This article was originally published in the Spirit of Jefferson Aug 2, 2023
This year’s Eastern Panhandle Pride celebration in Martinsburg on June 17 brought together an overflow crowd of well wishers and 77 vendors and nonprofit organizations. There was music, dancing, food and color everywhere. Painted cheeks, dyed hair, creative costuming, glitter. Queen Street in the city’s downtown sparkled.
All of this is to be expected from Pride events, but what was unusual for me personally was seeing how many groups were focused on helping the people most impacted by homophobia and transphobia. These are young people falling between the ages of 12 and 18, LGBTQIA+ or “queer” youth.
I spoke with three of these nonprofits that have local programs that include queer youth: the Eastern Panhandle Youth Alliance, the Eastern Panhandle Empowerment Center and the Court Appointed Special Advocates for Children, also known by its abbreviation CASA. None of these youth programs targeting queer youth existed five years ago, so why now?
One answer might be that more kids are willing to “come out” as gay earlier, as they’re made aware they’re not alone in their feelings, that there are other people like them and that there’s a community that will embrace them.
Even so, many queer kids can still have a rough road ahead. They can be unhappy and even depressed when they face blow back, especially from their peers or their families. I heard this from many of the people running queer youth programs.
It’s legitimate to question where that unhappiness stems from. Is it the case that a queer teen is unhappy because of their gender and sexual orientation, or is it that they’re made unhappy by the negative treatment they receive?
From my perspective as a gay man, it’s a question that has to be answered by looking at how they are loved, affirmed and supported. Do people acknowledge and respect them for who they are, or do they regard them as damaged or misguided—as youth who are making bad life choices?
Season Jones recognized the troubles facing queer teens from her experience as a volunteer with the PASS program in Berkeley County high schools and middle schools. PASS matches a student one-on-one with a volunteer who can provide “academic and student support.” Jones saw increasingly more students “pushing against binary gender identification,” a term that restricts the meaning of “gender” to only two possibilities: male and female.
Some of these students, she recognized, were in a questioning state, recognizing their own unease with either their sexual orientation or their gender identity or both. Many of these kids, especially those who declare themselves non-binary, had experienced name calling, bullying and threats.
The word “non-binary” is a coverall term implying that gender doesn’t come in just two flavors, male and female, that people can feel uncertain of where they fit and can adopt behaviors that don’t clearly fit the norms of either category. It can also mean that someone entirely rejects the notion that they belong to either category. That they’re something else: two-spirit, gender fluid, gender queer. Transgender individuals may also identify as non-binary.
In 2019, Jones set up a volunteer supported “safe space” for these kids to get together regularly and socialize. The group, the Eastern Panhandle Youth Alliance, attracted a steady membership of 12- to 18-year-olds, currently numbering 25 members and approximately the same number of adult volunteers. The alliance’s members for the most part consist of teens identifying as non-binary or transgender, smaller numbers as gay or lesbian. This breakdown in the membership is likely due to non-binary and transgender young people being currently the targets of religious and political conservatives.
The twice-monthly get-togethers of the alliance have become times during which its members can affirm each other in their choice of pronouns and in how they choose to present themselves. Importantly, the meetings have also become incubators for social, political and educational involvement with the wider community. For instance, Youth Alliance works in collaboration with the social outreach ministry of the Shepherdstown Presbyterian Church, whose social justice committee takes on projects to extend equality to marginalized groups, including queer individuals.
By the time the teens in the Youth Alliance program are required to leave the program at 18, many are better prepared and more confident to take the next steps in their lives, Jones said. The teens may also find their way into university life, which often has its own queer student social and assistance organizations.
Another local program sponsored by CASA of the Eastern Panhandle, an organization that represents and assists foster-care youth involved in the family court system through no fault of their own. Called Fostering Futures, the CASA program helps prepare young adults to navigate through the next phases of their lives. Cari Lefeber, CASA’s director of programs, described Fostering Futures and its associated annual Youth Leadership Summit run in association with Shepherd University.
Fostering Futures programs prepare teens in financial literacy matters, social and emotional wellness issues, obtaining licenses and identification documents, and other matters for making a successful transition to adulthood. They include an annual Brené Brown workshop to address questions of shaming that Lefeber said affects the majority of kids CASA provides for.
Most fostered kids feel a sense of shame about what caused them to be separated from their parents and family, even though the violence and neglect that caused the separation typically involve a lack of parental understanding or caring.
These CASA kids, by the way, are not all queer. The majority are not. CASA’s mandate is to provide advocates for all children and teens brought before the judicial system, because of some circumstance that makes it necessary for a judge to decide to remove them from their parents and put them into foster care.
For queer kids, a CASA advocate will negotiate with a family court judge and Child Protective Services to find a foster home and a volunteer advocate that are supportive and respectful of the kid’s gender and sexual identity. The child and the advocate will continue to work together for as long as the child stays in the system.
However, Lefeber said kids who identify as queer don’t often “out themselves” to the judicial system. She supposes this may be because they’re reluctant to reveal details of their identity to a court or to the strangers who will become their foster parents. These kids will often come with the personal experience of bullying and hate messaging on social media, behaviors that will make them leery of opening up.
It’s this reality of hate messaging that is the focus of a new program of the Eastern Panhandle Empowerment Center (formerly the Shenandoah Women’s Center) that has traditionally served abused, battered and trafficked women. Founded in 1977, the nonprofit agency has expanded its mission to encompass the underlying cause of much violence and hate crimes against women and others. It was recently funded by a national group, Future Without Violence, for a three-year period.
Keith Pollard, hired as the center’s hate crime victim advocate, will organize and oversee the program. Pollard talked about whether bullying of queer youth and adults rises to the level of a crime. He said it may or may not, because a lot of hate is tolerated by the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. You can recognize it as hate speech when it leads to physical or emotional violence, Pollard said. This often happens when hate speech is directed at queer youth during their formative teen years, he said. For those targeted by hate speech, it can lead to truancy, self-harming and suicidal thoughts.
Pollard has a history of providing services for queer clients in the District of Columbia, including young people who have been “pushed out” of their families and who end up on the street, homeless, drug addicted and in sex work. When hate speech and bullying toward queer kids is ignored by families and schools, Pollard said, it makes it difficult to identify and advocate for those kids before they end up in the criminal justice system or in social services.
EPEC will focus on educational objectives and advocacy, Pollard said.
The EPEC Hate Crime Victim program has set up a helpline for victims where advocates can direct them to programs and, if needed, take an individual on as a long-term client. The resource network, which will be Pollard’s responsibility to organize, will include independent therapists and counselors, medical professionals and attorneys, as well as established organizations such as the ACLU, Legal Aid of West Virginia, Fairness West Virginia and the NAACP. Together they will comprise an LGBTQ Task Force to “help ensure that LGBT-inclusive spaces, policies and practices are present and accessible in our community and schools.”
In my view, the ultimate acceptance of queer youth and queer adults by society may not come about soon. The gender and sexual norms of American society are strong and deeply embedded. They will have to be challenged to accommodate people who don’t fit into traditional male and female roles. Psychologists recognize that it’s not being different that causes social and psychological problems in queer people. It’s society not being accepting of differences that does.