Leelah Alcorn, a 17 year old transgendered teen who committed suicide last month, should not be remembered as a hero for the way she died. I feel deep sympathy for the poor truck driver she jumped in front of. I can’t imagine what he is going through. I can only hope that someday, he comes to realize that he was only the instrument she used to end her torture. That truck driver did not kill that poor girl, our society, our culture killed that child.  

Where is the outrage? Unless you read stories slanted towards the transgender community, you will only read about the tragic death of a boy named Joshua Alcorn, who was hit by a truck on I-71 in Ohio. If you read the suicide note she left on Tumblr however, you will get the true
story, it is heartbreaking. This 17 year old transgender woman was isolated from her friends for over a year and forced to undergo Christian therapy to set her on the path toward being the man she was never meant to be. Where is the outrage?  

We live in an intolerant society, If you do not fit the cookie cutter, white bread, “My Three Sons,” fall in line and look like me, society norm, you are ostracized. It may be blatant, it may subtle or behind your back, but it is ostracism none the less. If you are black, brown, gay, lesbian, transgender, or any number of other labels we put on people, especially if you happen to be homeless as well, for you, it’s the bottom of the 9th inning with 2 outs and 2 strikes in a 
losing game and somebody stole your bat.  

You lose! The game of life is not available for you. The American dream is not there, you are condemned to a nightmare. Many courageous people not only survive this nightmare but go on to live meaningful and sometimes great lives.  


Leelah thought she had run out of choices, her nightmare ended in death. O how I wish I could have talked to this poor girl and presented her with some better choices. I have some idea of what she went through. I am a transgender woman, but I am an old lady on my own and able to make my own choices in life. Unlike Leelah, no one tells me how to live my life
and I have learned how to deal with the ostracism. I don’t condone it and in most cases, don’t allow it but I have been around long enough to know how to deal with it.  Besides that, I can be a nasty bitch when the situation calls for it. You have to pick your fights, but when you decide to fight, you need to fight to win.  

Well guess what folks; I just decided to pick a fight. I am going to fight for the rights of transgender teens and younger, who have no way to overcome religious and cultural
intolerance. These children know who they are. I knew when I was 5 years old that I was a girl. In 1954 however, there was no way for me to know that I wasn’t alone, that I was not unique. I grew up thinking: no one else has ever felt what I felt. This ignorance that I grew up in is a thing of the past, thank the heavens. Now children who know they are in the wrong gender have information at their fingertips that was unavailable to my generation. 

This is why many teenagers and younger children are coming out to their parents and why more parents are accepting of their transgender children. These loving parents are a small minority unfortunately. Many if not most of the parents of transgender, gay or lesbian
children are suffering under the influence of religious intolerance. They are driven by elders, peers or their own deep seated beliefs that they had been taught their whole lives into forcing their children into their own cookie cutter mold.

These misguided beliefs are what killed Leelah Alcorn.  These misguided beliefs on the part of
parents and the communities that support them are what cause so many LGBT young people to flee or get kicked out of their homes and become homeless-- making them easy targets for the human traffickers and other creeps who prey on them. According to The Durso-Gates LGBT homeless youth survey of July 2012, 40% of homeless youth nationwide identify as
LGBT.  

These misguided beliefs seem to rule our society and it is these misguided beliefs that I am declaring war on!  Leelah Alcorn will not be remembered for the way she died. She will be
remembered for the way she documented the torture that she and thousands other
children like her are forced to suffer through. Everything about the suffering she lived through and even her suicide letter is out there for the world to see and weep about. Her short life and tragic death have shone a light on the greatest evil in our society. That evil is intolerance. It doesn’t matter if is based on culture or religion, in my humble opinion, intolerance of anyone who does not look like you, is the basis for most of the problems in our society.  

Until we learn to live together and not only tolerate but accept our differences and those of our children, we cannot consider ourselves civilized. We could take some lessons from Native American or other older civilizations, in the benefits of a tolerant society.  Because she put her suffering out there for the world to see, Leelah will be the banner that we march under. Her last wish was for a better society and for this we will fight.  

