Only 25 percent use condoms consistently. Sixty-nine percent of them have had sex with someone they met through these apps. They have failed to protect minors, who simply have to subtract a few years from their birth date to create a profile.ĭata from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a new study in The Journal of Adolescent Health together suggest that roughly one in four gay and bisexual boys aged 14 to 17 in the United States are on gay hookup apps designed for adults (Grindr, Scruff, Jack’d, Adam4Adam). But most online social networks for gay men are geared toward adults and focused on sex. It’s normal for these kids to want to explore intimacy. It’s common for gay, bisexual or questioning minors to go online to meet other gay people. The victim’s father broke down in court, saying, “The man sitting here, he destroyed my life, my kid’s life, my family life.” Gross on the gay hookup app Grindr and that they had met for sex before. positive, in a nearby backyard.Īuthorities later learned that the teenager had met Mr. A police officer apprehended Eugene Gross, who was 51 years old and H.I.V. He yelled that a man had broken into the house and raped him. “If you’re going to be pouring resources and passing bills around this I think important to know that this is another part of the population that needs to have their needs met and served,” she says.Last summer in Wisconsin, a mother came home to find her 15-year-old son running up the stairs from their basement. Already the House of Representatives has sent a number of bills on the issue to the Senate, although the legislation tends not to address the needs of homeless and LGBT youths. The report comes as Congress is looking at human trafficking as a rare issue of bipartisan agreement. Almost half of the participants were male, and the report includes insight into the experiences of trans males, which according to Dank is unprecedented. About 30% lived in either a friend or family member’s home or in their own apartment, often giving the money they made in the sex trade to families members in need. “They’re seeing the same things amongst the young people that they are working with, particularly with LGBT youth.”įifty-eight percent of the young people interviewed in the study lived either in a shelter or on the streets. “Having had many conversations with people who work with this population in California, Florida, the Midwest, the Northwest,” she says. According to some estimates, as many as 40% of homeless youths are LGBT.Įven though the report focuses on New York City, Dank stressed that it is not “the place where all gay kids go to engage in survival sex.” The Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that a total of 578,424 people were homeless on a given night in 2014-about 10% were between the ages of 18 and 24. In 2014, the Department of Education reported that 1.3 million school children are homeless. The exact number of homeless youth is hard to pin down. You put your pride to the side, you throw everything out the window and you forget who you are and you forget what you’re doing and you learn to be someone else.” Just try to think about something else.”Īnother 19-year-old gay Latino said he felt he had no choice: “If you have no food in your stomach, if you have no transportation, but you have a man in your face willing to give you money for a half hour. like it was just like he grabbed me by like my waist and he just started doing it. One 20-year-old straight male described his experience: “He asked me like do you really need the money? At that moment I thought I did. Many of the stories detailed in the report are telling and a great deal of those who engaged in the work didn’t identify as gay-but they found themselves selling their bodies to people of the same sex in order to survive.
“And if we were really going to be able to serve the needs of these young people we needed to know exactly what their experiences were and the large breadth of their experiences.”
“I realized at that point that there was so much that we didn’t know about this population,” she tells TIME. Meredith Dank, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute and lead author of the study, said she realized during earlier research on sex work that there was not enough good information about why LGBT youths made these decisions, so the study focused on letting them tell their own stories.