The last time Borja saw her family was to recover her cat. They threw him five months ago, when he returned to his parents in Madrid in September 2024, after being eight years in Barcelona living in his air. On his return, Borja wore with non -regulatory clothes, but his parents “did not take it well,” explains the 33 -year -old. Borja, who identifies as non -binary, is one of the many young people who face family rejection in Spain for belonging to the LGTBIAQ+collective. Without a solid support network, these young people can easily end on the street or homeless.
Born in a very authoritarian family, Borja always knew who he was and how he wanted to be. Given the derogatory looks for the skirts he wore, this young man explained to his parents that the clothes had no gender and that he felt comfortable like that. “I made it very clear, I told them: 'Hey, look, I can't take care of the look of others and less of yours.' But they didn't understand the concept.”
The reality is that Ab Borja had already thrown him out of home in adolescence. “My mother and I got angry and threw me for one night,” he explains. His relationship in 2024 was already diminished before, when, four years ago he traveled a few days to visit his parents. “We had a very strong discussion again and she ended up raising my hand. There I said enough. I turned to Barcelona and there was hardly any contact.” It was 2021 and it was at that same time when Borja entered the chemsex. “It is a way of looking to the other side and understanding that chemsex It is the alarm, but not the fire. When you have a relapse it is for everything I had not managed in my life. And in my case it was for the family. ”
Borja's security by defending his orientation is similar to Sam's, another young man from Madrid less than 30. fagot o ladybug. But when I heard homosexual I thought: 'I know how to define what I have been feeling years ago, ”explains Sam, who now identifies himself as non -binary. His family – very rooted in the Christian religion – rejected him with 23 years, after he confessed that he had had relations with other men, older than him and, in some cases, married.
His first encounter with a man happened during the pandemic, when the need to experiment was increasingly increasing. All its surroundings, – family, educational and social – was deeply rooted in the Christian community and the Church. His only relief was to talk to his aunts, who also belonged to the community, but discovered their homosexuality by reviewing Sam's history on the computer. “Then they began to take me to church meetings about homosexuality, but instead of helping me, they made me feel attacked. For them it was a sin. In addition, as we were in pandemic, they put me meetings of shepherds who at some point had experienced homosexuality and then retracted. But it did not serve me, they had at least experienced, which was what I wanted to do.”
It was in those moments of exploration when Grindr was downloaded (appointments application between people LGTBIQ+) and had its first meeting. “Immediately after I felt so bad that I had the need to confess.” And he did so. He spoke first with his aunts and then with his parents, with the hope that they understood something that I had already told them as a child: “I did not like women and did not want to marry. But for them it was not just to relate to a man, it was to relate to a man during the pandemic and that, in addition, he was married. He had committed adultery.”
Sam's hell came immediately after. “They put protection rules, they took my mobile and gave me one of keys,” he explains. “I couldn't connect to the Internet or leave home alone or stay at home alone. They were really extreme measures.” Sam endured in these conditions a whole year until he could no longer and, with the excuse of having a job interview, he was with another man.
He felt guilty again and his family was confessed again. But this time, they sought an intermediate solution. His parents paid him a room on a shared floor in exchange for working with his father in the maintenance of the church. “I endured three months. Psychologically, it was not well and working with my father supposed to have daily discussions. I no longer told them anything about my relationships with other men. But everything made a dent and, in the end, in December we met physically and they told me that the situation was unbearable and that I had a month to look for my life. I was left without work and had no money.”
Although there are no data on the LGTBIQ+ stateless of state, since 2022, the technical table of care for people LGTBIAQ+ at risk of residential exclusion of Madrid – formed by 11 entities that support the collective – tries to make visible the reality of young people like Borja and Sam. According to his latest report published in March of this year, in 2024 about 979 people requested accommodation despite the fact that, only in Madrid, there was a availability of 65 places. The organization now where a similar report in Barcelona has made: it indicates discrimination within the families that forces people who are part of the LGTBIQ+ collective to go for their own will, to leave, in what would be a “forced voluntary abandonment.”
Without roof, exposed to violence
“What happens here, in Madrid, is that the collapse is evident,” explains Carlos, social worker of the San Martín de Porres Foundation. The lack of resources forces workers to have to rule out people, prioritize cases and know that, because there is no space in other organizations, many young people are sleeping in the street. Other organizations that also have reception floors such as Eddy Foundation or positive support, in Madrid, or now where and Acathi, in Barcelona, also underline this situation.
