A study released this week debunks the myth that gays and lesbians live affluently. The UCLA’s Williams Institute report demonstrates that lesbian couples are “more likely to be poor than married heterosexuals, and children of same-sex parents are twice as likely to live in poverty as those of traditional married couples.”

This is hardly news to social agencies that provide support services to GLBT individuals. The cycle of poverty from youth to adulthood is prevalent in our community largely because of the disenfranchisement that begins in childhood for many GLBT people.

Dr. Delores A. Jacobs, CEO of The San Diego LGBT Community Center, for instance, receives requests from about 40 GLBT teens per month seeking housing assistance because their parents have kicked them out of their homes on the basis of their sexual orientation.

Yet these local homeless GLBT youth account for only a fraction of those in need of a safe, stable place to live. In California alone, of the more than 80,000 children in our foster-care system, a disproportionate number are minors who identify as being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.

Such children are often difficult to place, even in the GLBT community. Social agencies report that there is no surplus of GLBT people waiting to foster gay youth. This is because, even in states like California, where gays and lesbians can legally be foster parents or adopt children, most of us are ill-equipped to meet these children’s special needs. Most GLBT would-be parents prefer to adopt a newborn or use assisted reproduction to produce a biologically connected child rather than foster a child who’s been emotionally or physically abused or abandoned.

But this contributes to the continuation of the cycle of poverty in our community. California law only covers these minors until they reach 18. Then they are on their own. Without a place to live, no means of support and with incomplete education, they often become involved in petty crime, drug use and/or prostitution. It’s not unusual to find gay youth in juvenile detention facilities and, later on, in jail.

The California Legislature is considering extending foster-care benefits until foster children reach 21. Assembly Bill 12 would match federal funding, thus enabling foster parents to receive financial support for youth beyond age 18.

We need to support AB 12. Keep in mind that it costs Californians $32,000 per year per-person to incarcerate the more than 150,000 individuals in our 33 state prisons. We spend $10 billion per year in prison costs – that exceeds what we spend on higher education! We would be much better off paying to support youths while they finish high school and complete college.

But it’s not enough to ask the government to take responsibility. We need to play our part to stem the cycle of poverty by taking in these discarded GLBT children, loving them until they can love themselves and teaching them to extend their own hand when they are older to the GLBT children who will continue to be rejected by society.

Doing so will curtail the perpetuation of poverty in our community and expand our skills in healing our own. Adjunctively, it may even provide us greater credibility in the marriage debate. After all, if we want marriage rights then we need to start doing what most married heterosexual couples do – raising children. Children are the reason that married couples receive the benefits we’re asking for.

Only 30 percent of GLBT unions include children in the household, and the majority of gays and lesbians who are “married” or would “marry” do not plan to have children. That’s unfortunate – not only because courts may deem marriages devoid of procreation “voidable” but also because there are so many GLBT foster and other youth in need of parents.