Spare Change News

Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Risky Business: Turning to Sex for Survival

    When Travis turned his first trick, he still had an apartment in Roslindale and a job as a retail clerk. He was doing “well enough” financially until January 2010, when his shifts were cut to just five hours per week. His housemate helped him pay his rent for as long as she could. He looked…

  • Pride Highlights Issue on Homeless Youth

    This year, Pride meant a lot more than outrageous costumes, late night clubbing and activist signs. The Supreme Court decisions on Prop 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) have been pushed back to Monday as much of the nation awaits to hear the final ruling by the high court. The latter an initiative…

  • Homelessness Representation in Pride Week

    Boston Pride Week has grown massively over its forty-year history. What was once a few marchers and ralliers is now a massive celebration that brings people, organizations, churches, local businesses and, for better or worse, large corporations around the rainbow flag. In fact, the 2013 parade saw a record, setting 230 groups march. While Mass.…

  • Finding a Place for LGBTQ Homeless Youth

    It was a bright summer day in Cambridge when I first walked into the shelter run by Youth on Fire (YOF) near Harvard Square. A program of the AIDS Committee of Massachusetts, YOF provides necessary services to homeless youth ages 14 to 24. As my eyes adjusted to the dimmed light, I was greeted with…

  • Three Poems

    NO APOLOGY! let’s get something straight. i’m a full-fledged member of the 60s generation! The Generation! not generation x or double x or even xxx. No! i graduated from high school in 1965 and graduated from college in 1969. i am completely, unapologetically a complete product of the crazy, wonderful, mad, hopeful, imaginative, Imaginative, love-crazed,…

  • The Science in Property

    Being homeless is many things . . . invisibility, hyper organic networking, a byzantine paper procedural, sensory overload, protracted process for simple tasks, truncated opportunity, frustration, default wrongness, loss, social justice 101 streaming live, instant family, and a variable-but strangely-rather equal measure of humility and bravado. It is fluidity and forgetfulness. It is the new…

  • Homesickness and the Endless War on Terror

    Every spring, the mist over the shallow lakes across Kansas settles quietly in the early morning hours. During the long winter months in Massachusetts, the ponds and bogs encased by bent willows are sprinkled with slipping ducks on slick ice patches. On the mountaintops in California, in early fall, snow kisses their rocky tips, while…

  • Clear-Cutting Earth

    Water is the blood of the Earth. As the industrial age of humankind has developed, ecological devastation has taken place. How many of us go to the ocean for rest, sit on the beach and listen to the waves roll in to bring peace to our spirits? We have love affairs with the ocean, wilderness…

  • LGBTQ Youth Adrift

    LGBTQ Youth Adrift “Outside” Directed by Natalie Avery KUED, 55:58, free online (streaming) There are over 1.4 million homeless youth in the United States today and forty percent of them are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ). The independent documentary Outside is a microcosm of their lives adrift in an anchorless world, addressing the…

  • Adoption and Destruction on the Religious Right

    “The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption” by Kathryn Joyce PublicAffaird, 352 pp., $26.99 (hardcover) In her recent book, “The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption,” Kathryn Joyce notes that the “default view of adoption” in American society is a “‘win-win’ scenario” for all parties involved: adoptive…

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