Trans folks: Entertainment or human beings worthy of support? – Los Angeles Blade
Editor’s Note: This story contains details about teenage suicidal ideation and suicide attempts. If you feel hopeless or helpless, please dial 988 or call the Rainbow Youth Project at (317) 349–4073. 24/7.
By James Finn | DETROIT – It’s the middle of night, and Brandon’s heart pounds as he Facetimes a 16-year-old boy with a noose around his neck. The boy is crying. He says he’s going to hang himself RIGHT NOW because he can’t stand the hate he’s getting for being LGBTQ.
Thirty-six-year-old crisis counselor Brandon reaches deep into his experience and professional training to center himself. He slowly, gently, calmly talks the boy down. Brandon is not alone.
Hundreds of miles away, Lance sits up in bed, awakened by a SIP (suicide in progress) alert. He follows along as case manager Kristen, an RN with decades of experience as a rape-crisis counselor, marshals Rainbow Youth Project resources to keep that Texas boy alive.
Soon, an entire crisis team has the boy’s back. Brandon and Kristen are in Indianapolis, Lance is God knows where, traveling as he constantly does on Rainbow Youth business. Now, crisis experts in Texas are getting involved too. Brandon stays on the phone for a couple hours, until the boy is out of immediate danger.
That’s only the beginning of Rainbow Youth services
Within a day, Kristin has arranged for intensive, daily counseling with an LGBTQ-experienced child psychologist, and a Rainbow Youth lawyer has obtained signed parental consent for treatment. Lance has arranged to pay for it all at steeply discounted rates.
Today, the boy is stable and improving.
He’s down from five days of therapy a week to two, and he no longer feels so alone and rejected. Rainbow Youth volunteers check in with him every day just to say hi. They send him cards and little gifts to show him they care. They’re helping him build a friend network in his own community.
And Brandon?
That wasn’t his only crisis call that night. Tonight, the very night you’re reading this story, he’ll probably get at least one call like it, and a SIP alert will once again jar Lance and other Rainbow Youth principals out of dreams.
Meet the Rainbow Youth Project
Over the last few months, Lance, a retired gay business executive, has become a friend of mine. He and most other Rainbow Youth founders share something important with me. We each tried to commit suicide as teenagers because of our LGBTQ identity.
If you follow my columns in Prism & Pen or the Los Angeles Blade, you might have read my interviews with trans and gay teenagers Rainbow Youth have helped out of extreme crisis.
Today, I’m writing about Rainbow Youth itself, to introduce a remarkable, fairly new organization too few people know about.
Meet Lance, founder and driving force
On the phone yesterday, I ask Lance how it all started. “You retired fairly young. What moved you to spend your time helping LGBTQ kids at risk?”
I’m thinking he’s a fit, handsome man who looks like he’d focus more on gay circuit parties than volunteer work.
He tells me how he became active on social media after he retired, meeting queer people from different backgrounds, learning about social problems few people know about. He tells me the ball started rolling after he began funneling some of his own money “into LGBTQ people with legitimate need.”
Then came the the epiphany.
Sitting in an Uber one day, he read a “really hateful message” in reply to a mom struggling to find help for her transgender son. “What the fuck!” shouted Lance, so loud the Uber driver looked ready to kick him out of his car.
“So I DM’ed with her,” Lance tells me. “If nobody else would help that mom, I would.”
“But helping one mom wasn’t enough,” he says. “At 2:30 am, I called friends and said ‘we have to do this.’ Within a week, we were registered and put boots to pavement.”
Rainbow Youth Project came into existence then and there, born (symbolically) in the back seat of a cab.
Lance tells me, “We aired commercials in our target areas, like Texas and Florida, and we networked through the community, gay bars, restaurants, etc. Teachers across the country helped out by spreading the word. Within 13 days of our founding, we were paying for the mental healthcare of 13 kids who had fallen through the cracks.”
Meet Kristen, a no-nonsense nurse
She’s one of the first professionals the new organization recruited with a series of ads in Indianapolis, chosen as headquarters because of its heartland location.
On the phone, Kristen strikes me as a “best friend” and “worst enemy” type, hard-boiled but all in fierce advocacy for her patients.
“I’m involved with every significant call,” she tells me, “from DMs on TikTok to other social media. People call in by phone too. My primary focus is on follow-ups. For teens in acute crisis, I decide on next steps depending on what psychologists recommend.”
She adds, “I sometimes make young people mad by asking for welfare checks [from local authorities].” By the end of our conversation, I understand Kristen isn’t one to let “mad” get in the way of keeping her patients alive and healthy.
Her schedule is crazy and emotionally exhausting.
“The majority of our contacts come in midnight to 4:30 am. After each contact, which could last an hour to three hours, we’re required to take a 30-minute break and debrief with another professional. I work in the office and remotely. It’s a 24/7 commitment.”
Oh, and did I mention she’s a volunteer? She and Brandon both have “day” jobs, as do all Rainbow Youth crisis counselors and case managers.
Kristen says she doesn’t need money: “There’s no bigger paycheck than watching a young person go through crisis and come out OK, a better person who loves themself.”
Meet Brandon, a young gay professional on a mission
Brandon and other counselors like him are the Rainbow Youth front line. They receive extensive training and background checks, all for the “privilege” of donating their time to teens who have nobody else to turn to.
Like Kristin, Brandon splits his time between home and the Rainbow Youth office. The entire founder team comes in at least once a month, usually more often. Lance often flies in to make sure he gets personal time with the staff, to make sure they’re okay.
