The Free To Be Youth Project Continues Providing Hope For Queer Kids

“Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue, and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” (Wizard of Oz)

“Why are there so many songs about rainbows, and what’s on the other side?” (Rainbow Connection)

As I sit here in the middle of Pride, reflecting on the idea of #prideasprotest on yet another gray, dreary day in June, I find myself thinking about how we find, and maintain, joy in times like these. As a kid, rainbows conjured images of treasure, freedom, or someplace or something I could imagine beyond the challenges of day-to-day life. Maybe it was the idea of Dorothy Gale, dreaming beyond a monochromatic world and longing for color. Maybe it was the fact that I came of age in the trifecta of the 1980s that saw the end of the Cold War, the rise of the War on Drugs, and the AIDS crisis creating a multitude of bleakness. Rainbows were a glimmer of hope, joy, and the sliver of a possibility beyond what I could imagine. Even something as simple as watching the prisms that hung from the living room window, creating endless tiny rainbows on the wall, was enough to make me happy.

These last six months, I, like countless others, have spent endless hours running through various trauma-informed self-care approaches to navigate the current dystopian reality. Some days, it feels like navigating in a fugue state, or something absent of color. So it’s only natural that I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about how we, as a community, can carve out space to find and embrace those embers of happiness to help us navigate these dark, stormy days.   

I’m the director of Free to Be Youth Project (FYP), a very tiny project in New York City that provides direct legal support and advocacy to at-risk, street-involved, and unhoused LGBTQ+ youth throughout the city. Our program addresses the personal dignity and life-threatening vulnerability that runaway and homeless LGBTQ+ youth experience on the streets. Our clients are disproportionately People of Color, immigrants, mental health consumers, people who are involved in criminalized street economies, and/or who are HIV-positive. Here in New York City, as in other parts of the country, transgender and queer youth are having their very existence questioned – and in some instances erased – by the ban on gender-affirming care, the challenge in securing documents that reflect their gender identity, and the gestapo-like immigration policies and practices. The fear is so pervasive that many young people have all but gone deeply underground for fear that while walking the streets, they will be picked up by ICE or subjected to harassment, derision, or other acts of violence. 

And that’s just the community I serve here in this big metropolis. To say that all queer or trans youth are living in difficult circumstances doesn’t sufficiently capture the daily minefield of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric, legislation, and litigation that young people are forced to endure in big and small cities, suburbs, and rural communities. 

It doesn’t speak to the more than 936 anti-LGBTQ+ bills in the U.S., the half a dozen executive orders targeting LGBTQ+ youth (currently being challenged by more than 30 lawsuits), or the defunding of a suicide hotline for LGBTQ+ youth (despite statistics that say that almost 40% of queer and trans youth considered attempting suicide in the past year). It doesn’t speak to the climate and culture that young people are navigating in their schools, jobs, businesses, and public and private spaces. 

We know all too well how discrimination, fear, and lack of support make LGBTQ+ youth uniquely vulnerable to homelessness and how LGBTQ+ youth experiencing homelessness are more likely to report severe mental health issues compared to their cisgender, heterosexual peers. 

It should come as no surprise that young people have increasingly reported feeling fear, anxiety, and depression in these last six months. Yet, there seems to be little discussion of how young people are coping or engaging in self-care during this difficult time. For many, the solace or respite might come from being in queer youth spaces-those oases that provide a safe haven within the community.

Last fall, I found myself in one such oasis. The Oasis Center in Nashville, Tennessee is the only LGBTQ+ youth intervention center in a state that has been ground zero for the litigation surrounding the ban on gender-affirming care, struggling with book bans, drag ban challenges, and other forms of censorship. While there, I realized that with so much information, community, and collective action being systemically removed, young people – like those who come to FYP’s door and those in more rural settings – may not know where to find such a space when they need it the most. It was then that we decided to build the Rainbow Line, a bridge between rural and urban queer advocacy. A way to create a feeling of safety and solidarity between queer communities and embrace collective joy as a form of resistance.

The Rainbow Line initiative connects our work in New York City with Southern LGBTQ+ community centers. In our launch, we sent gender-affirming care packages including makeup, toiletries, queer and BIPOC literature (aka banned books like Heartstopper, Aristotle and Dante, and Out of Darkness), and self-care resources to local community partners. The stories we sent – tales of identity, love, and community – were both a response to the isolation and anxiety so many were feeling, as well as a chance to help them imagine something brighter. We launched this initiative by sending more than thirty packages to youth in Nashville, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. The clients in those spaces shared how meaningful it was to receive items that reflected their identities. They even reimagined the kits as a “shop,” selecting their own items and making the experience joyful, collaborative, and empowering.

We were so eager to build on our success that we began looking for partners in other southern communities. We found another oasis in Alabama. In the past year, they saw an almost 40% increase in homelessness, and we know from experience that nationally, LGBTQ youth already have a 120% higher risk of experiencing homelessness. Moreover, a growing number of LGBTQ+ youth in Alabama are experiencing mental health challenges, with 72% reporting symptoms of anxiety and 56% reporting symptoms of depression. This month, the Rainbow Line comes to Alabama, as we send books, art supplies, cosmetics, and self-care resources to two centers that provide support and resources to LGBTQ+ youth. We have plans to continue bringing rainbows to Kentucky this fall. The Rainbow Line is more than simply the sharing of resources; it’s the starting block of building a community as we plan to roll out a monthly virtual book club and interactive Goodreads discussion boards – formats that we intend to make accessible to allow all young people, regardless of location, to participate. One of the bright moments we discovered in launching this initiative was the positive response we received to our requests for support from authors, publishers, vendors, artisans, and companies. So many have expressed joy in sharing resources and understanding the impact it has on queer youth in need.  You can tangibly assist our efforts by sharing information about the partnership, sponsoring care packages, or getting involved with the virtual book club. 

It might seem strange for a small legal services project in the largest city in the U.S. to create an interstate collective action of banned books, makeup, and legal information across state lines. But in many respects, we were building on our belief in the collective power of community and in how much joy can come from being in those spaces. We wanted to create such spaces across boundaries, spaces that are for people regardless of whether they’re living in rural or urban settings. We hope to build a relationship between all of our respective communities, with a mindfulness toward what we imagine some of the challenges might be for those navigating a different terrain from those of us in large cities. In my mind, that’s where that prism of light starts to form, where it gives us all the chance to learn from one another, understand our differences, celebrate our similarities, and empower every one of us.

Our most powerful weapon is knowing that we can, and will, continue to engage in acts that meaningfully help individuals even when systems seem broken. Even though their victories may seem small in the course of things, they are powerful grains of hope to help us ride the current wave of despair. These are the very prisms of rainbows that filled my heart in my youth, the light that we can cast against the shadows.