Without them, he added that he would "probably still be using, and probably still lost and still hating myself and still thinking there was no escape.Because I’m a hard-hitting investigative journalist in the time of COVID, I pursue all leads on my way to a good story. "I know if anything ever happens to me, I've got a group of people behind me, ready to just string up whoever did it," he said. He considers Lost-n-Found a second family. He's also 100 days sober and making plans to go to college. Westbrook is hoping the center will open next spring.Ī few months ago when he was fearing death, Peterson reached out to Lost-n-Found and is now employed at its thrift store. Pierce, the young man behind the viral video, asked people to stop donating money to him, and to instead direct it to the building effort. Lost-n-Found is now refurbishing an abandoned, century-old building into a homeless shelter for gay teens, leased to them by a local church at the cost of $1 a year. "Or just petty criminal activity, stealing … digging in a dumpster for food." "Oftentimes they'll use drugs so they can stay awake and keep their wits about them, protect themselves, things like that," he said. "I've had kids whose fathers own large companies, have access to good bits of money, that just for religious reasons they're banned from the household, cut off from their families and they have nothing else to do."Īt one spot, under a bridge, off a running trail, behind a few gay bars, he says he finds kids as young as 16. "It's not that they're coming from a poverty-stricken life," he said. Until just a few months ago, Peterson was homeless, and the Atlanta streets are soiled with ugly memories, like walking to the McDonald's to get a milkshake, after having nothing to eat for days.ĭrugs, theft and "survival sex" – hooking up for a warm place to sleep at night – are all common resorts for gay homeless youth in Atlanta, says Art Izzard, who's spent the last five years trying to track down and help them as Lost-n-Found's outreach director. He would frequent adult bookstores, video booths and bathhouses, looking for a quick hookup, just so he would have a place to stay. "It was an easy way to make money… but I blew it all". The promising gymnast fled home, doing odd jobs for money – a lot of porn – and then dating a drug dealer, so he "didn't really have to have a job." "I can only imagine what I put her through and what she went through, because all she did was try for me," Peterson said.īut Peterson needed more than his mother to try for him. Now sober and reconnecting with her, he believes his family was just scared of what would happen to him. "Because I thought … she didn't love me because of it. "I was very much like, 'OK, mom, I'm going to throw it in your face that I'm gay,'" he said. He acknowledges some responsibility in the conflict with his mother that prompted him to drop out of school and leave home at 17. Peterson grew up in Walnut Grove, a rural area 40 miles from Atlanta. The group's three founders created the organization in 2011 after all of them had experiences trying to place LGBT youth in shelters, only to have them turned away. Lost-n-Found Youth is the only Atlanta nonprofit dedicated to getting homeless gay kids off the streets. In what activists say is a crisis of gay homeless youth in America, some call Atlanta "ground zero."īut the South also has few emergency shelters for LGBT youth in need. Religious families are more likely to kick out gay children, making the Bible Belt a particularly tough place to be young and LGBT. Nationally, about 40 percent of homeless youth identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, according to a survey by UCLA's Williams Institute. But each night, some 2,000 children and youth in Atlanta are homeless. Peterson, now 23, is one of many young people in Georgia, and other Bible Belt states, who flock to the big city – Atlanta – after coming out as gay. His second low point was earlier this year, crashing on couches in Atlanta and dealing crystal meth to support his $300-a-day drug habit. And I always will."įor HIV-positive men, having children can be a costly and difficult procedure.
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That's what really crushed me the most, because I've always wanted kids. "Because of the fact that I couldn't have kids. "Not because of the fact that I was positive," he said. He had just started to get his life back on track, he said, when he found out he was HIV positive. He started to cry and called his cousin who bought him a plane ticket home to Georgia. ATLANTA – Ryan Peterson's first low point happened in California in 2011 when he woke up on the roof of a house he didn't recognize, still high, after being awake for what he says was around five days.