Kicked Out
by Kyle Thomas Smith
EDGE Contributor
Friday Feb 4, 2011

http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ch=entertainment&sc=&sc3=&id=115860

Last month, the American Library Association's Over the Rainbow Committee published its list of the best LGBTQ books of 2010. Among the top nonfiction books, beating out even Edmund White and Augusten Burroughs, was Kicked Out, a book of essays by homeless and formerly homeless and/or runaway LGBTQ teens.

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Among the hardest hitting essays are those by Tenzin, a transgendered (FTM) Buddhist monastic and one-time kicked-out street kid, who vividly recounts how every minute of his time on the streets of San Francisco and other cities was marked by either assault or the anticipation of assault. Often it was hard to tell which was worse for him and his gutter-compatriots: actual rape and murder from pimps, Nazi skinheads and other lowlifes or the pestilence brought on by survival prostitution and scavenging for food and places to sleep. "The psychic legacy of my time on the streets persists to this day," says Tenzin, "A sense of contamination and alien defectiveness...has made it difficult to relate to others lacking similar life experiences." Yet he counsels those enduring similar experiences to "remember that you have value and that anyone who judges you for being queer and homeless wouldn't last a day in your situation."