Thread by @emmibevensee, I want to tell some stories about queer street kid life in [...]

I want to tell some stories about queer street kid life in SF in the early 10's and I'll do through the queerest lens I can think of: drama and beef. (thread)

Context: moved to SF with a small amount of money and no familial support. After i exhausted couches to sleep on, I slept (literally) on the stage of a creepy circus in dirty SOMA. The lights stayed on all night so i put a bob marley tapestry over and wore sunglasses to sleep.

I made good friends in that weird place but eventually i couldn't even afford the $150/mo (and the owner was straight garbage) for the illegal housing so I became homeless and started moving around in the squat / shelter systems. At this time i was also coming out as trans.

(epilogue: i went back to that neighborhood a couple years ago to idk vandalize the building or pick a fight or warn people about him and found that he was gone and there was some yuppy business there.)

The shelter was a weird place with strict rules and constant drama. Everyone there was deeply traumatized and exhausted and in a pretty low point in their lives so stuff was always boiling over but often the drama represented deeper complexities.

One time i was almost banned from the shelter for almost getting in a fist fight with this gay boy who refused to help mop bc if we didn't clean there would be collective punishment. This scuffle represented class dynamics in the shelter in interesting ways.

While most of the people in the shelter had been various degrees of poor before or most of their lives some people were newly poor and had no survival instincts. In a sense it was actually harder on them bc they couldn't accept it. So this queen literally didn't know how to mop.

I knew this other formally rich girl suddenly homeless through dad's bad business who really struggled but she was more compassionate and responsible. (tho me and gay boy squashed the beef later that night).

I guess that fight also represented tensions between the homeless youth and the staff. Some were control freaks and just mean. Some of the staff were incredible tho. Truly loved us and went out of their way to do stuff to show us luxury in that rough world in the Tenderloin.

Two of my favorite staff (both Black) were a man who taught us to play Dungeons and Dragons and was kind and nerdy and a woman from Louisiana who one time got us seafood and made a gumbo. There were some sweet queer staff too that helped us run events sometimes.

But bc of the strict rules we were always kind of in beef with staff teaming up and protecting each other. Like we had to leave early and be gone all day and be back before a time or sleep outside.. There was def a no snitching policy (tho some did and I imagine suffered for it).

There was also a lot of informal identity based alliances at play. Queers and Poc and particularly queer PoC (esp Black transwomen) were vastly over-represented. To some extent the queers and especially the transwomen looked out for each other but whiteness was still a factor.

The vast majority of the transwomen (and a lot of gay boys) were doing really quite rough survival sex work at that time. At some of the transgirl gatherings people would push me to feminize more and it really frustrated me bc of my gender identity.

But in retrospect I grew a lot of sympathy bc i realized what was actually happening was that some of the older Black and brown sex workers were trying to help me get a better hustle. Even though i didn't want it that way, it was kinship and i was privileged to b able to choose.

I learned other things about my whiteness there. I felt as homeless trans youth in the TL i was the bottom of society. But i started realizing more deeply that my whiteness garnered me privileges in that space as i was better able to game the system for relative perks.

The sex work dynamics in that world had other implications too. Namely, total war with the Castro gays. The Castro (gay neighborhood in SF) to us was the enemy. It was mostly white cis male and extremely exploitative and gated (not literally).

The kids would cruise their for a place to sleep and some of the Castro gays (as we called them) would pick them up and it was a pretty rough scene. We hated them for more than just that though.

They always voted against having a homeless queer youth specific shelter there (to protect against homophobia/transphobia stuff in the mainstream shelter system). On trans holidays they (used to) refuse to put up the trans flag on the corner even tho the BDSM and bear flags flew.

To us at the time, the castro was mostly just a ton of rich white dudes getting two white cis male SF salaries. It wasn't the sanctuary in the AIDs crisis and Harvey Milk and gay lib and other struggles they had faced. obv this is all generalization...

But like sometimes the gay men, more so in the castro than in the shelter would shout shit at us like "oh but you could be such a cute twink" or "shame about you trying to cut off your perfectly good..". I often felt more (cross-racial) class solidarity than queer in those times.

I think there was also beef more generally bw transwomen and gay men in my generation which was weird bc in my transmothers generation transwomen and gay men were thick as thieves (and they were also literally thieves..). She still goes to bear gatherings to hookup lmao.

But like things were different in the poor neighborhoods like the TL and in the shelter. To some extent people knew better than to fuck with transwomen there bc it's extraordinarily embarassing to get your ass beat by a girl 5 inches taller than you and in heels.

And most of the transgirls there grew up scrappy and carried weapons and looked out for each other too. So there was def still transphobic violence but there was some buffer. Plus everything runs on respect in neighborhoods like that. No disrespect, no trouble.

Sometimes there would be drama that was more complicated from an identity perspective. Like one time this brown straight cis kid and I got in beef bc he called me a tr*nny and I jumped at him. But like he saw me as privileged and white and I saw him as macho and transphobic.

But like... we were both homeless lol. In the end we were able to talk it out though probably in part bc his girlfriend at the time was my roommate in the group homes and I knew they were sneaking around and whatnot.

Later on though he dumped her and started dating one of the staff which caused DRAMA

. Another area of drama and beef had to do with drugs. Different kinds of addicts have different personalities generally and there would be tension with them and the non-heavy drug users.

We all knew all the best food lines in the city. Every week at union plaza there would be two trucks on either side. One was from this nice vegan curry place and the other was a meat spaghetti thing with free crucifixes.

The curry one was called curry not worry and we called the other one "pasta with some worries" because there was often drama there with the older homeless people and people kind of schwacked out on various drugs and struggling with mental illness.

At one point i was staring at this tweaker who was absolutely losing it (and her pants) in the plaza and this guy in line that i didn't know saw me and said the best thing ever to me. "There's a difference bw judgement and discernment" which i never forget.

I think he was calling me out bc i was no longer using drugs of any kind and i was judging her, when i could just be understanding what she's going through.

woops i broke the thread: https://twitter.com/emmibevensee/status/1337891023918338050