Leelah will be remembered for shining the light on the evil that lives within us all and for that she is a hero!  So I would like to urge all of you who feel as I do to join me under Leelah’s
banner as we fight for the more tolerant society that was her dying wish. Please go to this website and sign the petition to President Obama to enact “Leelah’s Law.”

www.change.org/p/barack-obamaenact-leelah-s-law-to-ban-transgenderconversion-therapy/u/9207981

Last December 2, Bennie Milliner, Executive Director of Denver’s Road Home (DRH) 
 (tasked with implementing the city’s 10-year plan to end homelessness) presented a proposal to Denver City Council’s Finance and Services Committee that would get the ball rolling on what at that time was called a Solutions Center. This proposal followed an unsuccessful two-year effort by the City to find a location for the “24 Hour Rest and Resource Center” which, at the time the urban camping ban was passed, the mayor and others had promised would be built to provide vitally needed emergency shelter and services to homeless people.  


The center, modeled after a similar program in Seattle, would be a referral-only resource which would provide “short-term behavioral health, housing and other services to help stabilize homeless and other individuals” before connecting them to longer term resources. Several currently and previously homeless individuals as well as some homeless advocates were in the audience, some of whom spoke during the public comment period. After thinking for nearly two weeks about a comment Mr. Milliner made during his presentation, on December 15 I sent him an email about it, which is printed below. As of today, February 2nd, I have not received a reply from Mr. Milliner.  

Dear Mr. Milliner:  
At the City Council’s Finance and Services Committee on December 2 you expressed surprise that anybody might think that people utilizing the proposed Solutions 
(or intervention) Center would not be free to leave at any time and wondered why anybody
might have any doubts about that. I think that deserves an answer.  This email is an attempt to do that.  


Apparently early on in discussions and planning about this Center, people in the neighborhood of the proposed site were extensively consulted about this project. As Billie Bramhall mentioned in her comments to the committee, this is as it should be. But as she also mentioned, the largest stakeholders for this project are the (largely homeless) people who will be using this Center.  To the best of my knowledge homeless people were never consulted in
this process. (While I am no longer homeless, the first I heard of this project was when it was formally announced about 5 weeks ago.)  

If homeless people had been involved in the early discussions, you would have heard their concerns and any misunderstanding probably would have been cleared up. There *is* interest among such people as demonstrated by the fact that there were at least two currently and two previously homeless individuals in attendance at the December 2 meeting. Yet, sadly, there appears to have been no effort to involve these stakeholders in the early discussions.  

Your example at the December 2 meeting of somebody wishing to leave the Center possibly having a “next destination” of the 16th Street Mall was a surprise to me based on the materials I had seen about this Center. Those materials include the packet provided at the last meeting of the Homeless Commission, including the November 6 announcement, the discussion at the November 18 meeting of the Commission, and a probably too brief look at the website for the Seattle Center. Admittedly, I am particularly sensitive to people trying to ram things down my throat, but when I read about locked doors (which is what that “time delay” on the doors, mentioned both in the packet and on Seattle’s Center’s website, is) and statements such as “there [will be] adequate staff and security resources to ensure that no one leaves the facility without staff escort or without a planned discharge and adequate transportation,” alarm bells (no pun intended) did go off.  

I am the person at the Commission meeting who asked the question, “If I were homeless and had police contact and the police wanted to refer me to the Center and I didn’t want to go, what would happen?” This was a follow-up to Benjamin’s question, as the answer to that concerned me, and I thought the matter needed to be probed a little more. (Sadly, I have forgotten both Benjamin’s question and your answer to it.) Of course, I used the police in 
my hypothetical situation because they are the agents of coercion in our society.  

In response to that question it sounded to me like you were dancing around the issue of how voluntary participation with this Center would really be and I let the matter drop when I thought pursuing Last December 2, Bennie Milliner, Executive Director of Denver’s Road Home (DRH) (tasked with implementing the city’s 10-year plan to end homelessness) presented a proposal to Denver City Council’s Finance and Services Committee that would get the ball rolling on what at that time was called a Solutions Center. This proposal followed 
an unsuccessful two-year effort by the City to find a location for the “24 Hour Rest and 
Resource Center” which, at the time the urban camping ban was passed, the mayor and others had promised would be built to provide vitally needed emergency shelter and services to homeless people.  

