Many at Kos have been following the saga of Maya Keyes, daughter of Alan Keyes, who got kicked out of her parent's life for being gay and an activist. Maya has a friend, Shymmer (Jefry Silva), who was also kicked out of his home for being gay. Shymmer died today. I'm not sure what the Kos community can do, but kids like this usually die in complete anonymity. I'd love it if the liberal community could show their support. Maya's blog is
here and her girlfriend's blog is
here.
The background story is
here and
here:
Shymmer is, to begin with, one of my best friends on earth. He is, as his boyfriend Shiva puts it, "one of those kids with starlight in his eyes - the world still surprises him, in the good ways." His first street name was Funshine, after the Care Bear; because he's one of those people who is always trying to make everyone around him happy, no matter what hell he's going through at the moment.
And he has been through a lot of it.
Shymmer was kicked out of his house a few years ago, the summer after his junior year in high school, because he is gay and his parents are conservative. Sounds familiar?
But unlike me, Shymmer's parents aren't famous, and he didn't have a huge online community supporting him. So Shymmer, for the past few years, has been actually out on the streets. He did manage to finish high school (like me also, he was Ivy-League accepted, but never made it to college - he was in my graduating year, 2003) but since then has been wandering. Any of you who deal with street kids at all will know at least somewhat what the streets can do to people - after a couple years it has certainly taken its toll on Shymm. He went from a bright cheerful kid with a potentially bright future to something of a wreck, having been beaten, raped, and otherwise abused during his time on the streets more than I like to think about. He ended up here where I am - in Chicago - on heroin and selling himself, until Shiva brought him back to DC and he cleaned up. But even off heroin and with Skyzombie's roof over his head, all the abuse is hard to get rid of, and emotionally he's just not been in a good place.
And there are so many more kids like him - For years a good number of my friends have been street kids I've known so many gay kids out on the streets who end up dead or on the streets forever. (I wrote a post about something like this over the summer...) They've been in situations like mine but didn't have thousands of people watching and ready to help them stand on their feet again.
So all this support I'm getting is overwhelming but... I haven't done anything to deserve this. It's not right that anyone should be in this situation, no; but I'm not the only one, there are thousands more and what help are they getting?
I suppose that more than anything this has just reminded me even more why Bria and I for so long have wanted to start a GLBT youth center; a place where queer homeless kids especially can find support - run by people who actually know what it's like to be in their position...
But, again, thank you all. You all are amazing. Just don't forget all the others out there like me...
...
Shymmer, who'd been staying with Skyzombie, had been doing really, really, really not well. Somehow its always more depressing when Shymmer, our own little Funshine Bear, is doing badly - Shymmer depressed is such a drastic contrast to Shymmer in his usual bouncy cheerful let's-go-make-the-world-sparkly natural state that when he gets in really bad condition it's frightening. But as Sky mentioned in his last post, Shymmer's been depressed, cutting, not eating again... the day before yesterday (I think. I'm losing track of days) Sky was going to take him down to the hospital because he'd starved himself back to an unhealthily low weight and we all (Shymmer included) thought that a stay in a psyche ward for a while would be preferable to starving himself to death. So they agreed that after Skyzombie finished teaching his last class of the day they'd take him in - except then, as I just found out, when Sky got back to his house Shymmer was gone. Either he or one of his alters decided that hospitalization wasn't gonna work for them, I guess, and it appears that he just took off and hit the streets again. So now we have one missing anorexic queer... everybody, please keep our Anjul in your prayers. He needs them, badly.
They found him, took him to a hospital, tried to nurse him back to health... but he didn't make it.