AKT Meets DSS

The Albert Kennedy Trust, the charity for homeless young LGBT people, is throwing a party with the Dalston Superstore for their 25th birthday anniversary.  We caught up with AKT communications officer Tony Butchart-Kelly to find out more…

Tell us a bit about yourself.
I was in the Royal Air Force as an Intelligence Analyst. I loved what I was doing in the RAF, but I realised I loved serving on the RAF’s LGBT Forum and being their media/comms officer more than what I was being paid to do! And it really hit home to me that whenever I take a job I want to be doing something that’s beneficial to society.
For anybody who doesn’t know about the AKT, just give us a brief rundown of who they are.
The Albert Kennedy Trust provides safe homes for young LGBT people who are homeless primarily because of their sexual orientation. For most of the young people we see, the reason they are homeless is because their families or care-givers have rejected them when they’ve come out.
And it still happens?
A lot. This year is our 25th anniversary year. On one hand we want to celebrate that we’re still here and how much we’ve grown, we also kind of want to say we wish we weren’t here because we wish there wasn’t a need. We want society to change to one where people aren’t rejected by the people they love just because they were brave enough to come out.

Going into the history briefly, the trust started in 1989, and Albert Kennedy was a teenager who jumped off a carpark?
Yes, it’s an interesting one because I think various myths have built up around Albert Kennedy and the situation he was in. The situation why he was homeless in the late 80s was because the care system wasn’t really set up to look after young gay people, so Albert had turned to spending more of his time on the scene in Canal Street in Manchester. Nobody’s entirely sure what happened that night, but all we can say with certainty is that he went up there and didn’t come back down by the stairs. It became quite a high-profile case, and he was quite slated by the press.
Why did it cause so many tremors that the Trust was set up?
There was already an awareness that young LGBT people weren’t being looked after appropriately, and Albert’s death really hit home that we needed to do something. The Trust got a lot of flak in the early days – I’ve got some clippings in the office that are just horrible – of all these older gays promoting their depraved HIV world to young people.  When actually all we were doing was trying to provide them with a roof over their heads.
Why are LGBT kids getting chucked out of their homes still in 2014?
It is hard to say exactly, but unfortunately we continue to see rises in the number of people coming to see us in the three cities we operate: London, Manchester and Newcastle. A lot of people ask if it is about religion, but I think it’s more about their cultural background; especially people from Caribbean and African communities where generally homosexuality is less accepted. We’ve also seen that where homosexuality is more accepted generally in the UK, young people can feel that coming out to their families will be okay, when it’s unfortunately not. Social media can play its part as well; young people are very willing to share every aspect of their lives online now, and if the wrong person sees that it often gets back to their families.
What can we expect at the party at the Dalston Superstore with Homoelectric?
Yes, I’m very excited about that! They got in touch with our Chief Exec Tim and started a conversation and they’re such a big name we were like ‘yes, please!’ And it basically hits all our demographics: in the East End of town, which is an up-and-coming gay area; there is a higher proportion of people from ethnic backgrounds, which is increasingly a large proportion of young people that we see; and it really reaches the age range that we see. So for them to come aboard and say ‘we think you’re doing a great job, let us help you’ that ticks all our boxes.

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