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San Francisco Youth Commissioner Battles Old Foe- Queer Youth Homelessness

MiaTu Mutch via Facebook

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA -- 20-year-old Mia Tu Mutch is assisting LGBTQ youth in this city by the bay face an old foe of hers, homelessness. According to recent statistics released by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, as many as 40 percent of homeless youths in the United States share Mia's onetime ordeal because they identify as LGBT. A significant number of those young persons experience a much higher rate of drug addiction, mental illness and sexual abuse than their heterosexual homeless peers.

In a Sunday profile in The San Francisco Chronicle, Mia tells writer David Wagner, that she is amazed she survived high school, citing facing bullying from her classmates, constant thoughts of suicide, rejection from her Southern Baptist parents, and the very real prospect of ending up permanently homeless. Mia is from a small Southern town, and after being forced to come out to her parents as a transgendered female, surviving a reparative therapeutic regime Mia's parents enrolled her in at their church- which Mia cooperated but chafed at the "pray-the-gay-away" sessions. She sees her current progress as nothing less than a miracle.

She began coming out as queer to close friends during her freshman year of high school. While she's been wearing women's clothing since junior high, she didn't begin identifying as transgender until after high school. "I feel like I've always been Mia Tu Mutch, even if I didn't have the name and the wig," she says. "Basically, the whole time that I was getting harassed it was because of my gender, not necessarily who I was having sex with."
"The main reason I was staying was because they were holding college over my head," Mia says. With her solid grade-point average and high-ranking Key Club position, Mia would've been a shoo-in with college admissions officers.
"Then they told me, 'We're not giving you any money unless you act straight and act like a man.' So I was like, 'OK, well, I guess that means that I have to leave.' "
Mia lived at a friend's place an hour and a half away from school while completing her senior year. She hasn't spoken with her parents since.

Mutch moved to San Francisco at 19 in search of a more accepting environment but was faced with homeliness and joblessness as well as struggling to enroll in college and attend classes. Mia told Wagner that  she made a point of looking as presentable as possible while attending classes at City College, fearing that her classmates might wonder where she had spent the previous night.

"I'm sure they had no idea that I was carrying a really big purse because all of my clothes were in there," she says. Hiding in plain sight, queer homeless youths often look just as fashionably put together as any yuppie loft dweller.
"It's hard to come out to friends as homeless," Mia says. ~ The San Francisco Chronicle

Despite the adversity Wagner writes, Mutch finally landed employment at a Goodwill store in the Castro, the first store of its kind to be staffed entirely by transgender employees.

Through this position and persistent volunteering, Mia forged connections within San Francisco's LGBT service provider community. She then landed a job as a program assistant at the San Francisco LGBT Center, where she organized a weekly meal night for local homeless people age 24 and under. Now she works at Lyric, a queer youth center in the Castro. She also landed a seat on the city's youth commission
As a youth commissioner, Mia wants to make sure the city enforces LGBT sensitivity training at the shelters.
Sometimes Mia gets frustrated when important youth issues get drowned out by the storm of debate over hot-button topics like gay marriage.
"I get really annoyed by the hundreds of millions of dollars that both sides of Prop. 8 have spent," she says. "Trying to pass it, trying to repeal it, trying to get it unre-pealed. I think that everyone should be able to show their love in a way that's equitable, but when we have so many queer homeless youth, I don't think our highest priority should be a piece of paper from the government."
Mia thinks that the ultimate responsibility rests with the family when it comes to preventing queer youths from ending up on the streets. "There's still a lot of education that needs to be done working with parents," Mia says. "They need to know that kicking their child out because they're queer or trans should not be an option."  ~ The San Francisco Chronicle