No Safe Place to Sleep

by Lola Bean/PNN Community Journalist

This story was produced in POOR Magazine's community newsroom at the US Social Forum in Atlanta.

" I felt safer in the box than I did in the shelter. " A lot of the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans gender) Community would rather stay on the streets than subject themselves to the violence and abuse running rampant in the New York City Shelter System. A stoic woman with steely eyes and a salt and pepper crew cut sits with me in a grey and musky cubicle, as she recounts gut twisting stories about being beaten, sexually assaulted, and tossed like a worthless and used up sack of garbage down a flight of stairs in a shelter that was supposed to be there to provide her with a safe place to sleep - all because she is queer.

" I talked back to one of the shelter staff, and she just grabbed me and threw me down the stairs, " she recounts with an accent of stern dignity

I met Jay Toole in POOR News Network's Community Newsroom at the Atlanta Social Forum. She is a strong and unapologetic butch dyke that spills the brilliance of her scholarship and uncompromising dedication out of her thin, light pink lips. She is the Homeless Shelter Community Organizer for Queers for Economic Justice, and a queer woman with close to three decades of poverty scholarship with a focus in houslessness under her belt. Jay probably knows more about the New York City Shelter System than anyone else in the Big Apple.

As she details the inhumane and violent stories the New York shelter system has written in her mind, my stomach began rejecting the pizza I had eaten just moments before and my headlight wide eyes began to fill with tears. As a poverty and abuse scholar myself, I immediately connected with Jay's experiences of being physically, emotionally, and economically violated because those with authority and access considered me to be less than human. The mental and physical blows she described almost knock the wind out of me.

The abuse she sustained was not limited to single instances. It was an unsaid contractual obligation in exchange for the right to sleep under a roof. " The guards would be in the same room I was being beaten in. They just turned their backs until they were done." She could be attacked in the bathroom, in the stairwell, in the main room – there was no safe space in the shelter. In addition to physical abuse, Jay sustained mental blow after blow as the shelter system psychologically battered her will.

When asked what the most difficult part of her experiences was, she immediately answers, “The loneliness. It was just lonely not being able to talk about who I am.” The shelters forced Jay to participate in group talk therapy. This was supposed to help her in her healing process and recovery, but actually served to further alienate and isolate her. Jay wanted to talk about her relationship, about the experiences she had as butch lesbian, about the trauma she was forced to endure for being a queer woman. All of these things were at the root of her joblessness, her houselessness, and her addiction. The counselors said she needed to talk about her problems, but when she did, she was told that her problems were to be kept to herself. The consequences for speaking were violent.

Jay was also separated from her partner of 14 years, Shiela. They were not allowed to stay at the same shelter together, although they were each other’s main source of support. Jay not only had to deny her own legitimacy, but that of her partner as well. The shelter system did not want her to exist.

Again my stomach turns. I hear so much of my story in her own. I’ve taken many beatings, lived in conditions I would not wish on anyone, and fought through trauma and its accompanying self medication. The most painful part of these experiences was, and in many ways still is, the lonliness. It crushes your will and dulls your sight. It leads you into dark places and traps you there. It eats the lining of your stomach and bleeds your tears dry. It is where you live with the flashes of memory and the shock of fear.

" Homophobia – it's alive and well in New York City, " Jay says with an upturned eyebrow elevated by dark irony. Jay's queer scholarship spans decades, and I follow her word all the way back to the mid sixties. Saturday nights, to be exact. Which one doesn't really matter, they all ended up the same. Jay and her crew would get together, go out for a night on the town, and end up arrested by the end of the night. Back then, women were legally forced to wear three articles of "female" clothing. Anything less was considered to be male impersonation and violators were charged with sexual deviance. As butch women, their clothing style was a criminal offense.

This is especially offensive considering that on the whole, it was impossible for butch women to get jobs unless they pretended to be men. " I used the name Melvin. " But even as Melvin, Jay could barely earn enough money to pay for a hotel every once in a while. She explains that it's hard to find work and that she was forced to live on the streets because with no work, there was no money.

Her words echoed in my ears loud enough for me to momentarily believe that they were my own thoughts replaying. In a flash, I relived countless failed job interviews, years spent moving from couch to couch with all of my belongings in my car, hours and hours of dumpster diving to try and find hopefully that last bag of bagels that would feed me for at least 3 or 4 days if I spread it out right. My stomach started turning again and the dry slice of starchy pizza started climbing once again up my throat. Most nights, I could find places to sleep and today cleaning houses helps keep me fed. Jay, a woman who lives to find safe spaces for houseless LGBT community members, spent decades living on the streets of New York City.

With a depth of experience that is only paralleled by her depth of dedication, she admits that as difficult as it was for her to earn a living, it was and still is even more difficult for queer people of color. Without skipping a beat, Jay proclaims, "It's a brown community in the shelter system in NYC. " To take it another step further, the most vulnerable population, is the trans gender community. They used to send the trans gender women off to an island. Ward's island, to be exact. " You're not going to believe the name of the building they were sent to on that island. It was called the Charles H. Gay building, " Jay said. Jay as fought for years to get transgender off of that island and into safe shelters. This task is all but impossible considering the general abusive treatment experienced by the trans gender community in most sectors of Amerikkkan life couple with the fact that out of 53 shelters, only 4 of them are considered acceptable by Queers for Economic Justice. In a recent victory, though, QEJ won a long fought battle and now trans gender men and women are allowed to self determine their placement in shelters.

This is unacceptable in and of itself, but considering the large number of queer folks in the New York City shelter system, it is outright appalling. Between 40 – 60% of homeless youth in NYC shelters are from the queer community. Jay explains, "“The kids I'm seeing on the streets today are the people I'll be seeing in the adult shelters tomorrow.”" Identifying as queer in the United States often leads to forced conditions of violence and poverty. Many men and women in the LGBT community are separated from their families and communities, find it extremely difficult to find work and places to live, and are left vulnerable to hate crimes and other acts of violence. It is no surprise so many queer youth and adults must pass through the shelter systems in New York City and throughout the nation. The large number of poor members of the LGBT community passing through shelters coupled with the high rates of abuse establishes the New York City shelter system as an institutional system of violence against queers. Jay Toole is working to change this.

" Education in the shelter systems is #1." Jay has spent years advocating for sensitivity training in the shelter systems. She worked tirelessly for three years to institute a pilot program in which shelter staff in 4 shelters would be trained on queer issues, especially in trans gender sensitivity. She conducts monthly “Know Your Rights” Trainings for houseless LGBT folks and has run outreach groups in a dozen shelters throughout New York City. Jay is fighting for the right of houseless domestic partners to have access to the family shelter system so they don’t have to be separated as she and Sheila have been. She is also active in the "Shelter Safety " campaign which seeks to end violence in the shelters.

When people are taught that some of their brothers and sisters are less than human, whether it’s because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, class, etc., it takes a lot of work to undo the damage that kind of teaching causes. When that damage causes hate and fear and violence that goes unchallenged in any system, it takes a great deal of strength to fight these battles. Jay and those in struggle with her are forced to face violence at all levels in order to secure a safe place to sleep for those in her community. There’s a lot of work to be done before shelters are safe for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans gender community. There’s a lot of work to be done before any of us can find a safe place to sleep.