Brandon says he’s fine, and he sounds cheerful and focused, but his job sounds super tough, more than I could probably handle. “We talk them off the ledge, literally,” he tells me. It takes me a minute to realize he means he does that every day.
He says call volumes are crazy, most of them from states that have passed anti-trans laws. He names Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Idaho, adding that Arizona calls are picking up now. Texas is especially bad, because the state is conducting “child abuse” investigations of the parents of trans teens.
That scares kids to death, more than I appreciated before talking to Brandon.
He says clinicians in anti-trans states are scared too, often afraid of counseling trans teens. “I just ran into that this morning with a [suicidal] client in Alabama,” whose therapist dropped him out of fear of legal trouble. Brandon adds, “Sometimes clinicians are afraid of treating gay teens too, in case they begin to ID as trans.”
I’m shocked when Kristen reminds Brandon they have four cis/straight teens on their caseload, kids bullied and traumatized because their parents are gay or trans, kids who feel alone and helpless because of intense and growing anti-LGBTQ sentiment.
Brandon tells me about a straight kid he counseled who didn’t bring photos of his summer vacation to his Florida classroom as part of a required assignment. He got ridiculed by classmates, and when he told his teacher he didn’t do the assignment because his parents are a same-sex couple, she excused him. But she didn’t tell the class why. She’s probably afraid of the state’s “Don’t Say Gay” law.
That cisgender, straight boy now feels ashamed and stigmatized. He called Rainbow Youth because he didn’t know where else to turn.
Brandon tells me about a funeral Rainbow Youth recently paid for, for a 16-year-old boy in Texas Brandon was not able to talk down. His voice turns hard as steel, and I know for sure I’d never be able to do his job.
I wish I could introduce you to the rest of the team
There’s the super-serious, super-careful D.C. attorney who won’t do phone interviews because he’s afraid of making a misstatement that could do harm. There’s the trans man who works as a long-haul trucker and has a big TikTok following. There are well-heeled gay business executives, Lance’s friends and peers, who help him keep operations afloat with cold hard cash. There are the dedicated volunteers who jet around the country to help clients with practical matters like living arrangements or talking to parents.
I interviewed a trans girl once whose mother kicked her out of the house. Within 24 hours, one of those volunteers flew over a thousand miles to get the girl accepted into a halfway house where she’d be safe.
There are the major trans players on TikTok forming an advisory committee to spread the word about Rainbow Youth and help staff understand trans issues on a deep, personal level.
I can’t introduce you to most Rainbow Youth principals, because they’re not safe
They’ve received bomb threats and death threats, which are getting worse as time passes. The FBI reached out to Lance to warn him to keep a low profile at Pride events last summer. He didn’t, but FBI warnings about “credible threats of violence” have him on edge.
That super-careful lawyer I wrote about went to pains to make sure I knew not to print Brandon’s and Kristen’s last names — out of fear for their safety.
He’s not imagining things. Kristen was creeped out recently when she left the office to find that somebody had zipped-tied her car-door handles shut. She’s certain that was not a random prank.
I could describe some of RYP’s clever security precautions, but of course I won’t.
Meet Rainbow Youth’s major challenge
“Rainbow Youth is small,” Lance tells me. “We are not GLAAD or Lambda, but if we can render help, we do it. Youth, adult, whatever. We legally advocated for an adult trans person in Arkansas denied SPAP. We fought for them, and even bought them groceries.”
As a matter of fact, Rainbow Youth are gearing up right now to distribute winter clothing and blankets to LGBTQ homeless.
Staff are asking themselves, “How do we grow? How do we scale up? How do we stay focused on direct services and intense, personal, ongoing support?”
Lance probably doesn’t want me to mention this, but I know he’s digging deep into his own pockets each month to cover expenses that fundraising isn’t meeting. I could tell you how much he’s spent since founding Rainbow Youth, but I don’t want to embarrass him, and I agree with him that singing his own praises would be counterproductive.
“So,” I ask him, thinking about these challenges. “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”
“We talk about expanding in a sort of PFLAG way,” he says, meaning semi-independent local chapters all over the country. “We want young people to have a place to turn where they live.”
His tone shifts. Big time. He’s so excited about that vision. I can FEEL his dream, one I know Kristen, Brandon, and EVERYONE I’ve spoken to shares. Their vision is SO necessary.
LGBTQ people in the United States are facing a crisis
We’ve become political punching bags and many of us are suffering, especially our youth, who are dying of suicide at scary, increasing rates. The Rainbow Youth Project is a spontaneous, organic, frontline response to that crisis.
The Rainbow Youth Project are trans people, gay people, bisexual people, mental health professionals, and plain ordinary folks with a passion to spread love.
@rainbowyouthproject @chris sederburg @LennyZenith @Tee Mauter @Taylor Rey @Jakob Loven / Doctor Reaper #transhealthcare #trans #translivesmatter #nonbinary #pansexual #lgbtq #lgbt #protecttransyouth ♬ original sound – RainbowYouthProject
Want to help them grow? Want to volunteer your time or services? Want to learn how to donate? Want to offer them moral support or encouragement? Do you need services? Are you an LGBTQ teen who feels helpless or hopeless?
Give Rainbow Youth a call. They may be struggling to grow, but so far they’ve never turned down a queer kid in need.
Here’s a link to Rainbow Youth’s website if you need help, or if you can be part of that help, here’s where to start.
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James Finn is a columnist for the LA Blade, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, an alumnus of Queer Nation and Act Up NY, and an “agented” but unpublished novelist. Send questions, comments, and story ideas to [email protected]
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The preceding article was previously published by Prism & Pen– Amplifying LGBTQ voices through the art of storytelling and is republished by permission.