Damayanti Wallace, a queer Black poet, community organizer and Chicago native, recounted police disrupting recent open-mic nights where queer youths of color often found sanctuary.

“I was able to be around these adults who were queer and in queer relationships and it was so loving and so welcoming and so beautiful and, also, so messy,” they said. “I remember [when] cops would come into the open mics and try to stop whatever we were doing or [when] my mentors [had] to go stand at the door so the police wouldn’t come in.”

Wallace is a co-founder of GoodKids MadCity, a non-profit youth organization fighting to end inner-city violence, call for community resources and to abolish police. Through both their work and their experiences as a queer Black person, Wallace has seen the individual struggles of each identity, as well as the unique tension with police born from this intersection.

“Policing is inherently violent to a Black queer person because it’ is the embodiment of all of the things we are running away from or fighting on a day to day basis,” they said. 

To Julian Mohammed, a Black gay man based in Harlem, the tension is unsurprising. With two police officers for parents, Mohammed grew up around law enforcement. This closeness helped illuminate more overarching issues within the force, he explained.

“I know for a fact they do treat minorities different,” he said. “I’ve heard that from their mouths, that if a minority walks up to them they’re gonna be more likely to perceive it as a threat. That’s more common, I guess, in the neighborhoods they’re in.”

The issue, to Mohammed, is that police officers simply do not care about certain communities.

“I’ve seen a lot of cops say ‘f——’ and I don’t know if they’re just saying it because everyone used to say it back then,” he said. “But I feel like if you were hate crimed  or anything, it’s gonna get brushed under the rug.”

Police discrimination may be a driver of poor health outcomes and inequities among Black LGBTQ+ people, according to a 2020 paper published in Social Science & Medicine. The same paper found that four in ten Black LGBTQ+ men claimed they’d faced police violence in the last year. Another study found that Black transgender people are 50 percent more likely than their non-Black counterparts to be arrested following a police stop.

The singularity of these difficulties has left Wallace disillusioned with policing.

“You place black and queer together and it’s almost like you’re placing yourself in your own special kind of hell,” Wallace said.

The post Black queer community often at odds with police appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

Meek Young, 37, of Jersey City and owner of Groomed Guys Mobile Barbershop seeks to provide a safe zone for members and allies of the LGBTQ+ community  looking for a haircut. 

“Being a Black queer woman, I really want this to be a space for anyone that just wants to be themselves,” Young said. “That is why I have a sign in the shop that says ‘Enter as strangers. Leave as friends.’” 

Haircuts can be heavily anxiety-inducing for the LGBTQ+ community. Oftentimes, barbershops are used to traditional gender norms with hairstyles, which leaves individuals in the LGBTQ+ community in a state of distress. Young said that she understands the difficulty for them when it comes to seeking a place where they feel comfortable getting a haircut and wanted to change that. 

“So many of my customers have told me they came to my barbershop because of the pride flag on the back of my van,” Young said. “The flag is a staple of my business. It is there to let people know that they are always welcome as themselves.”

Young keeps a pride flag on her van to encourage people of all gender identities, sexual orientations, and races to get a haircut at her shop. The mission of her barbershop is to make all feel comfortable and accepted. Photo by Nathan Morris

The flag attracts customers like Victor Muñoz, 30, of Brooklyn.

“Sometimes, people in the community feel like they are constantly on edge about personal conversations with a new barber because you never know who you’re dealing with,” said Muñoz. “It is totally different here. It feels safe.”

Young gives client Victor Munoz, 30 of Brooklyn, a haircut. “I saw the flag here and knew that I had to come here,” he said. “It is so inclusive.” Photo by Nathan Morris

Not everyone passing by has displayed positive feelings towards the flag that she displays on her van. She said that an individual came up to her van and threatened to burn her pride flag. 

“To me, it’s a choice to be a piece of shit,” Young said.

Meek Young gives client a haircut in her mobile barbershop. Photo by Nathan Morris

Young said she has a large clientele in the transgender community that often come to her shop for a haircut in the beginning of their transition, which she calls the “big chop.”

“I think quarantine caused a lot of unhappiness,” Young said. “People were stuck at home, and I think because of that unhappiness, some wanted to begin their transition.” 

