According to some estimates, as many as 40% of homeless youths are LGBT.Įven though the report focuses on New York City, Dank stressed that it is not “the place where all gay kids go to engage in survival sex.” The Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that a total of 578,424 people were homeless on a given night in 2014-about 10% were between the ages of 18 and 24. In 2014, the Department of Education reported that 1.3 million school children are homeless. The exact number of homeless youth is hard to pin down. You put your pride to the side, you throw everything out the window and you forget who you are and you forget what you’re doing and you learn to be someone else.” Just try to think about something else.”Īnother 19-year-old gay Latino said he felt he had no choice: “If you have no food in your stomach, if you have no transportation, but you have a man in your face willing to give you money for a half hour. like it was just like he grabbed me by like my waist and he just started doing it. One 20-year-old straight male described his experience: “He asked me like do you really need the money? At that moment I thought I did. Many of the stories detailed in the report are telling and a great deal of those who engaged in the work didn’t identify as gay-but they found themselves selling their bodies to people of the same sex in order to survive.
“And if we were really going to be able to serve the needs of these young people we needed to know exactly what their experiences were and the large breadth of their experiences.” “I realized at that point that there was so much that we didn’t know about this population,” she tells TIME.
The film is also visually striking as well as highly atmospheric, lending plenty of beauty to its emotionally-driven story.Meredith Dank, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute and lead author of the study, said she realized during earlier research on sex work that there was not enough good information about why LGBT youths made these decisions, so the study focused on letting them tell their own stories. Shun faces bullying and homophobia, for example, and is estranged from his family as a result of his sexual orientation, while Mio struggles with self-identity, as he is attracted to women but falls deeply in love with Shun. While at times more dramatic than it needs to be, as well as beset by pacing issues, Stranger By the Shore takes care to portray Shun and Mio’s relationship as one that’s relatively realistic.
Set in the idyllic backdrop of rural Okinawa, the film follows their developing relationship through its numerous ups and downs, although it does finally culminate in a happy ending.
#SEX GAY ANIME TEEN MOVIE#
The only movie rather than a TV or OVA series to make this list, Stranger By the Shore is a slice-of-life title that spans several years in the lives of Shun and Mio, an openly gay aspiring novelist and an orphaned high school student (and later restaurant worker) respectively.