In this episode Calpi, Clay & Todd talk with Queer & Genderqueer Author, Dog Trainer & Freelance Writer Sassafras (Lowrey) Patterdale. Their first book, Kicked Out, is an anthology written by & about the experiences of unhoused queer youth. When Kicked Out was first published back in 2010 around 40% of unhoused youth openly identified as LGBTQ+. In the face of the recent Grants Pass v Johnson ruling and aggressive rollback of civil rights for BIPOC, trans, and queer people, we find ourselves terrified over what the youth not face.
This current administration has cut support programs for marginalized communities, pardoning and cozying up to known human traffickers like the Tate Brothers, and just now authorized Queer & Trans people to be subjected to surveillance.
On our resources page we have a ton of info on Security Culture and what to do about your phones, computers, and online presence depending on your risk profile. We are currently producing instructional content to help people improve their digital security.
Hard Left News is community supported. Your support allows us to produce instructional & educational content, and to be able to talk with BIPOC, Queer, Trans, & Leftist voices that need to be heard. If these resources are important to you, please subscribe, share, and consider donating.
Next week we will be talking Tech, Digital Safety, and Security Culture.
Sassafras is a celebrated author whose queer and leather books (Roving Pack, A Little Queermas Carol, Leather Ever After, and Lost Boi) have been honored by the American Library Association, the Lambda Literary Foundation, the International Leather Association- Writing Awards. Sassafras’ work regularly appears in leading magazines/publications, and Sassafras has taught queer storytelling workshops at colleges, conferences, bookstores, festivals, and squats from Atlanta to Berlin to NYC to Oakland to Amsterdam. The film rights to Sassafras’ queer leather novel Lost Boi were recently optioned!!
You can find links to Sassafras’s writings, projects, and social media here:
Website: https://sassafraspatterdale.com/
Sassafras’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/SassafrasPatterdale
Sassafras on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sassafraslowrey
Sassafras on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sassafraslowrey
Sassafras on FaceBook: https://youtube.com/introvertcircus
Sassafras on YouTube: https://youtube.com/introvertcircus
Kicked Out: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7717332-kicked-out
Additional Links
p:ear Mentor Center: https://www.pearmentor.org
Transponder Community Resources: https://transponder.community
Center for American Progress – Federal Response to Gay & Transgender Homeless Youth [PDF]: https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2010/06/pdf/lgbtyouthhomelessness.pdf
DHS Now Allows for Surveillance based on Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity: https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/dhs-now-allows-for-surveillance-based
What to know about the Tate brothers, social media influencers who face trafficking charges: https://apnews.com/article/romania-andrew-tristan-tate-travel-ban-lifted-3c8b56be5d99f9ed04045f4680e5f8c0
KSQD Grants Pass v Johnson Series
Community Support Systems & the Maslow Project w/ Nicole Ritterbush: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8kBiMl5eps
History of Political Action of the Unhoused w/ Annie Powers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYg6v6MmohM
KSQD – Moment of Truth with Ami Chen Mills Podcast: https://ksqd.org/series/momentoftruth/
Kicked Out: Queer Youth w/ Sassafras Patterdale Transcript
In addition to writing books, I spent about a decade working in LGBTQ youth, particularly LGBTQ’s Homeless Youth Policy work in New York, and running a drop-in center there.
And so I was very deep in the numbers side of things as well, and exactly what you’re saying.
We know that the numbers that we have are not the best numbers, but what we have are so staggering that we know that it’s significantly more.
And in particular, that number that I use a lot, and we all are using, of the 40% of homeless youth identifies LGBTQ.
We know that queer youth of color are significantly overrepresented amongst homeless youth populations, that transgender and non-binary youth are overrepresented.
The numbers that we have even show that, but it’s yeah, exactly, it’s staggering.
And we don’t have great numbers when we look at adult LGBTQ plus population.
And instability, what we know is that LGBTQ adults are also overrepresented amongst populations of people experiencing houselessness.
But the numbers are less good for a variety of other reasons that are not going to get any better anytime soon.
It is March 2nd, 2025, and this is Hard Left News.
I’m Todd Zimmerman.
In this episode, Calpi, Clay, and I talk with queer and genderqueer author, dog trainer and freelance writer, Sassafras Patterdale.
Their first book, Kicked Out, is an anthology written by and about the experiences of unhoused queer youth.
In the face of the recent grants passed V.
Johnson ruling and the aggressive rollback of civil rights for BIPOC trans and queer people, we find ourselves terrified over what the youth now face.
This current administration has cut support programs for marginalized communities, has been pardoning and cozying up to known human traffickers like the Tate brothers, and just now authorized queer and trans people to be subjected to surveillance.
On our resources page, we have a ton of info on security culture and what to do about your phones, computers and online presence depending on your risk profile.
We’re currently producing instructional content to help people improve their digital security.
Hard Left News is community supported.
Your support allows us to produce instructional and educational content and to be able to talk face to face with BIPOC queer, trans and leftist voices that need to be heard.
If these resources and talks are important to you, please subscribe, share and consider donating.
Next week, we’ll be talking tech, digital safety and security culture.
