Rejected by Religion, Saved by God

When he was 17 years old, Kedar Powell's dad handed him a jar filled with $25 in change and kicked him out of the house.

"'This is what you want to do? Bye,'" Kedar recalls his dad saying. "And that's how life started for me."

Kedar is gay. His father is Muslim. His mother had already rejected him — she is a devout Christian who had divorced his father years earlier. But he found redeeming moments in his religious upbringing in Brooklyn.

"I was always in the church, in the choir. I loved to sing. Singing is my passion," he said.

But as he came of age, he realized he was "different." His mother tried to set him straight at church, but eventually turned him out, sending him to live with his father — but things were even worse there. And after his father sent him away, he became another gay homeless youth on the streets of New York.  

"I slept in abandoned buildings. I slept in the train," he said. "I used to break into abandoned buildings and sleep on the floor."

For more than five years, he survived by performing sex work, occasionally escaping life-threatening situations. He said God guided him out of those episodes. 

Jennie Livingston, director of "Paris is Burning," the classic documentary which explored the underground world of voguing and ballroom, said LGBT youth are disproportionately homeless.

"Who do they get thrown out by? Generally the religious parents. And it's ironic, it's sick, it's really unfortunate. I don't know how those parents define what love is, or what the inner principles of those religions are," she said.

As many others have, Kedar found community through the voguing scene, but at 27, he feels he's too old to regularly participate. But he hasn't aged out of God. Even though he now has a stable home in Queens, he still visits an outreach program for LGBT youth run by the Church of St. Luke in the Fields. He's stopped going to church, though. He said he's tired of people trying to make him straight.

Instead, he expresses his spirituality through dance.

"It's very important for us to perform. That's how we get our energy. Our life. Everything," he said.