The following is a transcript from an art piece I was involved in called �civic endurance� at around 2002 in Seattle:

�I've weathered a lot of years on the streets, six in total. When I first got out here I was 14. I had just come out to my parents. My dad was not cool with it at all. My mother was okay with it, but I initially ran away �cause I knew my dad was really wouldn't want me around. We met at Vah House, which is like this coffee shop on Capital Hill. It was going well, I guess, until he started hanging out with these crack-heads. Like he started getting more aggressive and it grew. He wanted me to be his sex-slave. Like I was the housewife and he was the moneymaker and it really didn't workout like that. The last I heard from him, he hung himself.I am that bad of a person? Did I make him � And then I silence myself, every time I ask that. I just thought it would be safer, you know, if I was a full-on woman, carried myself as such, than me just being queer and in everybody's face. I've been going as Maria since last October, almost a year.When I first started telling people I was, like, really lenient because I knew people weren't gonna get it right away. But now I've been getting into fights. Like I'd smack �em and they'd know exactly what I'm supposed to be called and they don't get it, so I smack them. I do such things, to get the point across that I'm a lady. The reason why people are so resistant, I think, is that they know me as one sex and then I leave for a month and I come back as a different sex. I think that's what disturbs them, I guess.If you're into prostituting, there's a large tranny, transgendered market. The really crude way of saying it, if you're a chick with a dick, you make a lot of money. I guess I would be a chick with a dick. Living amongst all these sick predators, pedophiles ... I felt like a slab of meat, like in a meat market, the QFC deli aisle �Of course people are gonna rummage through and throw away what they don't want and use, and use, and use what they want.�

this is where I was in my life when I was there ( in seattle ). QFC (Quality Food Centers) are a chain of grocery stores in Washington State.

A caring woman named Elaine Simons, was the director of Peace on the Streets by Kids on the Streets, a homeless youth organization started in the mid 90�s in Seattle, Washington �s alterna-queer neighborhood of Capital Hill. In late 2002, PSKS clients (such as myself) and a couple artists from NYC by the name of Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Terry wanted to do an art project in collaboration with some city agencies including PSKS. The project was to be an artistic protest against the vagrancy laws in the City of Seattle (and certainly everywhere else). McCallum and Terry set up a camera on a very accelerated speed across the street (at the Paramount Theatre) and focused on someone on the opposite side of the street (different people walked up and changed periodically) and stood in the same spot of sidewalk for a 24 hour period (outside the Metro tunnels).

(To check it out for yourself go to www.mccallumtarry.com/endurance/ )

I was involved with this art project during a very turbulent time in my life during the whole year of 2002. I wanted to participate because I wanted to tell my story. I stood in one spot of asphalt sidewalk for an hour and a half until someone else took my place.


Well, from reading the transcript, the first thing that comes to mind is the fact that we had met at the Bauhaus Caf�. I don�t know where they heard �Vah House� from.
Wow� I was just a ripe 19 years old trying to finish my GED at Peace for the Streets
until I met this ex navy dude from Illinois by the name of Jay Powell. He was 33 years old, a security officer for the Washington Mutual Tower in Downtown Seattle, and had a flat on the western slopes of Capital Hill very near to where the now defunct Coffee Messiah Caf� stood for hella years. He had started smoking crack and letting stupid hoes from the Central District suck him off for crack. I was so na�ve that I stayed with him.
Later he committed suicide apparently because he couldn�t come out to his father about our relationship. I remember that I would often times blame myself and would fall into a deep dark depression that lasted for years after that. I remember thinking those things about myself, how I felt that I wasn�t worth anything. Oh yeah, the resulting drug and alcohol use was insane. It was my way of self-medication. It lasted on like that until I turned 22, just before coming to the norcal. And, about getting into fistfights over which pronoun I prefer to be called, i mean that was all in Seattle. I don't have to experience (thank goddess) major problems with my gender here in Esseff.

As for my being on the streets, as of June 14th, 2006 I signed my first lease for my first place. So I guess I have been off the streets for a total of four months. Wow! Only four months? I have been through a lot of shit these past 10 years. I�m so glad that I am no longer homeless. But that does not mean I am no longer �one of them�. I should give back to the community by writing quality pieces voicing the plight of being homeless and queer in San Francisco. Giving back by doing what I love to do. This is what I am doing now. I am no longer that scared and depressed little transling that I was in 2002. As The City progresses so will I. Today at this moment in time I am actually happy. It was raining today and I have on these bright blue rubber clogs with no traction whatsoever. Which made the slicked down brick and asphalt sidewalks of San Francisco really slippery. I enjoy being able to write for a website such as roaddawgz.org because of what I know and believe what this site stands for. We give voices to those whom might not be heard otherwise. That�s a really powerful thing to be a part of.