Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [107]
Indiana Youth Group, Indianapolis
As with most gay youth grassroots organizations, Indiana Youth Group (IYG) is the creation of a few single-minded individuals.
Chris Gonzalez was a new graduate in journalism from Franklin College in 1987 when he began volunteering at a gay and lesbian switchboard in Indianapolis. He soon discovered that many of the calls to the switchboard were from young people desperate for help and contact, but there was no agency to which to refer them.
As a consequence, Gonzalez and his life partner, Jeff Werner, a tax accountant, began holding talk sessions for teenagers in their home twice a month. Before long, they had twenty to thirty-five people attending each time. The program expanded rapidly, moving to Damien Center, an HIV-AIDS center, and taking on the name Indiana Youth Group.
Casting about for funding, Gonzalez came to realize that the teen counseling he was engaged in had a direct tie-in with AIDS prevention. By providing self-esteem counseling, IYG was simultaneously encouraging young people to take responsibility for themselves and to avoid putting themselves at risk. The Indiana Health and Education Department agreed, providing financial backing that enabled IYG by 1991 to start its toll-free phone line, create chapters in nine other Indiana cities, and accommodate 120 to 150 young people at three meetings a month in Indianapolis.
The toll-free line is staffed by teenagers who take fifty hours of pretraining to qualify for phone duty. They usually process one thousand to fifteen hundred calls a month, primarily from within Indiana. (About a third of the callers mention that they have contemplated suicide.) But when the ABC network program “20/20” referenced the toll-free hot-line number in a segment that aired in May 1992, IYG was flooded with more than one hundred thousand calls in thirty days from every part of the country.
The calls and letters that followed were heartrending cries for help from isolated and frightened youngsters. But IYG was unequipped to handle them, and most went unanswered. Nonetheless, the responses represented unscientific but powerful testimony to both the quantity and the pain of gay and lesbian young people across the nation.
Since 1992 IYG has continued to expand. A local foundation helped the organization purchase its own building. Then, with passage of the Ryan White AIDS appropriation law, the U.S. government granted IYG $250,000. This money provided for increased staffing, including a nurse, a full-time individual and family counselor, and a case manager. Gay and lesbian youngsters now utilize IYG facilities for health, job, and education counseling.
Tragically, IYG’s architect, Chris Gonzalez, died of AIDS in 1994 at age thirty. Jeff Werner undertook to carry on the work. “Chris had a vision and he went for it,” said Werner. “We’re proud of what we’ve done.”
Despite Indiana’s reputation for conservatism, the pairing of teen counseling and AIDS prevention enabled IYG to win establishment support. “Our primary focus was not to promote the so-called gay lifestyle,” Werner said. “By pegging to AIDS we could do what we needed to do and make it palatable.”
Why, Werner is asked, are so many youngsters still in such a state of isolation? “Even with all the resources, there are still large numbers of adults who don’t understand homosexuality and who can be very hurtful.”
“It gets better as the years go on,” he said optimistically. “The next generation will be much, much better off.”
OutYouth/Austin
Struggling on a budget of seventy thousand dollars, OutYouth/Austin operates an ambitious program with a staff of one and a half