Now let’s get back to our talk with Sassafras Patterdale.
Because we were doing a series of interviews with some friends of ours at KSQD in Santa Cruz on the Grants Pass v.
Johnson ruling, how that impacts those that are houseless going forward.
And I remembered an episode of the Lee Harrington Passion and Soul podcast that you were on, where you had brought up your book, Kicked Out.
And, you know, it was planted back then, when I originally heard that, that we definitely have to get a chance to talk to you.
Ever since that ruling, I think a lot of folks don’t realize the disproportionate number of queer youth that are represented in the houseless population.
And you edited a book.
Can you give us a rundown of what Kicked Out is about?
Yeah, absolutely.
And also, thank you so much for having me.
I’m so excited that this worked out and that we get to have this conversation.
It is a conversation I love having.
And I feel like, as you were saying, doesn’t happen often enough.
So, yeah, my first book was an anthology titled Kicked Out.
It released in 2010.
That’s wild to think about, but it released in 2010.
And it brought together the voices of current and former homeless LGBTQ youth.
And the contributors ranged in age of experience from folks who were currently experiencing homelessness at the time that the book was being published to the oldest contributor had come out pre-Stonewall.
And kind of everywhere-ish in between was the range of who the contributors to the book were, as well as some folks who were doing policy work at the time around the epidemic of LGBTQ youth homelessness.
And Judy Shepard, mother of Matthew Shepard, wrote the foreword for the book.
That’s awesome.
That’s not the only book you’ve written.
Can you tell us a little bit about your writing since then?
I’ve written a lot of books.
Podcast World, where I pick up a stack of books.
Yeah.
So I’ve written, I think I have 12 books in print.
Most of them are queer.
There’s also a whole other side to my work that is dog training books.
Nice.
But my queer books, probably I’m best known, I’d say for my novel Lost Boy, which released from Arsenal Folk Press and is a queer punk leather retelling of Peter Pan.
And also features punk kids and precariously housed queer folks.
And it was a Lambda Literary finalist for transgender fiction.
And the film rights were optioned like a year and a half ago.
So it’s going to be a list.
Peter Pan is a great basis to make a queer leather retelling of homeless youth kind of like.
It was very fun.
It was like my, it was my dream project in a lot of ways.
And I was like, how has nobody done this?
I must do this.
And I was very, very, very grateful for the opportunity to get that book out in the world.
I love it.
I don’t know about you, but I mean, leading up to the election and especially since then, I’ve been very stressed out, very concerned.
I spent some time houseless and Calpi has as well.
And I know a lot of houseless queer youth or have known quite a few over the years.
And even though the numbers are around about 40 percent, yeah, reported, it’s, I feel like almost every homeless youth has been queer.
So I feel like it’s just, it’s a matter of reporting.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
It’s an absolutely staggering statistic.
I mean, it’s like, if you look at the population of people who are homeless, and then you look at the population of people who are queer in some way, yeah, it’s, it’s a massive amount.
And again, that’s just the reported, the self-reporting, like, youths, right?
That’s not considering queer adults, right?
Like older people, veterans, et cetera, who, it’s, the intersectionality about it is absolutely off the wall.
It’s bonkers because you can look at similar statistics with, like, people of color being homeless and it’s, there’s so much overlap.
It’s absolutely wild.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, the numbers that we have, in addition to writing books, I spent about a decade working in LGBTQ youth, and particularly LGBTQ’s Homeless Youth Policy work in New York and running a drop-in center there.
And so I was sort of very deep in the numbers side of things as well, and exactly what you’re saying.
We know that the numbers that we have are not the best numbers, but what we have are so staggering that we know that it’s significantly more.
And in particular, that number that I use a lot, and we all are using, of the 40 percent of homeless youth identifies LGBTQ.
We know that queer youth of color are significantly over-represented amongst homeless youth populations, that transgender and non-binary youth are over-represented.
The numbers that we have even show that, but it’s, yeah, exactly, it’s staggering and we don’t have great numbers when we look at adult LGBTQ plus population.
And instability, what we know is that LGBTQ adults are also over-represented amongst populations of people experiencing houselessness, but the numbers are less good for a variety of other reasons that are not going to get any better anytime soon.
So if you were to be able to pinpoint kind of when things started, just historically, like when things started going, for lack of a better term, apeshit for homelessness and its numbers, especially with queer people, when would you say that that started and why?
Oh, that’s a great question.
That’s a huge question.
I know, I know.
I’m sorry.
No, I’m not sure that it’s one that I am equipped to answer specifically.
And I think some of that, again, is going back to the ways in which, the ways in which queer community and queer culture has so often existed outside of, outside of, within our own, in terms of community care networks, and that we don’t have great data.
We don’t have great data now about LGBTQ homeless youth.
And so to look at sort of when, I think something that was really meaningful to me when I was working on Kicked Out, and then when I was doing policy work around youth homelessness, was really centering the idea both for community stakeholders, for lack of a better term, who needed reason to care.
But also for homeless queer youth was really framing what we do know, which is that this isn’t a new issue.
