again, however, the nature of the respondents’ desires for a future Pridehouse, and indeed the general slant of the surveys as a whole, suggest that resources for social, intellectual and professional development must be preceded by the rudimentary materials for survival.

Caveat Surveyors: Some Warnings about the Use of Surveys and Interpretations of Survey ‘Data’.

In interpreting survey data, some general points are in order. First, it seems important to explain that although the research team dedicated a considerable amount of time to rewording questions, deciding on what questions would be most important to ask, trying out the surveys with youth to get their detailed feedback and critique, and bringing those comments and criticisms back to the group, then revising the survey a number of times to arrive at the final version, nevertheless the actual practice of administering a survey to young people living under conditions of hardship and even crisis seemed to many of us to border on the unethical. What good, team members asked, does completing a survey do for these youth? The point of the survey---to collect quantitative data about what youth wanted and needed, as well as to try to get a better, more empirically grounded understanding of who these youth were, what their living conditions were, and the factors which contributed to their present circumstances, seemed “academic” in the worst sense of that term. The position many of us took was that the exercise felt rather exploitative, just another way of reducing the complexity of peoples’ lives and turning that complexity into numbers. Too-simple ‘data’ could make us LOOK like better researchers, when in actuality, in terms of our goals as community-based interventionist researchers, doing surveys made our research praxis WORSE, not better. It took peoples’ time, and gave them little ($20 for helping us pilot the surveys, and giving detailed feedback on them, and $5-$10 for completing the final version.) The research team expressed a clear preference for face-to-face interviews rather than paper and pencil surveys as a research tool.

The problem with surveys is surely compounded because typically survey data are artifacts of the survey itself, in other words, how you design and word the survey produces the so-called “information” you can get from it. In our survey, we saw this in some very specific ways. For example, the survey asked if people would want Pridehouse to be a “drug-free house”, and data show that this was a clear preference. However in interviews it became clear that many people believe that this is an unrealistic and even sometimes oppressive condition to live under, and wanted fewer rules and restrictions for their own “home”. One young man spoke of the need to be allowed to have moderate uses of non-addictive drugs as a “reward” for staying off harder drugs, and as a way to help managing addictions. Even those who were adamant that trying to “kick” while around other users would be impossible, envisaged a house where one floor, but not all floors, would be drug free. People did recognize degrees of drug (ab)use and addiction, and many people clearly felt moderate consumption of non-addictive drugs was certainly no worse than moderate consumption of alcohol. But we did not ask about drug use in any way that permitted them to express their views about degrees or kinds of drug use---nor, interestingly, did we ask whether the house should be alcohol free. So what we produced as a response to drugs at a Pridehouse was in this way an artifact of our own survey, in that it told us more about our survey (specifically its errors and weaknesses) than about the (far more sophisticated and complex) views of the respondents.

Another apparent contradiction our survey produced was about whether homophobia is a barrier to accessing services and support. Because although respondents stated overwhelmingly that there is a real need for dedicated QQ housing, in fact only 10 of the 60 surveyed stated that homophobia is a barrier to their use of services and supports. Taken by itself, that would tend to suggest that dedicated services, including housing specifically for QQ youth, are NOT needed. However when we look in detail at the responses, what we discover leads us to ask whether this question itself has created these contradictory “findings”.

Because, interestingly, this question was NOT answered by 33/60 people. This is the highest number of non-responses in the whole 45-question survey, and even higher than the number of non-responses to the (far more time-consuming) cartoon task question. How do we interpret peoples’ failure to answer the homophobia question? One possibility is that terms like discrimination and homophobia use academic language which is alienating and/or meaningless to many respondents. But interestingly, one young woman who didn’t answer the homophobia question took the trouble to write on the rant page that “foster care sucks when you’re gay” because, she said, of “homophobic staff/residents”. At least in her case, understanding the term itself wasn’t the problem. Another urged that we should use the more “neutral” language of “alternative lifestyle”, and not mention homophobia.

What we need to be able to do, and what we have been able to do because we combined multiple data types and multiple ways of “getting at” youth views and experiences, is to interpret numerical data in greater complexity than is typical of survey data interpretation, and one thing we might caution about a question like this is that people seem reluctant to accept and to state that their sexuality creates barriers for them, even though in many other ways, through words and pictures, through face to face interviews and in their responses to other survey questions about their home, school and street experience, youth are very clear about the many ways that QQ sexuality definitely IS a barrier. So rather than conclude that only 10/60 youth found homophobia to be a barrier, we would suggest, instead, that this question makes people, even LGBT people, far too uncomfortable for them to want to answer, and would, again, warn against an overly literal interpretation of quantitative data, particularly when questions deal with stigmatized identities/practices.