During the quarantine, those questioning their gender identity were also provided with the opportunity to process how they were feeling. She said it makes her happy to give haircuts to the transgender community and the LGBTQ+ community as a whole because she aims to offer an accepting, affirming, and theraputic environment.

Meek Young gives a haircut to her client while wearing a mask. Photo by Nathan Morris

Young lived in New York City for 10 years when she began cutting hair before moving to Jersey City. When she told her mother that she was moving to the city to do hair, her mother could not believe it.

“My mother said to me, ‘Who would let you do their hair when you look and dress like a boy?’” Young said that did not phase her.

Sign that reads “Enter as Strangers. Leave as Friends.” Meek Young said she wants clients to know that your haircut experience with her will be genuine. Photo by Nathan Morris

She started out in the mobile barbershop business by giving haircuts to the employees of Spotify and Tumblr while they were at work. When the pandemic hit and offices closed, she tried to figure out her next move. She said that Soho was the perfect pivot once the city started to open up again because it was a heavily trafficked area.

“As a veteran, this mobile barbershop has really helped with my anxiety because it gives me the opportunity to control my own space,” she said. 

Now, Young said that she feels like she has defied many odds by having a business that is Black, female, and queer owned.

The post Van Barbershop provides safe space for LGBTQ+ haircuts appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

The post Dating apps can be a dangerous space for LGBTQ users appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

Parisa Pena, 24,  immediately noticed the transphobic environment at Kingsborough Community College, where she first came out as transgender to her social groups.  She was so scared of what others reactions would be, so to test the waters, Pena lived her life as a gender non-conforming male.

Last month,  Pena was one of over 100 transgender, non-gender conforming and non-binary (TGNCNB) New Yorkers gathered in City Hall’s Council Chambers. Of the 51 individuals slated to testify before the Committee on Women and Gender Equity, 25 were students, staff, and faculty at  City University of New York (CUNY) schools. Each recounted negative experiences encountered as TGNCNB students, staff, and their allies. Complaints included consistently being misgendered, the lack of restroom facilities inclusive to those of all gender expressions, physical and emotional violence, workplace discrimination, and much more.

The oversight hearing, spearheaded by Helen Rosenthal, District 6 Council member and chair of the Committee, allowed them to talk about their experiences living as TGNCNB people. 

Despite the passage of anti-discrimination laws such as the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA), this year, many needs of TGNCNB community, which hovers around 0.6% of all 798,00 adults living in New York, were still being overlooked.

“It became obvious as a city council body, we have an opportunity to have a hearing and ask the administration, ‘What is going on? What are you working on to address the needs of this community?’ she said.  One of those organizations was CUNY and many of their students weren’t going to go unheard any longer. 

For Pena, who identifies as a Latinx,  non-binary, transgender woman, it took a few years of being at Kingsborough  Community College before she was comfortable to tell her truth about being a transgender woman. When she did, she, like 78 percent of TGNCNB youth nationwide became a victim of harassment from students and even staff members at the school. 

“At times at Kingsborough, I was often sexualized and demoralized for being a transgender woman,” she said.“Students talked about me in the hallways, took pictures of me leaving the bathroom and spread rumors to the student population. Professors refused to use my pronouns,  defaming my gender identity. The student board committee didn’t do anything to protect me. The school just let me know that the student would be talked to and nothing else.” 

Shortly after the picture taking incident, Pena’s most upsetting moment came when school officials essentially did what the student did, and took a picture of her without consent, plastering her picture on promotional material for transgender inclusitivity in the school community. The material was circulated around the school, officially outing Pena as transgender to the entire student body. Being outed,  whether done maliciously or not, can lead to harmful, and sometimes fatal consequences. LGBTQ youth contemplate suicide almost three times the rate that their heterosexual counterparts do and are almost five times as likely to have made a suicide attempt compared to heterosexual youth, according to the Trevor Project. 

For transgender youth, according to  the 2015 National Center for Transgender Equality survey, 40% of transgender adults within the age range of 10-34, reported making a suicide attempt in their lifetime, and for 92% of them, their attempt occured before they turned 25.  

Pena transferred to John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where she is now a senior. While she still faces the occasional microaggression, John Jay has been a safer environment.  But for others like Red Washburn, 38, simply packing up and leaving Kingsborough wasn’t an option.

