Member-only story
“Hobosexuals”: Exchanging Sex for Shelter
It’s time to re-think what homelessness looks like and how we help
In 2014, I met up with a friend on St. Thomas, USVI for lunch.
“You look like one of those ‘backpack girls’,” he told me as I arrived and sat across from him, storing my backpack under the table.
“What’s a ‘backpack girl’?” I asked.
He explained that women had been showing up on the island with nothing but a backpack, going to beaches and bars to chat up guys they could go home with and have a place to sleep.
Oh.
I wasn’t a backpack girl, and while I didn’t have any judgement about the new phenomenon, I was interested by the fact that it was a phenomenon at all.
Whether or not these women had homes on the mainland, they were, when it all boiled down to it, showing up homeless on the island.
“Hobosexuals”
In 2016, the New York Post published a story featuring two homeless men in New York who…
