New Report Offers A Look At ‘Survival Sex’ And The LGBTQ Youth Who Are Turning To It

After his grandmother kicked him out into the cold, someone offered the 19-year-old a warm bed for the weekend. All the guy wanted in exchange for his hospitality was sex. “At first I didn’t want to,” said the homeless teenager. “But I didn’t want to stay in the streets.”

As another 19-year-old put it, “It’s not as bad as sleeping under the bridge.”

A detailed new study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youth in New York City, released Wednesday by the nonprofit Urban Institute, sheds light on “survival sex,” or trading sex for cash or shelter. The practice is common among teenagers and young adults who, the report finds, have few other “viable means for meeting their basic needs.”

The problem, he said, is that you can’t rely on survival sex. One night last week, when the temperature dropped well below freezing, Jonathan ended up in the hospital with frostbite. A shelter had turned him away, saying there were no available beds. “I felt like I was in no-man’s land,” Jonathan said.

Dank, the Urban Institute researcher, hopes the study will help the LGBTQ movement realize that it has focused too little funding on youth. “We know what’s driving people into survival sex,” she said, “but if we don’t have the right holistic social safety network there, which requires lots of resources and money and people trained to help these young people, then we’re not going to be able to stem that tide of young people left out in the cold.”

The Huffington Post