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. 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.
