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A Hunger Crisis in the L.G.B.T. Community - The New York Times
A Hunger Crisis in the L.G.B.T. Community
By Roni Caryn Rabin
July 18, 2016 11:05 am
Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans are more visible than ever
before. Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, and the talk show host Ellen DeGeneres
are gay. Kate Brown of Oregon is the first openly bisexual governor. The Olympic
gold medalist and transgender woman Caitlyn Jenner has a reality show.
But the affluence of such prominent figures masks a bleak reality: Many people
in the L.G.B.T. community go hungry.
A new report on hunger found that more than one in four L.B.G.T. adults could
not afford to feed themselves or their families at least once in the past year. By
comparison, only one in six heterosexual adults reported a similar crisis.
Certain subgroups in the L.G.B.T. community are particularly vulnerable to food
insecurity, including minorities, women, the unmarried, bisexuals, those without
college degrees, younger people and those who have children in the home. (It is
believed that transgender people also go hungry, but data on this group is lacking.)
Experts say L.G.B.T. teenagers, who are not covered in this report, are also at risk of
going without food, especially if they are homeless.
Behind the statistics are people like Sofia Torres, a lesbian who at 71 is
unemployed and receives only $35 a week in food stamps after recent cuts. Or
William Gonzalez, a 50-year-old gay man from Queens who survived a hate crime
and lives on a government disability check, and relies on a local food pantry called
the River Fund for groceries. Or Tanya Asapansa-Johnson Walker, a 53-year-old
transgender woman who has for years relied on food pantries because finding a job
is so difficult.
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“As soon as they realize you’re trans, you see their face changes; everything
stops right there,” Ms. Walker said.
Ms. Torres worked her whole life in construction, carpentry and security jobs,
but she never married or had children, so her support system is thin. Though she has
friends, she said, “Friends come and go.”
The new report, “Food Insecurity and SNAP Participation in the LGBT
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Community,” published Monday, uses data from four major national surveys that,
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when combined, represent the lives and challenges of nearly 20,000 people in the
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L.G.B.T. community.
“This is eye-opening for many people, and it’s even eye-opening for many in the
anti-hunger world, who haven’t typically worked with the L.G.B.T. community,” said
Adam P. Romero, a scholar of law with the Williams Institute at U.C.L.A. School of
Law who is one of the authors of the new study. “I’ve had a number of people from
different anti-hunger organizations say, ‘Wow, I had no idea that hunger was such an
issue in the L.B.G.T. community.’”
Experts say there are many reasons L.B.G.T. people face more economic
challenges than their straight counterparts. A 2013 report on poverty found that
lesbians, gays and bisexuals may face employment discrimination and higher rates of
being uninsured. For some, a lack of family support may also play a role. A lack of
access to the financial benefits of marriage has also affected the economic status of
gays and lesbians, although that should change now that marriage is legal for all.
The findings will also surprise many within the community itself, said Lorri L.
Jean, the chief executive of the Los Angeles LGBT Center.
“Our own community is as ignorant of these statistics as the straight world,” she
said.
The surveys include the Gallup Daily Tracking Survey of Adults, the National
Survey of Family Growth, the American Community Survey of Cohabiting Couples
and the National Health Interview Survey of 2014. (The SNAP program in the
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report’s title refers to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly
called food stamps.) ConAgra Foods provided some funding for the report.
According to the new report, L.G.B.T. adults are 1.6 times more likely than other
adults to report that they did not have enough money for food for themselves or their
families at some point in the last year. Same-sex couples are 1.6 times more likely to
have received food stamps in the past year, compared with heterosexual couples.
Food insecurity has a disproportionate effect on minorities. When asked the
question, “Have there been times in the past 12 months when you did not have
enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?” the differences are
striking.
Nearly half of L.G.B.T. African-Americans (42 percent) answered yes, compared
with 28 percent of straight African-Americans. Among Hispanics, 33 percent of
L.G.B.T. adults had been hungry, compared with 24 percent of those who are
straight. Among whites, 21 percent of L.G.B.T. whites reported not having enough
money for food in the past year, compared with 13 percent of those who are straight.
Notably, among Native Americans and Alaskans, L.G.B.T. and straight adults were
equally hungry, with about 30 percent each reporting that they had been too poor to
buy food in the past year. The data is from the Gallup Daily Tracking of Adults,
which surveyed 81,134 straight people and 2,964 people who identified as L.G.B.T.
Among L.G.B.T. people, women were more likely to be hungry than men; 31
percent of women and 22 percent of men reported not having enough money for
food in the past year.
The perception that the L.G.B.T. community is affluent, educated and highachieving has been perpetuated by Hollywood characters like the lawyer Will
Truman on the sitcom “Will & Grace,” and reinforced by a cascade of high-profile
celebrities, businesspeople and athletes.
Because gay and lesbian couples have historically been less likely to have
children, there also is a perception that such couples have more disposable income
than people with families. Though the data is fairly sparse, most studies actually
show gay men earn less on average than other men.
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The belief that most L.G.B.T. people are affluent is “one of the most persistent
and, frankly, pernicious myths about the L.G.B.T. community,” said Gary J. Gates,
who wrote the first report on food insecurity in the L.G.B.T. community and is an
author on the new report as well. “It emerged in part from the community itself, as
part of a strategy of marketing the population as an attractive consumer market.”
While the strategy of promoting “pink” money and the purchasing power of the
L.G.B.T. community “got a lot of companies on board and increased their
understanding of L.G.B.T. issues,” he said, it also hid the economic problems faced
by vulnerable members of the community.
“It’s not like on TV, where all the gay people are fabulous and live in nice
apartments in Manhattan and are white,” said Cathy Bowman, L.G.B.T. and HIV
project director at Brooklyn Legal Services.
Many anti-hunger organizers are now starting to think about how they can make
their food services more welcoming to L.G.B.T. people, and how to address the issue
from a policy perspective, said Abby Leibman, the president and chief executive of
Mazon, a national anti-hunger advocacy group.
Ms. Jean, of the Los Angeles L.G.B.T. center, said she planned to use the new
report to raise awareness and “raise a ruckus,” and press the local food bank
operation to restore the food pantry that used to be at her center.
“I have had government funders over the years say to me things like, ‘Yeah, but
you people don’t need it,’” Ms. Jean said. “There’s this myth in our society that gay
people are rich, but it’s not the truth. We have this huge swath of people who make
less than their straight counterparts, and most people, even in our own community,
do not know that.”
Correction: July 18, 2016
Earlier versions of two picture captions with this post were reversed.
The top photo is of Sofia Torres, and the second is of Tanya AsapansaJohnson Walker.
A version of this article appears in print on 07/19/2016, on page D1 of the NewYork
edition with the headline: An L.G.B.T. Hunger Crisis.
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