Washburn, an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies at Kingsborough, made headlines when they penned a June 2019 op-ed in the Daily News about the abuse they received from the school’s administration after coming out.

  The trouble began when Washburn, who identifies as transgender, non-conforming and nonbinary, came out as transgender to their department in 2017, announcing that they were requesting a name and pronoun change, as well as the fact that they were having male chest reconstruction surgery. Within six months of that announcement, Kingsborough informed Washburn, who has been at the college for six years, that the Women and Gender Studies (WSG) program, was getting defunded. They believe it was because they came out.

 Gender studies programs often serve as safe spaces for queer stiudents.

Dr. Brianne Waychoff, an associate professor at CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community also saw their gender studies department lose funding.

“I think that is how most interdisciplinary programs are at public universities. It’s hard for people to understand what they are,” Waychoff said. 

Despite not having a budget, full-time professors, or even a physical space for the program, Waychoff is remaining positive about its future.

“It’s consistently growing and students are taking the intro class because we have it as general education offering now, she said. “There’s a lot of verbal support for the program and I think that people are generally glad it’s there. There’s just not a lot of tangible support.”

Despite their negative experiences, Waychoff, Washburn and many others have hope that after the hearing, there will be better experiences for the queer  community within the CUNY school system.

“I was really moved and inspired by the testimonies that were shared today, said Washburn. 

 I know it takes a lot of courage to tell your story and speak your truth, but they gave me a lot of hope that things will change across CUNY.”

For Waychoff, change will only happen if there is continuous and consistent effort on all sides.

“Find your allies and work together,” Waychoff said. “Get on every committee that you can and bring this up at every meeting.”

The post CUNY gender non-conforming students and staff want City Council support appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

Katherine Franke is a Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University. She’s considered to be one of the “nation’s leading scholars writing on law, religion, and rights” and has written books on topics such as abolition and reparations. Now, Franke is joining a different distinguished group of Americans, she and her partner have decided to sponsor an asylum seeker, a young trans woman from El Salvador. They will take her in and be responsible for her until she is given permission to permanently reside in the country.

The woman, Ana, not her real name,  was being held in Tijuana when Franke met her. She was with a group of Columbia students volunteering with Al Otro Lado, an organization the provides legal assistance to migrants on both sides of the border when she met Ana and heard her story.  Ana told Franke about severe abuse she fled in El Salvador and then endured in Tijuana when she was sent there by the U.S. government. She says she was beaten and terrorized by drug cartels and the Mexican Federal Police.

“She had been into the clinic a couple of times, one of the other lawyers there had done an intake with her and had just been completely flattened by the story,” Franke explained. “We sort of took her under our wing when we were there, and get her ready as possible before she was put into detention.”

Sponsoring asylum seekers is not an answer to the number of people who are trying to enter the country, but it has been a method of welcoming refugees from into the U.S. from other parts of the world in times of crisis. Traditionally, sponsors were not private citizens like Franke – it was religious groups. According to a report from the Catholic church, they resettled 1.1 million refugees in the United States between 1987 and 2016.

Under a Trump administration policy (“Remain in Mexico”) that started in late January, Central American migrants from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, are sent back to Mexico once they reach the U.S. border, to wait while their asylum claims are processed. In March, when Franke met Ana, it was projected that nearly 100,000 people  tried to cross to the U.S. – Mexico border just in the month of March.

Sponsoring asylum seekers is not an answer to the number of people who are trying to enter the country, but it has been a method of welcoming refugees from into the U.S. from other parts of the world in times of crisis. Traditionally, sponsors were not private citizens like Franke – it was religious groups. According to a report from the Catholic church, they resettled 1.1 million refugees in the United States between 1987 and 2016.

Franke did not become a sponsor through a religious organization, but instead through a non profit called Showing Up For Racial Justice. The group runs a program that supports “folks on the caravan by connecting them with volunteer sponsors in the U.S. in order to give them a chance to get out of detention and plead their case for asylum,” according to their website.

It was clear to Franke that Ana was facing incredible odds, and Franke was reminded  of the case of Roxana Hernandez, another trans woman who died in ICE custody in 2018. After weeks in Tijuana, Ana’s number was called – she would be moved to the San Ysidro, San Diego, CA., Customs, and Border Protection processing and detention facility – the same facility that held Hernandez before her death.

