Numerous queer teenagers wrote to adult feminist publications in the 1970s in search of queer community, particularly looking for queer adult mentors. As shown through the pages of the underground feminist press, teenage lesbians were often marginalized from gay bars, LGBTQ+ groups, and gay coffee houses that pushed them to the periphery as protection from unfounded accusations of pedophilia. As Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon argued in their article “The Realities of Lesbianism,” without the ability to socialize within a queer-supportive community, young lesbians would be forced to turn to “unsavory areas of a city” where prostitution and drug addiction thrived. While it is difficult to find statistics that document queerness as a source of teenage runaways in this era, the national Runaway and Homeless Youth Act was established in 1974 to address growing rates of runaways that were represented in the media as rooted in “juvenile delinquency.” Recent studies have found that LGBTQ young adults ages 18 to 25 have more than twice the risk of being homeless than their heterosexual peers, amounting to 20% of the young adult homeless population. These statistics were likely comparable if not worse in this early era of gay liberation when corporal punishment and forcible conversion were far more common. Teens’ letters written to feminist newspapers in search of queer mentors convey the precariousness and loneliness of their problematic home situations.
Queer teenage girls existed in a liminal space between youth and adulthood, and between feminist and LGBTQ+ movements—their accounts often describe being treated as too transient, too female, too young, or too dangerous for their issues to be taken seriously within queer collectives. As captured in writings by teenage lesbian feminists Lee Schwing and Helaine Harris, without political experiences through organizing or direct action, or “middle-class status experiences” like marriage and college, teenage runaways were often treated as lower-ranking than their older middle-class peers. Running away from home in search of queer mentors, teen lesbians sometimes struggled to find their roots at the crossroads of gay liberation, women’s liberation, and youth liberation.