A third example of the limitations of surveys is seen in our question “what would you like to see in a future Pridehouse?” and we listed 14 possible services, from drop in meals and drug rehab to books and video games. Lacking almost all these services, many people, not surprisingly, ticked off everything in sight, and the result you see in the chart is a veritable rainbow flag of different desires, with slight variation in priorities among the groups we distinguished (male/female/trans). Now this response is quite different than responses to other multi-item questions, such as “where did you get support while you were at school”. In one case we are asking about what, in the abstract world of ideals, people would “like to have”; in the school question we were asking about an experience they all did in fact have, so their responses tended to be less “global” (e.g. “I was supported by everyone”) and therefore more significant (e.g. we could see that school counselors on the whole were NOT very helpful to QQ youth, and not more helpful than peers or other adults, or regular teachers, despite the fact that it is explicitly their job to give that kind of support).

So how do we make useful sense out of the Pridehouse services question? One way is simply to see where each group differed in their desires for a future Pridehouse, and, if what people tended to do was to check off everything, then we could perhaps look to see what items people actually chose NOT to tick off. This would tell us what they DIDN’T value. And what they didn’t value, using that criterion, was for males, video games, to be mixed with regular housing, and computers and the internet. For females, they DIDN’T value video games, queer youth rehab, and to be mixed with regular housing. Trans respondents DIDN’T value video games, and a clothing room. Trans and female youth MOST valued a community kitchen, something very low down on the agenda of males, who MOST valued queer staff, and a clothing room. Interestingly, books were very high on the list for women; and complimentary therapies very high on the list for trans respondents. Consistently valued by all three groups was an on-site nurse, and interestingly less valued by women than by men or trans youth was to have queer staff. This of course makes sense given our finding that fewer street involved women than men self-identified as lesbian, for the reasons explained earlier in this report. What we can derive from this question is perhaps simply the need to look at differences within QQ groups, rather than generalize statistically across groups, because we can see that such a generalization would produce living conditions which best suited the dominant group (white gay men) and far less well suited the group numerically under-represented, i.e. trans youth of colour. And indeed this is the pattern identified in Trish Salah’s literature review, and it should make us wary of generalizing from numerically based data sources such as surveys, which invariably “lump together” information about all QQ youth rather than seeking to understand and identify group-specific needs.

Perhaps the most important warning about interpreting these data, however, is the fact that the sample size is so small. Of the 60 respondents, for example, there were only 5 trans youth. Now that number MAY be representative of the proportion of trans youth to street-involved QQ youth of all other categories out of a total pool of 60 people, however it is simply not statistically significant to poll 5 individuals and then produce statistical “outcomes” from such a small set. And indeed 60 respondents is a very small sample for a survey. However what we were about in this study was trying to gather “suggestive” information, to try out a range of methods and see what the powers and the limitations of each method appeared to be, and to see if using multiple methods produced contradictions (in the case of the “drug-free house” and “homophobia” questions, it did, for example), and to see whether we could enrich our information by combining several data sources (as we could e.g. in the case of understanding women’s seeming disvaluing of queer staff, and their apparent under-involvement in street-based life in general, which appeared, from in depth interviews, to be an artifact of the economic determination of sex/gender “options” for young street involved women living in poverty).

So overall, this survey, and indeed all aspects of this research, should be read as richly suggestive, as a place to begin, as a “trial run”, and therefore as a good basis for creating a longer-term, more extensive study of sexuality, street-involvement, and housing needs. And the study as a whole is perhaps best read as indicating a need for more complex, multi-faceted and multi-dimensional research methods, since it does show the many ways in which layering one kind of data on top of another enables more complex, more complete, and indeed more accurate understandings to be developed.

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[1] Of significance here is the definition of ‘youth’, ‘adult’, and ‘senior’ operative in communities of poverty within affluent societies, such as the Downtown East Side within the City of Vancouver. Senior’s services, which can include housing, are available to people as young as 40. “Youth” services extend until aged 30. That makes the adult life of a member of the DTES community just ten years. This is in perspective of a reduced life span, and likely also connected to both relatively weaker intergenerational relations of obligation and accountability, and an apparently higher rate of child/youth sexual exploitation.