From the Front Lines

 

A word from Kate Barnhart

Director, New Alternatives 

 

If you look at an LGBTQ+ homeless youth program on paper, at the numbers of meals served or the train fare handed out or the pairs of socks distributed, it would look like what we do is very tangible, focused on the necessities of daily life. And that's part of it. Keeping people alive means feeding them, and keeping them warm, even when that means staying open all night during the bitter cold of NYC winters.

 

But that alone is not enough. We can't just meet the physical needs of our LGBTQ+ youth; we also have to provide something that is in very short supply these days as the forces of hate spread across the country. In order to stay alive, to keep struggling through challenge after challenge, to keep on taking the next step, people need hope.

 

I can't order hope in bulk, like the cases of condoms that show up in boxes on the doorstep. We have to build it, kindle it like the tiniest flame, protected from the wind in a cupped hand. We build it by creating a community, by creating an eccentric extended family where all are welcome no matter how queer, how trans, how loud, how different. We create our family out of layers of clients, and slightly older clients, and clients who got older and joined the staff, and the adult staff, and the volunteers, and all the people who send us money or toothbrushes or winter coats.

 

And into this big eclectic family of people weaving strands of hope into a net to catch those who are falling, came Ernst and his camera. Outsiders don't always get it. Sometimes they are taken aback or pitying or want to reduce the young people to children and take away their complexity. But Ernst just added himself to the busy chaos, using his acceptance and lack of judgment to gain trust. That trust, in turn, allowed him to capture not just the two-dimensional images of the young people, but also their courage, and their creativity when faced with obstacles, and also their hope.

 

These days, queer hope and queer lives are resistance in the face of forces that want to erase us and so many others. May this book be a reminder that we were—we are—here.