Franke decided to become Ana’s sponsor, responsible for her legal resettlement in the U.S. – she filled out the paperwork and will be responsible for everything from finding her a place to stay, to help with medical care, and bringing her to court appointments. When Ana entered detention she had Franke as a sponsor and a man named Jose Campos as her attorney. Campos spent the first week of Hernandez’s detention trying to find a way to get in contact with Ana. They hoped that because Ana had what so many did not – representation and sponsorship – that she would be processed and released quickly. Instead, she has been detained since she was taken from Tijuana.

“The biggest reason why we want to get them out of there is that they’re not being recognized as trans women, they are being put in with the men,” said Meredith Vina over the phone.

Vina is a trans woman living in San Diego. She and her wife Eleanor are both retired, and they have been able to visit Ana in detention.

“For example, we went to see Ana* today and she was in a room with five other men. Now, fortunately for her, we talked to her and we said: ‘Are you okay? Do you feel safe?’ And she said that the men were respecting her and actually respecting her pronouns so far.”

Vina not only visits Ana in detention – she is also sponsoring a trans woman seeking asylum from Central America.

“The way I got involved – It was just all these caravans coming up to Tijuana, and having friends getting involved in going down there and bringing supplies,” Vina said. . “Getting to the point where we said ‘How can we get these people to the United States?’”

The post Professor sponsors trans woman refugee appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

The post Drag Kid in NYC appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

The post A barbershop in Brooklyn that cuts hair outside the gender binary appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

Hundreds of people entered the Temple Emanu-El on yesterday to honor the life and legacy of Edith “Edie” Windsor, a gay icon whose battle for marriage equality led to the legalization of gay marriage.

Mourners held their heads down, sniffled back tears, held hands or embraced loved ones as they entered the funeral service.

“She was just one person, but was able to have this sort of huge ripple effect on the lives of so many Americans, and so many LGBTQ Americans,” said Nick Morrow, who came up from Washington, D.C., to attend the service. Morrow now works with the Human Rights Campaign, but helped with the press team for Windsor’s Supreme Court trial.

Windsor’s quest for equality started in 2009 after her spouse, Dr. Thea Spyer, died of complications from multiple sclerosis. The couple was wed in Canada, but the marriage was not recognized in the United States because of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Windsor had to pay estate taxes, about $600,000, and knew that was wrong. Her case climbed all the way to the Supreme Court and her victory opened the door to all gay couples being allowed to wed.

Hundreds of people gathered outside Temple Emanu-El to honor the life of LGBT activist, Edith Windsor. Photo by Lisa John Rogers

“Her legacy is one of love, and the right that we now have to marry the people we love,” said Rabbi Amy B. Ehrilch at the start of the service. “To have love as your legacy in life, and in law, is an everlasting blessing, which will continue to encourage and shelter generations to come with the freedom inherent in justice and equality.”

Some time after Windsor won her landmark case, Hillary Rodham Clinton came out in support of same-sex marriage. Support of LGBTQ rights was prominent in her failed presidential campaign.

“She helped changed hearts and minds,” said Clinton to the hundreds gathered at the Upper East Side synagogue, “including mine.”

In 2016, Windsor met her “next love,” her widow, Judith Kasen-Windsor.

“How does someone find the words to describe someone as unique and special as Edie?” Kasen-Windsor said to the mourners. “We all know she was a remarkable woman, a leader, a technology pioneer and a civil rights trailblazer who without end gave to those tirelessly around her.”

The couple’s love story was featured in The New York Times.

“To me she was simply my love,” she said. “When I met Edie, I knew the moment I set eyes on her years ago that she was the woman for me.”

Roberta “Robbie” Kaplan, Windsor’s Attorney in her civil rights case, said that for the last eight years Windsor was worried that she did not have long to live.

“After her spouse, Thea Spyer, passed away, Edie had suffered from a series of heart attacks which were diagnosed by doctors as broken heart syndrome — which is a real thing,” said Kaplan. “Indeed, Edie asked me and some of the other lawyers on her team to carry her nitroglycerine tablets with us when we attended events — just in case. Because of her heart condition, I think it’s fair to say, I became completely neurotic about making sure that Edie’s case got decided as quickly as possible.”