The center, modeled after a similar program in Seattle, would be a referral-only resource which would provide “short-term behavioral health, housing and other services to help stabilize homeless and other individuals” before connecting them to longer term resources. Several currently and previously homeless individuals as well as some homeless advocates were in the audience, some of whom spoke during the public comment period. After thinking for nearly two weeks about a comment Mr. Milliner made during his presentation, on December 15 I sent him an email about it, which is printed below. As of today, February 2nd, I have not received a reply from Mr. Milliner.  it further would not yield anything productive. If the views and concerns of homeless people about this proposed Center had been pursued early on with the same vigor as discussions with the neighborhood, there would have been more time and space to develop such thoughts and I suspect misunderstandings would have 
been avoided. Instead, materials developed solely to address concerns of the neighborhood were presented as fait accompli, leaving homeless people and those of us who are wary of how they might be treated to let our fears run wild.  

One final note about this. While I can’t and won’t attempt to speak for others, another fact that gives me concerns about such a center, and probably helps fuel my paranoia about it, is the fact that I am at odds with what appears to be the view that drives much of official discussion about homeless people in Denver.  

Specifically, homeless people tend do be viewed as problems that need to be fixed. I disagree with this view, even when limited to those who are usually identified as having substance abuse and/or “mental health” issues. (And I find the terms “mental health” and, particularly, “behavioral health” highly problematic.) I am more inclined to view the homeless individual as the “identified patient” in family systems therapy, with the larger society being the family. It is not just the “identified patient” that needs to change but the whole family (i.e. society) that must change.  

As Arnold Mindell perceptively notes in his book City Shadows: Psychological Interventions in Psychiatry (ISBN 0-14-019162-3), “Such concepts are not always greeted enthusiastically by city officials” (p. xiii). Based on my experiences in Denver I think that is putting it mildly. But if you or anybody associated with Denver’s Road Home would be interested in a viewpoint other than what I believe to be our culture’s dominant one, I recommend that book. I will admit that it is a bit dated (1988) and perhaps there are good materials which are more recent. Still, I think City Shadows is a useful book.  

So this has been my attempt to explain why some of us were concerned about how voluntary this proposed Center (whatever its eventual name) would be. I hope you found it useful. And in the future I hope the Homeless Commission/DRH finds ways to bring people experiencing homelessness into discussions about things that will affect them early in the planning stages. Maybe you can keep that in mind as you and the Commission consider what changes to make to the Commission as you begin moving beyond the initial 10 year plan.  

(Editor’s Note: The Denver City Council on December 22nd voted unanimously to approve the $2.325 million purchase of a building at 405 S Platte River Drive, in the Athmar neighborhood, for the “Solutions” Center. The Center is expected to open at the end of 2015 after renovations are completed and service provider(s) are selected.)

By John Claybaugh

Gary, Calvin, Linda, and Tina are real people. 
Only the names are changed to protect the innocent.  
I wonder.  

I wonder if I will see my homeless friend Gary tomorrow. I wonder if he’ll be housed soon. I wonder if he will die on the streets. If he does die on the streets, I wonder if it be soon or years from now. I wonder if Calvin would have taken better care of himself and received better  medical care if he hadn’t been homeless all those years. Had he received housing sooner, I
wonder if he would have maintained better health and lived longer.  

I wonder.  

I wonder what would have happened in Linda’s life if she had been able to get housing sooner. I wonder if she would have lost her kids if she had never found herself without a home. I wonder if she would have overdosed on heroin if she’d had a home and been able to have her kids live with her. I wonder if Tina’s kids would have been able to live with her if she had not found herself without a home. While I don’t know the circumstances of her having
six children over the years, I wonder if having a home would have meant that she didn’t find herself pregnant as often. I wonder if she is one of the many women experiencing  homelessness that have had sex in order to have a safe place to stay.

I wonder. 

I wonder, when women have sex as trade for a safe place to stay, how many nights, on average, are they given a place to stay. I wonder if they have to have sex constantly to insure that they are allowed to stay there. I wonder how many times an unwanted pregnancy is the reason that they lose the ability to stay in that safe place. I wonder how many children in
America spend the afternoon wondering if there will be something at home that they can eat for supper? I wonder if these children would make better grades if they knew for sure that they would be able to eat at night. 