After his parents left him without alternatives, Sam was bound to the abyss. At that time, he was meeting a boy who was apparently young. “He supplied the identity of a young man, but he was really 60 years old. I wasn't right and told him what was happening to me. He offered to leave me a room at home.” Before entering, Sam had requested a positive support accommodation, which offers support from homeless people from the group. “They told me that it could not be, that there was a waiting list, so I accepted the Lord's proposal.” However, I only spent there a month.
The first step for Sam to jump towards his autonomy happened after, one day, “that man would enter my room and abuse me.” “I could have resisted, but I doubled in size and strength, so I submitted. Then I felt very bad. I felt I was there in exchange for doing what I wanted with me.” That same afternoon, he called positive support again, explained what he had just lived and immediately provided a floor. He also called his family, but the only answer was that “they didn't want to know anything about me. They didn't want to hear what had happened.”
Those who are not lucky to enter directly into a shelter or a floor are seen, in most, committed to couchsurfing Like Sam. “Many people agree to live in sofas in exchange for certain favors,” says Rodrigo Araneda, president of Acathi, an organization that gives assistance to migrants from the LGTBIQ+collective. “It is an invisible, more complex, because it puts you in a situation of vulnerability when having links with other people. It exposes you to risks that you cannot control,” he explains. The alternative is the street.
Non -Novice
It is not the same to be in a street situation with a register than without him. Borja verified it to see that without documentation he could not access many resources. But for people LGTBIAQ+ migrants like Farzad and Abel, exclusion is even greater, especially if they are in an irregular situation.
Born in the city of Arak (Iran), Farzad's family discovered his sexual orientation when he was 16 years old. “They hoped that it would be something passenger, but they were emotionally distanced from me.” At 18, after learning that he had a boyfriend, he was thrown out of the house. He spent nine months between friends houses and the street until he got a job at a Tehran travel agency until 2014, when he was barely 24 years old. Without any contact with his family, Farzad says that the only person who has unconditionally wanted is his sister who has an intellectual disability. “Today I keep keeping a gift that made me before leaving. He is a wooden pendant who learned to do in the association for people with disabilities. She didn't imagine that she would go to not come back.”
Farzad currently resides in one of the reception floors for the LGTBIAQ+ collective offered by Acathi in Barcelona. And is waiting to get a job and the protection offered by the condition of asylum. Before, however, he spent three months living on the street after being the victim of a scam. While he was in Italy, studying, a lawyer promised him that he could get to Spain and undertake a business paying more than 41,000 euros for a series of procedures that did not reach anywhere. He arrived in Barcelona in July 2024 with just over 700 euros and an Italian visa about to expire.
Scams and extortion are recurring factors in migratory processes that aggravate people's vulnerability. When Abel (27 years old and originally from Venezuela) was rejected by his family, he escaped from his country with her boyfriend. They had been together for a year and had no money. They crossed on foot Colombia and Ecuador to get to Peru.
“In Colombia they kidnapped me and I have suffered physical and psychological violence. I come from an unstructured family, very believing, but with an absent father and an abuser mother,” explains Abel, who already has a residence permit in Spain. He works as a floral artist, a job he got thanks to the Eddy Foundation. “I arrived with my savings and I could spend 10 days at a hotel until I got a room. But I could only pay me a month and a half. So, I started looking for organizations and found them.”
Networks outside institutions
“Sinhogarismo is a problem. But so is to institutionalize it and make people who always depend on social services,” explains Abraham, coordinator of the Chueco Project, a meeting point for people from the LGTBIAQ+ collective at risk of social exclusion of the San Martín de Porres Foundation. “You enter a circuit in which you depend on the shelter that welcomes you, but it does not focus on knitting a more informal network that remains in time.”
Chueco Project was designed in 2023 to cover the gaps left by a welfare network centered on the chemsex and in hierarchical therapeutic models. Abraham explains how there are two axes that go through people in street or exclusion: the first one is drug use, which goes beyond chemsex. The second is prostitution. “Therefore, it is necessary to offer spaces that do not criminalize, but that suppose a damage reduction space while offering workshops, therapy and an environment in which participants may feel welcomed and heard instead of being stigmatized.”
Chueco recovers the territory with dance workshops, cinephors or board games where to socialize does not imply paying or placing itself. Because the community is also built dancing without drugs, reading together or sharing doubts about sexual health.