Windsor was not only celebrated for being a gay rights pioneer at the service, but for her accomplishments in her profession. Windsor earned a master’s degree in mathematics at New York University and went on to work at IBM. She eventually rose to the highest technical position at IBM as a computer programmer, which was incredibly rare for a woman at the time. After she retired, Windsor was responsible for putting many gay organizations online in the early days of the Internet.

“Always quick to volunteer, not only information but also her time and her energy, and she felt very, very strongly about the issue of ageism in the LGBT community as well as the mainstream community,” said Sandy Warshaw, a close friend.

At the end of the service, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of LGBT friendly Congregation Beit Simchat Torah asked the mourners to stand for the “gay national anthem.” People laughed, and everyone exited to a live rendition of Over the Rainbow.

The post LGBTQ hero Edith Windsor celebrated in moving service appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

The post A new face for the transgender community appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

“I had a lot of male barbers that would cut my hair and they would not be into cutting it down really low [short],” said Parker, 55, a landscape photographer and resident of Sunset Park, Queens. “They tried to talk me into keeping it a little longer.”

But Khane Kutzwell, 43, came to the rescue with her barbershop, Camera Ready Kutz that caters to the grooming needs of the LGBT community. On her website, she includes queer, asexual and intersex people to her barbershop in the comfort and privacy of one of her apartment’s bedrooms at Eastern Parkway in Crown Height, Brooklyn.

Parker’s colleague told her about Camera Ready Kutz three years ago and she has been a customer ever since. She even brought her 14-year-old son there after a hair clipper was pressed to tight to his scalp and cut him in a traditional barbershop.

“A lot of barbers tend to put a lot of pressure on the scalp when they were cutting his hair and he didn’t like the experience,” Parker said. “It’s like a dentist, you have to feel comfortable to go on a regular basis.”

They travel 30 minutes to get to Kutzwell’s two bedroom apartment, where one of the bedrooms serves as a barbershop.

Kutzwell started her barbershop in 2007 when her friends in the LGBTQ community complained about the service they received at neighborhood barbershops. For the community, getting a haircut is an irksome experience because they could never get what they wanted.

Kutzwell’s family emigrated from Trinidad and Tobago when she was really young and she grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens. Her upbringing shaped who she is today.

“I didn’t grow up male or female,” she said. “My family just treated me as whatever I presented at the moment.”

Now she identifies herself as a trans-entity, an entity who’s always transitioning through gender. But in the male dominated business, Kutzwell identifies herself as a female.

“I wake up sometimes and I feel more male than female, sometime more female than male,” she said, “So, I don’t identify as anything in particular, I just let myself be.”

Kutzwell said that she is not the barber for the LGBT community.

“If you look it up on the internet, there are tons of other LGBT friendly barbershops, so I’m not claiming that I’m the only one here,” she said. “But I always try to step up the game through the internet.”

Apart from promoting the business through website and Facebook, she has built a mobile app to make reservation easier for her prospective customers.

Although Kutzwell’s barbershop caters to the LGBT community, her customers include people from all backgrounds, races, gender, sexual orientation, and religion, such as the Orthodox Hasidic Jewish Community in Brooklyn and Muslim women. Her vast range of clientele gives her a boarder sense of different cultures in the world.

“Every culture has their own way of conducting haircut, like the Hasidic Jewish, they don’t want their side to be touched, or Muslim women who would only remove their headscarf in front of the people they trust,” she said. “Those cultural variations always amazed me.”

Apart from offering tolerant service, Kutzwell has many promotional discounts such as her famous “Get A, Get 50 percent off” program for students who get good grades.

“In the end, it’s about supporting your community,” she said.

Kutzwell’s next project will be her own mortar and brick storefront LGBT friendly barbershop in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. She hopes the barbershop will be a place where people can hang out and get their hair and nails done in a nonjudgmental space. Her dream is to have barbers and beauticians, who share her belief of unprejudiced service to the LGBT community, housed in one spot.

“I’m planning on taking a beautician class, so I can take a better care of my clients,” she said. “After all, I’ve always wanted to go back to school and sharpen up my skill.”

The post LGBTQ barbershop makes the right cuts appeared first on Pavement Pieces.