Robert Speer, the 26th Mayor of Denver, helped create a “City Beautiful” initiative in Denver 
back in the 1910’s. The initiative was based around the novel notion that if cities had parks and open spaces for people to congregate in, then people living in the city would feel happier and healthier, and be more engaged in the community around them. That’s why Denver has strange little pockets of land in-between diagonal and perpendicular streets, where people can congregate, see a little bit of nature and retreat.  

But no longer can just anyone walk into the little sliver of land between Broadway, Lawrence Street and Park Avenue.  “Triangle” Park is now closed.  Back in 2006, there were high hopes
for this little triangular island of land, when the city decided to name it “Eddie Maestas Park” after the old business leader turned founding member of “The Larimer Square North Merchants” Association” - the precursor to the “Ballpark Neighborhood Association.”  

Eddie was nicknamed “The Mayor of Larimer Street” because of his legacy of “running the neighborhood.” He is remembered as being a fair and honest man who respected everyone. There are stories of him hiring homeless folks to sweep the front of his store in exchange for some food. But, he is also known as the person who “fought off skid row”--meaning he helped usher major developments into the neighborhood, like Coors Field, which led to the tearing down of most of the neighborhood’s low-income housing as soon as timeline obligations to HUD were fulfilled, and developers were legally allowed to do so.  

But the “homeless problem”--as some folks call it--didn’t go away with the designation of a “historical district” and the introduction of some new swanky bars and eateries. It only  increased, because even though there were countless promises from the city to develop low income housing to replace that which had been torn down for the sake of “revitalization,” the city... lied.  

So, homelessness grew. And grew. And Grew. In 2012, the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative counted over 14,000 people experiencing homelessness in their point in time survey.  (Then, HUD narrowed the definition of “homelessness” so as to exclude most of the population, and in 2014, even though everyone knows the city is still overflowing with people who have no safe or stable place to live, they claimed to have only counted 4,000 homeless people.)  

In 2011, reports swirled of how “Eddie Maestas Park” had turned into “Bummuda Triangle”--a well-known hang-out for people waiting to get into one of the two shelters catty-corner to it, and a prime location for drug deals to go down. Eddie’s family reportedly asked the city to take the sign bearing his name down after seeing a plethora of trash lying around on the ground.  

But what was to be expected? Where were poor people supposed to go? There was, and still is, only roughly one shelter bed for every 14 homeless people living in Denver, and we have yet to see any substantial development of low-income housing. Where are they supposed to congregate?  

When city officials, police officers, business owners and a few representatives
of local neighborhood associations held a meeting about their plans for the park in 2013, they assured Denver Homeless Out Loud members that “We’re not shutting the park down to kick out the homeless.  We don’t want the drug deals... and we’re going to build a garden... homeless people will be welcome inside the garden... if they want to garden.” But, who wasn’t there to weigh in on the conversation? People who actually utilize the park.

 “But we invited them...” said the group of “concerned citizens.”  The same year, two other parks often frequented by unsheltered people were shut down for “renovations.” In open 
forum community meetings, city officials and neighbors both mentioned “homeless issues,” but refused to say that these renovations had anything to do with kicking homeless people out.

Both Sonny Lawson Park (at 23rd Street and Welton) and Benedict Fountain Park (another “triangle” park formed by 20th Avenue, Tremont, and 22nd Street) reopened earlier this year, before the Triangle. After Sonny Lawson--also known as “Jurassic Park” by those who frequent it most--reopened, I witnessed a violent fight break out there, and heard a woman
say “What you expect is gonna happen when they shut the f-in’ triangle down. All the problems come over here. This used to be a nice park.” And it was, respectfully.  

Prior to the renovation of the three parks, Jurassic Park and Benedict Fountain Park-also known as “the living room”--were considered the two calm parks.  The Triangle, everyone knew, was where some less than desirable things occurred. And for a while cops, neighbors
and city officials agreed that it was better to isolate that behavior on one block, than to have it happen in alleys behind people’s houses in the neighborhood. 

