In a blue rowhouse in the District’s Eastern Market, Tiara is wiggling her hips and singing along throatily with 21 other black youths. Their voices are velvet. Tiara, in her rainbow-striped top, press-on blue nails and yellow sneakers is dressed down for the occasion; her friends dazzle in red wigs, sparkly eyeliner, crop tops and leather miniskirts. As the keyboardist pounds out the melody, arms are raised, heads thrown back and all the voices come together in a crescendo.
The group is Breaking Ground, a local theater collective for LGBT youths of color; they are rehearsing for their next performance in September, a musical extravaganza chronicling their varied life stories. Hers, Tiara knows, is unusual even among this eclectic group. But for now, she is just reveling in the luxury of being herself.
Like so many young transgender people in the city, Tiara is not a D.C. local. She was drawn in because of the city’s progressive laws, vibrant LGBT community and social support for people like her. She’s living in a newly opened transitional housing apartment off Benning Road in northeast D.C., run by the LGBT nonprofit Supporting and Mentoring Youth Advocates and Leaders (SMYAL). The building opened its doors to eight homeless youths in January, trying to plug a vast gap in the city’s resources for young LGBT people without housing; Tiara, in her early 20s, was the first resident to move in. Next summer, she will have to move out and find her own way.
This apartment is not much like home, she often marvels. The ghetto in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she lived until last year is home also to the Chipangano, the ruthless youth militia linked to President Robert Mugabe. She worked discreetly as an LGBT youth activist, but no one outside her family knew she wanted to live as a woman, or even that she was gay. She went by her male name, Traimo. Every time she dabbed on face powder or wore a tight top in public, she felt like she was participating in a small revolution. Her first thoughts when she woke up every morning were, “Am I going to come home alive today?”
Last summer, while she traveled to the District for a young African leaders’ fellowship, someone sent photos of her dressed in women’s clothes cuddling with her boyfriend to everyone in her neighborhood back home. She knew immediately she couldn’t return, or she or her family could be kidnapped or even killed. So she stayed, hoping that someone in Washington, a sanctuary for undocumented and LGBT migrants fleeing persecution, would help.
She wasn’t too worried at first; she had endured abuse, harassment, rejection and constant fear of violence in Harare ever since she was a teenager. She had witnessed kidnappings, lost loved ones and gone hungry. She had suppressed her true identity since she was 4-years-old. She would survive this. So, she consulted a pro-bono lawyer in D.C. and traveled to New York to link up with other African immigrants and ask for help.
It was in New York on a ferry that she first encountered a transgender woman. Tiara couldn’t stop staring. The woman just went about her business, playing on her phone, humming a tune, unaware of her surroundings. When she got off, Tiara followed her for a few blocks just to be near her, entranced by her freedom.
But that independence proved elusive for Tiara. Everyone she met in New York was too busy trying to survive America themselves to help her. She realized she was in real trouble when she found herself living in the Staten Island Ferry Whitehall Terminal, riding the ferry back and forth every night for days. In November, days after the U.S. presidential election, she ended up back in the District. Like nearly three-quarters of black transgender women in the city, she was homeless.
“So here I am, thinking, okay, I’m a queer undocumented homeless person of color. How does this work?” she says. “I’m like, now I’m here so I can sit here and cry or start to figure out things myself.”
Life lessons
Six people are crammed into Tiara’s open-plan kitchen in the apartment on Benning Road, watching a young man make breakfast oats. The ingredients are simple: blueberries, bananas, nutmeg, cinnamon, condensed milk and oats. He’s explaining to the residents of the SMYAL house how to shop on a budget.
“I don’t know what that means,” Tiara moans. “When I go to the supermarket, I just end up buying everything.” The concept of price per unit fascinates her. “I’ll try that next time,” she laughs.
The cooking class is part of SMYAL’s life skills program, which was launched for the residents of the housing complex in May. The goal of the housing program, its executive director, Sultan Shakir, says is not just to provide shelter, but also to make independent adults out of the youths.
