Wednesday, February 11, 2015 // The Statement
8B

swells from every corner of the caf-
eteria-disco from every teenaged 
body in attendance, his voice rings 
true and sharp.

Eric Stanson is a youth volunteer 

at Ruth Ellis.

“I LOVE THE WAY YOU MOVE 

SO SEXY. LET ME SEE YOU 
POP THAT BOOTY,” he screams 
when Adrian, no longer pirou-
etting or holding up any middle 
fingers, gyrates down the dance 
floor. Stanson bellows his anthem 
throughout the night, directing 
at whoever gathers the requisite 
courage to venture down the cat-
walk. He does it tirelessly. He does 
it relentlessly. He does it homicid-
ally. He heaves his words with the 
weight of a man looking to instill 
the fear of God, to change lives. He 
does it because, in some ways, he 
just may.

Studies by the University of Cali-

fornia, Los Angeles have indicated 
46 percent of LGBTQ homeless 
youth on the streets run away due 
to familial rejection of their sexual 
orientation or gender identifica-
tion. In many cases, the resulting 
self-doubt and invalidation fes-
ters long into adulthood, only to 
materialize in the form of severe 
depression or self harm. One of the 

ball’s most palpable intentions is to 
create a breathable atmosphere of 
affirmation, one that any bystand-
er can feel wash over them, can 
inhale, exhale with fire.

Roman Bertram, a high school 

student who has been visiting 
the Center regularly for the past 
year, nods casually along to Stan-
son’s red-faced chants, not unlike 
a middle-aged Mormon man who 
stumbled into a Marilyn Manson 
concert.

“They couldn’t get me out there 

if they pointed a goddamn flame-
thrower at me,” he says after a beat. 
“I mean, don’t get me wrong — I’m 
glad I’m here, but shit ... like an 
actual flamethrower.”

Bertram leans back when he 

laughs. He lets his head fall back 
so he can really feel the warmth at 
the base of his stomach rise up his 
throat on its way to chortle out in 
a guffaw. He has kind eyes that he 
sometimes winks when he’s in the 
middle of telling a joke, eyebrows 
that rise comically in the tiny 
moments before the man he’s been 
glancing at walks by.

Without any prompt, he talks 

at length about his plans for the 
future.

“I want to major in English,” he 

says, with a period. “I don’t really 
care where I go, but I want to be 
reading when I get there.”

Bertram doesn’t know how he 

will pay for college, acknowledg-
ing his high school years have been 
“kind of a mess.” After being bul-
lied for much of his freshman and 
sophomore year, he began to lose 
interest in schoolwork, followed 
quickly by any hope that things 

could ever change.

“It’s hard to talk about because it 

felt like I had such little control at 
that time. It was a blur,” he says. “It 
was a lot of confusion, then frustra-
tion, then not really caring. I didn’t 
know who I was.”

His eyes turn to granite when 

he talks about the weeks before he 
found Ruth Ellis, scrolling desper-
ately online for some modicum of 
understanding — anyone willing to 
listen. He felt pride in being ready, 
for the first time in his life, to talk. 
The search words he used were 
“gay,” “Detroit” and “help.”

“I try to be here as much as I can, 

usually every day,” he says. “I don’t 
even really have to be doing any-
thing: I can just come and sit down 
and have regular conversations 
with people about literally any-
thing. It started to get better once 
I started coming. I felt like, after a 
really long time, I wanted to get it 
together again. Still, I —”

Bertram’s thoughts are cut short 

by a loud crash reverberating from 
the other end of the cafeteria-disco. 
Two men have fallen face-first into 
a chair while trying to execute a 
complex bodily maneuver involv-
ing a combination of breakdancing 
and tap dancing in sync. More than 
half the room now gapes silently, 
hands splayed over O’d lips. A bal-
loon pops without much aplomb. As 
the downed gentlemen silently rise, 
fragments of their dignity hanging 
around them in ribbon-like tatters, 
the familiar chant starts up again. 
Albeit a little quieter, a little shak-
ier.

“I LOVE THE WAY YOU MOVE 

SO SEXY ... Let me see you pop that 
booty?”

In a weekly meeting of former 

Ruth Ellis youth — those who now 
have stable jobs and housing after 
an extended period of time visiting 
the Center — two attendees go over 
examples of open-ended questions 
as if they were in a high school 
journalism class.

The gatherings, called “Out In 

The System,” are project-oriented, 
and the group — which consists 
of approximately ten members 
in total — is gearing to propose a 
change in the way Detroit’s Child 
Protective 
Services 
interviews 

victims before referring them for 
foster care. On a dry erase board 
hanging in the back, goals like 
“Develop research question” and 
“Develop research sample” have 
been scrawled in black marker by 
Tom Molina-Duarte, the leader-
ship and advocacy coordinator 
guiding the discussion.

The intention is to select a pool 

of viable interview subjects, then 
record them answering a series 
of questions that Molina-Duartes 
hopes will convince CPS to include 
Ruth Ellis in the conversation when 
they speak with kids about leaving 
home or help them better mediate 
the relationship between out youth 
and their respective families. Moli-
na-Duartes talks patiently.

Often, the dialogue wanders and 

the two former Center visitors talk 
openly, casually about their pasts. 
Victor Kalten doesn’t seem per-
turbed when he discusses the night 
he was raped by two men while in 
foster care. Bonnie Dyer is luke-

warm when she mentions how cer-
tain members of her family won’t 
let her communicate with or even 
go near her niece ever since she 
came out as a lesbian.

“I feel like a majority of these 

kids don’t even make it to foster 
care. A lot of them are just out on 
the streets,” Kalten says. “I think 
the numbers they use to calculate 
the percent of homeless people who 
are LGBTQ comes from how many 
there are in foster homes. Which 
doesn’t make sense because there 
are so many who never even make 
it there.”

“Even in foster care,” he says. 

“The fact that you’re LGBT doesn’t 
really get discussed. It’s treated 
like a secret.”

Kalten talks at length about 

the complex disparity between 
admitting to the world that you’re 
gay and the lead-up to the realiza-
tion that you’re not straight. In a 
foster care system where there is 
little dialogue about sexual orien-
tation, Kalten feels this lead up can 
become unnecessarily drawn out, 
even harmful.

“Things changed so much for me 

before I told people I was gay and 
after,” he says. “It felt like I was 
completely unprepared because I 
had never simply been told that it 
was okay to be gay. No one came up 
to me and had a conversation about 
it. One of the things I want out of 
this project is to make sure other 
kids don’t go through the same 
thing.”

The stigma, Dyer adds, forces 

many LGBTQ individuals to con-
stantly question their circum-
stances, often for good reasons, but 
sometimes in ways that can need-
lessly put them at odds with the 
people around them. She referenc-
es experiences with the job market.

“I know a lot of people who have 

been fired from their jobs after 
they’ve been outed,” she explains. 
“And they carry that knowledge 
with them wherever they go to 
work next. It’s the same way when 
you’re a kid and you’re being raised 
to believe straightness is the only 
thing that exists. Without ever 
realizing it, it gets so much harder 
to trust people to accept who you 
are.”

When there isn’t anything else 

to say, Bertram watches the danc-
ing quietly. He doesn’t move when 
Adrian stuffs two large balloons 
into the bust of the dress he pulled 
on two hours ago and two more in 
the back of his underpants. After a 
while, he smiles.

“Flamethrower,” is the only 

word he says before walking away.

RUTHELLIS
From Page 8B

“The fact that 
you’re LGBT 
doesn’t really 
get discussed”

