Public Administration’s Ethical Dilemma: Homeless LGBT Youth in the Twenty-first Century

The field of public administration is facing many challenges in the twenty-first century. Such overwhelming matters include stemming the rising cost of healthcare, reducing unequal incarceration rates and police violence toward persons of color, and creating reasonable and understandable tax reform. Also on this list of notable items is managing natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and mudslides. It is still debatable whether wildfires in the western United States are considered a natural disaster or human-made. Still, the effort of managing wildfires in terms of cost looms large on both a human and a physical scale.

The above-mentioned disasters are major in scope and can lead to life-changing results. However, another area of ethical concern for public administration should be the rising LGBT homeless youth epidemic. The concept of homeless youth is not a new phenomenon. However, the importance of homeless LGBT youth has been woefully overlooked within public administration. The rise in numbers of homeless LGBT youth is growing and the outcomes are often devastating.

It is with a sense of urgency that this special Public Integrity symposium is written. One might consider this special symposium a call to action for scholars and community workers, as the six articles presented here use social equity as a framework. Social equity was first advanced by H. George Frederickson during the late 1960s. One could speculate that Frederickson’s theory was informed by a changing time in the United States which included unrest brought on by the civil rights, women’s rights, and LGBT movements of the same time period. What is certain is that social equity theory ushered in a new method by which public administration scholars could analyze issues that relate to the human condition. It is, therefore, reasonable and appropriate for the articles here to use social equity as a way to frame their topics.

Not enough is being done about the disturbing overrepresentation of LGBT youth among the homeless population in this country. According to The Williams Institute, 40% of homeless youth served by agencies identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. This striking figure betrays a dark side to the number cited above: We still live in a dangerously repressive society.

Advocates of LGBT rights have had a great deal to celebrate in recent years. Not only did same-sex marriage become legal within the United States in 2015, but the country’s public support of gay marriage also has skyrocketed over the past decade: A Gallup poll found that in 2015, 58% of Americans thought that same-sex couples should be allowed to legally marry, compared to only 37% in 2007. This is definitely a victory for the LGBT movement. However, other problems facing the LGBT population have proven more intractable, and it is time now that we turn our attention to them.

Persons reading the articles contained in this symposium should not consider the epidemic of homeless LGBT youth to be a gay problem, but instead as a universal problem that should be attended to by scholars and others who want to see the elimination of this grave situation.

To date, only one book has been published in recent history on the topic of LGBT homeless youth; namely, an edited volume by Abramovich and Shelton (2017). The volume has shed much-needed light on the homeless LGBT youth problem, primarily in Canada. Like Abramovich and Shelton’s book, this symposium presents an ethical issue that should be addressed by everyone concerned, with the well-being of all youth, especially LGBT youth, as the focus. The articles here include the following topics: dropping out of high school, living on the streets, being assaulted, theft, sex work, and the like. Each article fleshes out what public administration can do in order to deal with this epidemic, which some might view as akin to a drug epidemic or a natural disaster. Some of the articles are solo authored and some articles have multiple authors. For example my article has three authors and the amazing and hopefully life-saving research was done equally.

If the field of public administration is to take social equity theory seriously, then we as public administrators and scholars have an obligation to not only read the articles here with a great deal of urgency and compassion, but also with a sense that not all youth are heterosexual and not all youth have understanding and supportive guardians. It is up to public administrators to assist in creating change. Indeed, this is our ethical dilemma and one of the most pressing issues in the twenty-first century that needs to be attended to as a collective. Let us not have the next generation of public administration scholars and practitioners argue that we in the early half of the twenty-first century did nothing or very little to end this suffering.

DEDICATION

To the LGBT youth who continue to strive despite the obstacles, this work is respectfully dedicated in hopes that it will lead to a brighter future.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Dr. Carole Jurkiewicz for seeing the value of this topic and its societal importance. Thanks also go to Dr. Richard Jacobs for supporting me in the process of this symposium. Finally, many thanks must also go to the amazingly talented and committed authors of the articles presented in this special symposium.