“We’re big on life skills like cooking and financial literacy, jobs training and connecting them to the larger community here in D.C.,” he says. “We instill a sense of independence from Day One, they are expected to live alone, get to work, eat and save by themselves. We don’t want to put a bandage on their situation, but help them become self-sufficient.”
SMYAL launched its house in response to the first-ever census of homeless youths in the District in 2015, which found that nearly half identified as LGBT. "That is a crisis we felt we really had to address," Shakir says. This population is one of the most vulnerable on D.C. streets: Hate crimes against them almost doubled in 2016, according to the mayor's office. When they are homeless, LGBT youths are at the highest risk of unsafe sex work, mental illness and abuse.
Despite these risks, the District offered only about 20 beds for homeless LGBT youths until this year, through organizations such as Casa Ruby and the Wanda Alston Foundation. SMYAL’s eight-bedroom space hardly closes the gap, but it has helped get some of the most helpless young people off the street and working. For Tiara, it is a safe space with lifelines, including a paid-for phone, Metro card and grocery money, a pro-bono lawyer to file her asylum papers and volunteer work. She’s never seen a therapist or a physician focused on transgender health. This week, she has her first appointment at the Whitman-Walker Health clinic.
“Stories like Tiara’s are sadly all too common among homeless kids here in D.C. There are so many trans women of color who seek asylum in Washington, D.C., where there are opportunities for access to health care, legal services and housing,” says Lourdes Ashley Hunter, a transgender activist who runs the Trans Women of Color Collective. The city provides legal protections for the transgender community, a stark contrast to more than 30 other states where it is still legal to discriminate against transgender people in jobs, education and housing.
Sometimes, Tiara gets tired of fighting. Like last week when she woke up, feeling refreshed, only to find a nasty comment from her cousin on Facebook telling her she could never be a woman.
Or the times she speaks to her parents and her 10-year-old niece and remembers that it could be years before she sees them again.
And that time in January when she was walking from the Stadium-Armory Metro station to the house and was grabbed by a man who said he had just gotten out of prison and “wanted a welcome home present.”
But most days, Tiara wakes up and puts on her armor. When she arrived, she was unemployed, and alone. “Now, I have my own key, my own door, my own space.”
Back home, she was an LGBT youth activist and peer educator; she bailed out gay children from jail and took them to see “safe” doctors who wouldn’t out them. In the District, she has managed to stay connected to this passion. She volunteers at two LGBT organizations — SMYAL and Trans United, as a grass-roots youth organizer.
Through Breaking Ground, she has finally made friends, many of whom have been homeless at variouspoints in their lives. They teach her that sometimes it's okay to be silly, to play, to be carefree. She wrote the script for her scenes in the play, based on her own experiences of coming out to her family.
“One time my mother and I were watching ‘the Jerry Springer Show’ with an episode of a gay man and trans woman. And my mom suddenly said which one are you?” she says.
“So, I said I’m the girl obviously! And she said so does that mean you want to have the operation? I said well, if I have the money. That’s how I came out to her.”
When she is overwhelmed, she goes to CVS in Eastern Market. She lingers in the makeup aisle, buying miscellaneous items she doesn’t need — a set of travel brushes, face spray because her face gets sweaty.
Each day is different, and here she can wake up and dance and live as herself. She dreams of one day performing in drag as a magnificent, transgender Beyoncé.
It’s a privilege, she thinks.
“It’s really amazing how my life switches in one snap. Everything changes,” she says, watching “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” on her Ikea couch.
“Snap. I come here for a program, the opportunity to meet American leaders, six weeks, awesome.
“Then snap, I’m stuck in the U.S., I’m homeless, I have nowhere to go.
“Then snap, like that … I’m in a shelter. Snap, I’m sleeping in the Staten Island Ferry Station.
“Snap, I’m in Brooklyn on a couch. Snap, I’m here.
“This is progress. I’ve been lucky.”