The first time I met a homeless person was when i was  employed as a bellhop in Colorado. Kurt, as we’ll call him, also worked as a bellhop, but he lived in a tent in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. I never understood how Kurt managed to dress for work each day in a clean white shirt and pressed dark trousers. Did his tent come equipped with an ironing board?

Unlike Kurt, I was never without a solid roof over my head because there was always the option of getting a roommate to help pay the rent. That’s ‘roommate’ as in one roommate, not several roommates (like four or five), which is generally the case today. Housing was considerably cheaper in the 1970s; almost anyone could afford an efficiency apartment or a room for rent. The most memorable rooming houses and roommate situations in my life at that time included:

1. A Baltimore rooming house on the wrong side of the tracks. The elderly woman landlord didn’t mind that the place reeked of food cooked on hot plates. She permitted an old man to live inside the fire escape exit. Great life experiences for a 20 year old.
2. A Cambridge apartment with a guy studying to be a makeup man for the funeral home industry. His nights were spent studying makeup design patterns for different types of dead people.
3. A room in a ritzy Boston South End townhouse with a bearded guru-type who spent his free time inside intoxicating swirls of hashish, kief and marijuana smoke. One day (when he was not stoned) he left a letter on my typewriter that stated, “It would be best if you found another place to live. I will give you 2 weeks.”
4. A basement room in the home of a Boulder, Colo., lady where snakes from her garden would often wind up in my bed.

In those days, so-called homeless people were hidden away from the eyes of society. They might be bums on Skid Row or Carl Sandburg-types who rode the rails for a while before going on to write about the experience. Others were committed hobos with no future. Institutionalized homelessness, or the sight of ten people on a sidewalk holding cardboard signs, did not exist.

Cheap rooming houses, as mentioned, were plentiful. In those days, The Philadelphia Inquirer published long lists of rooms for rent at reasonable rates. When I left home voluntarily at 19 because of internal family disagreements, I rented an attic room in nearby Paoli. While I still visited my family once a week for Sunday dinner, I was learning fast that in life you cannot get away from “people problems.” As one great French writer put it, “Hell is other people.”

In that Paoli room, for instance, I had to deal with an elderly landlady who took great pleasure in going through my bureau drawers, reading my personal mail and journal while I was at work. When I would invite a friend over, she’d shout to me from the bottom of the stairs, “It’s time for your friend to go.” No matter what my living situation had been like at home, my mother had never said this to me.

I’m bringing up homelessness because I recently read articles on Philly.com and G-Philly about old sofas being placed on Philly streets for homeless LGBT youth. I wondered why the sofas weren’t dedicated to all the homeless, since all homeless people have the same needs. Why single out youth and sexual orientation as a qualifier? I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the explanation that the street sofas are supposed to represent the peculiar situation of homeless kids who are gay, namely that when they are kicked out of their homes by their families, they often crash at friends’ house and sleep on sofas.

According to Philly.com, “In Philadelphia, about 40 percent of homeless youths are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transsexual, studies say. National statistics mirror that — and show more than 40 percent ran away or were forced out of their homes because their families could not accept their sexual orientation or identity.”

I think that most kind-hearted humanitarian-types would agree that parents who kick their underage kids to the curb because of sexual orientation need to be charged with some form of child abuse. On the other hand, what about those kids who come out to their families when they know that they will be kicked out of the house once they do? Life on the street is deadly. Life on the street changes people. Is it better for kids in this situation to take the “I’m going to lay low and not announce anything until I am ready to go out into the world” approach? I’m talking about finishing school, getting a job and finding a place to live before presenting Mom and Dad with the truth. After all, the universal movement for equality should not require underage martyrs.

Consider the life choices for underage martyrs of equality: an overcrowded homeless shelter; an illegal tent under I-95 (as opposed to a legal tent at the foot of the Rocky Mountains); begging for money with a paper cup under the El; teaming up with other homeless kids in West Philly and then begging for money with the group’s dogs in front of a posh Center City restaurant.

Life on the street is also not kind to one’s physical health: one can develop cold sores and blisters in winter; tooth decay is a given (no toothpaste or dental floss available); body odor, fleas and bedbugs; and let’s not forget major sunburn in summer.

When I was in high school nobody ever came out as gay. People were rumored to be gay but the actual label was never mentioned as a self-affirming badge. ‘Fairy’ and ‘homo’ were the big words then. ‘So and so is a fairy,” people would say. “Your Uncle Harry is really a big fairy but you wouldn’t know it with those construction boots he’s always wearing.”

I grew up thinking of fairies as winged creatures out of a Disney cartoon: Tinkerbell from Peter Pan was a fairy. Fairies had wands and could dance up and down walls and ceilings, but their main mission in life was to make people happy and grant them wishes. Yes, the world could use a zillion fairies.

In the 1970s the average family seemed better able to understand the concept of unconditional love. One almost never heard of a son or daughter being kicked to the street for any offense, great or small. When parents would threaten to kick their kids out or transfer them to an orphanage, the threats were rhetorical and theatrical. Some of these “all bark and no bite” threats happened for the following reasons:

1. Talking back to a parent, using a curse word or even the term “shut up”; hiding uneaten peas or Lima beans in dinner napkins; smoking in the woodshed; stealing the family car for a joyride; refusing to join Little League or get a summer job as a golf caddy; refusing to go to church (often accompanied with the announcement, “I am an unbeliever!”); stealing Father’s liquor (Scotch or bourbon); shoplifting at the local convenience store; and for males, putting peroxide in your hair for optimum blond streaks.
2. Uncontrolled adolescent pyromania (corn fields and barns up in flames) or the routine destruction of mailboxes in quiet suburban housing developments.
3. Claiming to side with draft resisters during the Vietnam War or with those opting to go to Canada to avoid the draft.
4. For females: Getting pregnant in high school. Often pregnant girls were squirreled away out of sight until the pregnancy was over. When they returned to school they bore the psychological scars of the Scarlet Letter and were avoided by cheerleaders and National Honor Society-types.

I’m going to close with the story of the teen son of a distant cousin who came out to his parents. He was barely out of high school at the time and the shock was significant. Like most families, I suppose, they just assumed that he would follow his older brother into opposite sex dating and marriage. After he came out to his family, he was not kicked out of the house or forced to “reform,” although some family members initially were more accepting of him than others. I’ve no doubt that previously his family had been under the impression that if you raise a child right, teach him “correct values” and fill his head with sound guidance, he’ll turn out just the way you want him to turn out.

Is that a Tinkerbell illusion, or what?