Now, issues from the Triangle have sprawled out into the neighborhood and affected everyday
life in the area.  When Eddie Maestas Park was first designated as such by the city, it came with a $275,000 price tag, along with some inkind donations from Brent Snyder (deputy
assistant attorney general turned developer man), in the form of benches and trellis pieces. At the time, the neighborhood group and the city seemed to know how morally reprehensible it was to ban poor people from certain areas. 

Mark Upshaw, the architect and planner on the project said, “The park is for everybody.... We
realize the homeless are going to use it, and that they have a right to be there.”  A few years later, and the Ballpark Neighborhood Association picks a fight with the city over expanding the Rescue Mission, throwing every cheap shot they could, and pressuring the city to pay $1.8 million to make sure homeless people get arrested every time they pee in LODO or near the stadium. And the same “not in my backyard” group of people were the ones deciding the fate of the park.  

“But, we’re not excluding the homeless,” whined the representatives of Ballpark.  Denver Urban Gardens (DUG) is going to take it over, we were told. Turns out, DUG didn’t want the project, but the city and the planning group just dumped it on them. So, DUG did everything
it could to make the best of the situation they reached out to homeless provider agencies in the neighborhood to try and get homeless folks to participate in the garden, and they reached out
to Denver Homeless Out Loud and offered us a plot of garden space. We accepted. 

We have a few gardeners within our group who are working on the plot, but WE ARE STILL LOOKING FOR MORE PEOPLE WHO ARE EXPERIENCING HOMELESSNESS TO JOIN US and make sure that homeless people aren’t excluded from the park.  

If interested please contact us-- [email protected] 
or 720-940-5291.

But, if the opening of the park is any indication of its future, here’s what’s to be expected:

After months of delays from the city, DUG was finally able to open the park on October 16th. A new sign, honoring the former patriarch of the Ballpark Neighborhood Association, Eddie 
Maestas, stands right outside the six foot tall fence that takes a code to get through. Inside (aside from DHOL folks that showed up), we found a few DUG representatives, a few service provider employees, some business owners, some representatives of Curtis Park Neighborhood Organization, a woman who said “I’m Ballpark,” a dozen or so 
tiny garden plots, five police officers, and one person drinking cider who may have been assumed to be homeless.  

Oh, and one last side note - after millions of dollars (literally) of renovations to the parks along Park Ave over the years, there are still zero public restrooms. Councilman Brooks and Bennie Milliner of the Denver’s Road Home assured residents at a community meeting about the parks that the city couldn’t afford them.

Our bed is under a bush with a dirty blanket for warmth.  Our kitchen is a dumpster near our bed. The food is dirty and rotten, yet it fills our stomach. Our toilet is a wall or under a tree. When it’s cold outside, we are cold. When it’s hot, there is no relief for us. Every day we walk the streets with no place to go.  We are not alone in our journey; we are many people that the mainstream doesn’t want to look upon. 

To them, we are a useless lot. They wonder why we don’t help ourselves. Many of them wonder what happened to us that we ended up on the the streets. They believe the problem is drugs, alcohol or mental illness.  These are a few of the reasons why we are homeless. Then there are those of us who have been battered, lost our jobs, the roofs over our heads, our children, with no money left in our pockets. We are destined for the streets, the bushes and the dumpsters.  

Before we became street people, we had dreams. Sometimes our dreams were a family, home, jobs that could support our families. Life isn’t our dreams. We became ill, unable to work, our bills became delinquent. We are unable to pay our rent and are evicted with nowhere to go.

Standing on the street for hours, a shelter takes us in for the night. One night there is no room for us. Depression looms in the darkness of our minds. We begin to walk the street again. We desire clean food, a roof over our heads, clean clothes, clean toilet facilities, an opportunity to make a living, a place where we can start a new life.

In the depths of our lives on the streets, feeling hopeless, useless and forgettable, a thought creeps into our minds. The thought is God. If we aren’t able to help ourselves, maybe he would
help. In the corner of a concrete wall and behind a bush we fall to our knees and cry out in prayer. Death is at our door.  Our lives have been so difficult that we think perhaps if we surrender to spiritual power there may be hope. Sleep creeps into that teary spot under the bushes.

 When we awake it is a perfect morning. The sky is blue and the sun is brilliant. As we walk the streets that we walked the day before, in our hearts there is hope that today will bring a better life. 

If you understood our lives would you help us?