rfmcdonald | [LINK] "Rejected by their families, gay teens in the South flock to Atlanta" (Reply)

America Al Jazeera's Betsy Kulman reports on the desperate migration of many rejected LGBT teens from across the American South to Atlanta.

Ryan Peterson's first low point happened in California in 2011 when he woke up on the roof of a house he didn't recognize, still high, after being awake for what he says was around five days.

He started to cry and called his cousin who bought him a plane ticket home to Georgia. He had just started to get his life back on track, he said, when he found out he was HIV positive. It crushed him.

"Not because of the fact that I was positive," he said. "Because of the fact that I couldn't have kids. That's what really crushed me the most, because I've always wanted kids. And I always will."

For HIV-positive men, having children can be a costly and difficult procedure.

His second low point was earlier this year, crashing on couches in Atlanta and dealing crystal meth to support his $300-a-day drug habit.

Peterson, now 23, is one of many young people in Georgia, and other Bible Belt states, who flock to the big city – Atlanta – after coming out as gay. But each night, some 2,000 children and youth in Atlanta are homeless. Nationally, about 40 percent of homeless youth identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, according to a survey by UCLA's Williams Institute.

Religious families are more likely to kick out gay children, making the Bible Belt a particularly tough place to be young and LGBT. In what activists say is a crisis of gay homeless youth in America, some call Atlanta "ground zero."

But the South also has few emergency shelters for LGBT youth in need. Lost-n-Found Youth is the only Atlanta nonprofit dedicated to getting homeless gay kids off the streets. The group's three founders created the organization in 2011 after all of them had experiences trying to place LGBT youth in shelters, only to have them turned away.