In June 2013, the Williams Institute—a national think tank based at the University of California Los Angeles ( UCLA ) School of Law— released a groundbreaking study that examined poverty in the LGBT community, comparing their rates and patterns to those of heterosexual people nationwide.
The results were sobering and, according to the study, would "debunk the persistent stereotype of the affluent gay man or lesbian." Among its key findings, LGBT people were more vulnerable to poverty and more likely to be receiving cash assistance and food stamps. After surveying homeless agencies across the United States, the authors estimated that approximately 40 percent of homeless or at-risk youth accessing their services were LGBT. "While we had no population based data with which to estimate poverty rates among transgender people, we noted surveys that showed very low incomes," the study concluded.
Two years earlier, The National Transgender Discrimination Survey report entitled "Injustice at Every Turn" determined that transgender people lived in "extreme poverty" and were "nearly four times more likely to have a household income of less than $10,000/ year compared to the general population."
For Chicago House Chief Executive Officer Rev. Stan J. Sloan, the statistics contained in those reports are burned into his mind along with how much attention they initially received and how, suddenly, people stopped talking about it. "Nobody was jumping in. There was radio silence," he recalled to Windy City Times.
After Chicago House opened the TransLife Center in 2013, the images and stories of its clients alongside those of the many destitute, homeless and HIV ravaged LGB individuals and families the organization has supported since 1985 set Sloan on a deeply personal and impassioned mission to end the horrific devastation of poverty and economic disparity in Chicago's LGBTQ community and nationwide.
"The LGBT community has made more progress in less time than any civil rights movement in the history of the United States," Sloan said. "But we've done so at a price. We told Congress and the business community that we're wealthy and that they need to pay attention to us because we have power and influence. But we started thinking that that's who we are as a community when, in reality, if you're LGBTQ, you're almost twice as likely to live in poverty. While, for the most part, white gay men continue to make great strides forward relative to income levels, we're not doing an adequate job of bringing our brothers and sisters along with us."
The subject that Sloan believes "very few people ever talk about" will thus be the central and critical topic at the Chicago House Sixth Annual Speaker Series to be held on October 15 in the Chicago Hilton's Grand Ballroom.
Former LGBT liaison to the White House Gautam Raghavan will moderate a panel featuring Emmy-nominated transgender actor and activist Laverne Cox; the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Milk and activist Dustin Lance Black; and Jason Collins, the first openly gay player in the National Basketball Association. Together, they will focus upon the roles of gender, race and the myriad of intervening factors that contribute to LGBTQ poverty.
Sloan wants the event to serve as a launching pad for a revolutionary campaign that Chicago House is currently masterminding alongside the country's most prolific and innovative national advocacy organizations.
"The luncheon has taken the place of a black-tie event in that speakers talk about the issues that Chicago House clients face so people can actually learn about our mission," Sloan said.
To that end and since its inception, the speaker series has featured former President Bill Clinton as well as former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and, in 2013, Hillary Rodham Clinton. "We were founded on the issues of HIV/AIDS, poverty and those issues affecting the LGBTQ community," Sloan said. "We need our speakers to be well-versed in the intersection of all three."
"Nobody talks about the greater umbrella of poverty," he added. "We just talk about pieces of it; safe schools, homeless youth or elders and the struggles of the transgender community. Poverty hurts whether you're white and gay or black and trans*. On October 15, we will start talking about it in ways that make us all want to start contributing and helping people out. Our hope is that, through this discussion, people start thinking about the fact that we can be doing better in taking care of one another."
A video to be shown at the event will feature two of the people whose lives Chicago House has helped to turn around. "It's really difficult for the trans* youth out here today," The Trans Life Center's Danielle Love says in the piece. "You're forced to resort to doing things to survive that nobody would ever imagine."
"Being poor in America is painful," Sloan adds in the video. "Being poor and invisible is even more painful. Our LGBTQ brothers and sister living in poverty are both poor and invisible."
With the tremendous leaps forward that have been made in the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDs and with nationwide marriage equality on the horizon, Sloan told Windy City Times that he believes the time has come to unify as a community in order to engage and defeat the poverty within it through an uncompromising, unrelenting, head-on attack.
"We are at a tipping point," he said. "Either we stay together and we start looking out for each other or we assimilate and vanish. The time has come for LGBTQ solidarity in taking care of those less fortunate in our community."
