Trevor Project helps gay youth with NYC call center

Aneesh Sheth, a call center counselor for the Trevor Project, the nation’s only 24/7 suicide prevention hotline for LGBT and questioning youth, at the group’s new call center facility downtown last week

By Diana Britton

One night last Fall, Jeff Teich got a call from Miami.

“Trevor helpline, my name is Jeff,” he said.

On the other line, he heard the voice of a young teen whose father had recently kicked him out of the house for coming out and proclaiming he was gay.

“I got nowhere to go,” the young teen said.

Teich, 45, was this boy’s last resort for getting help and figuring out how to get to safety.

“He was on the street for three days and didn’t know what to do,” Teich said. “That was one of the closest ones that this person on the other line might really do something to hurt themselves.”

Inside, Teich was feeling the urgency of the situation weighing down on him:

“You’re frantic as you’re trying to save their life. Definitely a lot of adrenaline going on.”

But on the outside, Teich remained calm as he remembered what the Trevor Helpline had taught him—to be a listener for the person on the other end of the line.

Knowing where the caller was located, Teich’s first priority was giving him the names of nearby shelters, hospitals and police stations and helping him find a way to get there. After agreeing on a place to go, Teich helped the boy come to terms with his sexual orientation and talked about how he could deal with his family.

Every time Teich hangs up the phone, he has no way of knowing whether an anonymous caller actually seeks help. But he still finds peace in the work he does for the Trevor Helpline.

“Even if that person were to commit suicide the next day,” Teich said, “you were still there for them.”

The Trevor Project, a non-profit organization based in Los Angeles, is the country’s only suicide helpline serving gay and questioning youth. While the helpline currently receives 900 calls a month on average at its Los Angeles office and has a contracted prevention center in San Francisco, the organization will reach even more youth in need when it goes bicoastal with the opening of its New York City call center in the Financial District on Oct. 2.

The organization has come a long way since its humble beginning. The Trevor Project began as a play written and performed by James Lecesne in the early 1990s, when Lecesne heard a report on NPR stating that gays and lesbians accounted for 33 percent of all suicides.

“I thought it was crazy, because those were just the ones they knew about,” he said.

Drawing on his own experience as a gay teen growing up in suburban New Jersey and flipping through his old journals, Lecesne wrote a short play about a 13-year-old named Trevor who attempts suicide.

After seeing the show one night Off Broadway, Peggy Rajski and Randy Stone approached Lecesne about making the play into a short film. The 18-minute film, “Trevor,” won the 1994 Academy Award for Best Live Action Short. But Lecesne hasn’t let the award go to his head.

“Saving lives, Academy Award… I go for saving lives,” he said. “That to me is the greatest thrill that you could have in a lifetime.”

HBO picked up the film in 1998 and asked the filmmakers if there was a toll-free number the network could publicize in case there were gay teens in crisis. At that point, when Rajski and Stone went to find one and discovered there was no helpline specifically for gay teens, and the Trevor Project was born.

“For me, it was a very personal story,” Lecesne said of “Trevor.” “I just didn’t think it would have such lasting value.”

The helpline has been going strong for almost 10 years now, but in February 2007 the organization felt a loss with the unexpected death of Stone, one of the founders, who suffered from heart failure at age 48. The Trevor Project recently launched a major campaign in Stone’s honor to raise funds for opening the New York call center. To date, they have raised $600,000, including the largest gift the organization has ever received, from Jodie Foster, a close friend of Stone’s. The organization believes the money will certainly go to good use.

“We believe that there is a huge need that we’re still not fulfilling,” said Charles Robbins, the Trevor Project’s new executive director.

In fact, suicide is the third leading cause of death among youth ages 16 to 24, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and the department of education in the state of Massachusetts found that LGBT and questioning youth are four times as likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers. Every time Trevor’s public service announcement airs on such networks as Fox and the N, Robbins said the helpline’s call volume increases by fourfold.

The New York call center will help meet this growing need, according to Robbins, who adds that it will give the organization a three-hour time zone advantage, leveling out the calls across the continent. The majority of their calls come in after school from the Midwest and southern regions of the United States, where there are relatively few resources for LGBT youth.

“We could be the first person they’ve ever talked to about it,” Teich said.

New York was a natural choice for the new call center, given the organization’s cadre of support among its Manhattan-based donors and board members.

Jeffrey Fishberger, the New York call center’s psychiatrist and co-chair of the New York steering committee, made leeway back in May when he met with 10 health classes at La Guardia High School to talk about “Trevor” and the issues facing LGBT teens. One student, who came out after reading a blurb about the Trevor Project in the school newspaper, raised his hand during the visit.

“‘I just want to let you know I’m the Trevor of the school,’” Fishberger recalls the boy as saying. “It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had in my life.”

Besides Fishberger, Robbins said New York offers a level of volunteerism that’s easy to tap into given the organization’s large network of people.
On August 16, Dave Reynolds, manager of the New York call center, began the process of interviewing and training counselors to run the new telephone lines. Volunteers don’t need any experience with helplines or psychology, Reynolds said. Besides committing to two shifts a month for at least a year, counselors just need to be non-judgmental, aware of LGBT issues and willing to offer a listening ear. Of the 35 or more applications Reynolds received, he chose 10 candidates who appeared to be a good fit and capable of going through the training.

“Our biggest need right now is human capital,” Reynolds said. “We’re nothing without our volunteers.”

Aneesh Sheth, a new volunteer, recently underwent four full days of training on two back-to-back weekends. The weekends included a series of speakers and seminars on how to deal with a variety of crises as well as numerous roll-playing activities.

“The drive to want to do this was still in all of us,” Sheth said after enduring the 32-hour training.

Sheth, a 25-year-old actor living in Chelsea, said his inspiration for volunteering came out of his own experience growing up in a small New Jersey suburb. During his senior year of high school, Sheth was the only person who had come out.

“I didn’t feel like I had anyone to talk to,” he said. “Having that really drove me to want to be that for somebody else.”

Teich said he also relates to his callers because he also knows what it feels like to come out.

“In each caller, there’s a little bit of me in them,” he said. “I wish that there had been a Trevor Project around when I was a kid.