I think this comes up a lot of this idea that this is new.
And it just simply isn’t.
We know that many of the people, and there’s a photograph that I do not have with me.
Easily accessible, but there’s a photograph from one of the New York newspapers of the Stonewall Riots, that we’re naming street kids as being photographing.
We know that homeless queer youth have always been, and particularly homeless trans youth and homeless trans youth of color, have always been at the forefront of the community, and have been overrepresented.
So I think the answer is always, is that we just don’t have, or I don’t have, and I don’t believe there is great data around when.
One of the reasons I ask is because in Oregon specifically, there was a debacle that was very political, and leaders at the time, I say leaders, people in government at the time, were pushing to close down several mental health facilities during a time when you could be committed for anything, basically, out of the societal norms.
The main hospital I’m trying to think of, I think it’s Fairfield, and it was the largest population of people with mental health issues, including that counts being gay, being essentially pushed out of hospital into the public, just generally.
No resources, no plans of places to put them, whatever.
They were just set out and deal with it, I guess.
So that was one of the main catalysts in Oregon specifically for our housing crisis, and that happened, I want to say, in the 50s.
I used to be a caregiver.
I had a client who was actually in that hospital right before, I think she left right before that happened.
It was absolutely obscene, because these people had been institutionalized for common junk, just being slightly sad or not obeying the rules in wherever they were living, and they had nowhere to go.
And as depressing as that is, it’s very clear that that was one of the catalysts.
Absolutely.
I mean, it’s impossible to have broader conversations about homelessness in queer culture in general, without discussing the ways in which the mental health, the ways in which mental health has been policed and weaponized against queer folks, and also the ways in which social safety nets have profoundly failed a variety of marginalized populations and continue to fail marginalized populations, and in particularly people experiencing homelessness when I was doing direct service work for many years in New York.
And we think about the closing of hospitals or…
This is something that is still happening in a variety of different ways and different iterations of people being released from hospitals, whether it be because they were there because they were physically ill or they were in a mental health facility and being released without safety plans, without housing plans.
I mean, this happens literally every day.
I would very comfortable saying in every single state in this country.
I would also say that it’s also pretty prevalent that instead of hospitals, we’re looking at jails, like we’re looking at people, like homeless people.
If we look at the statistics of homeless people that are in legislature turning homelessness into a crime, a crime to sleep, a crime to sit, a crime to stand, like anywhere in public.
If we look at that and we compare that to the statistics of homeless queer youth, we can see it’s just a pipeline.
It’s such a direct route to the incarceration system, and so legislature has a huge, huge impact on essentially the systems that we have in place just failing.
Drop-in centers are helpful, but they don’t get kids out of jail.
Well, sometimes they do.
I will say, not in a broader systemic way.
I think one of the challenges that was sort of the day-to-day work that was my job when I was doing direct service work that was also very policy-linked was spending significant amount of time liaisonally, connecting with the legal aid attorneys of the youth class of my program, connecting with, and I was in New York with NYPD, the police department, and tracking those kids down, figuring out where they were being detained, what they were being detained on, could we work with their attorneys to get them out as a drop-in program?
So, I mean, it is a solution.
It is absolutely, to your point, a very, in many ways, a direct pipeline, but also a very circular system that people get very stuck in.
In jails, hospitals, shelter, jail, hospital, shelter, without clear paths out of that and in many ways, almost impossible paths out of that because of these systems turn.
Now there are efforts, very deliberate efforts to create or to reinforce this horrible pipeline to the prisons, to back into the mental institutions.
Well, I don’t think it’s going to be mental institutions these days.
But…
Returning to that…
Hold on a second.
Returning to that world view of the 50s and 60s, where everything was pathologized.
Absolutely.
And now they’re talking about people with ADHD, autism, various mental health issues, going to these rehabilitation centers, which means concentration camps.
Not that we are, our society is in any way equipped to handle that.
But I’m wondering if, as we’re looking at this nightmare, are there organizations, are there communities that have been good at providing or working towards support systems for the unhoused, and for these marginalized groups, like the work you were doing in New York?
Yeah.
I mean, I think these times are terrifying.
As you’re saying, this is certainly a nightmare in so many ways for, I think, certainly everyone I know.
That said, and I will say, and I will sort of frame this in that I am an eternal optimist.
And so that sort of impacts the way that I view these things.
But so in some ways, this conversation feels really perfect of where we’ve been talking about, in that we’ve been here before.
We know how to do this.
This isn’t where we wanted to be.
And I don’t think it’s where any of us imagined that we ever would be, or would be again.
But I take a lot of peace and comfort in knowing that this is work that we have done, and work that we’ve done not that long ago.
And that I don’t think that the feels like an avalanche backslide, like no question feels that way.
I think it’s important to also remember, at least in my mind, for me, how much progress has been made, and that I do believe that that is going to continue to shore up how much gets sort of pushed back on us.
And so for me, to answer more directly, answer your question, I think I look at it in a couple of different, in terms of looking for the helpers, who’s doing this, who’s doing this well.
I look at it in a couple of different directions.
I look to folks who are on the ground doing community organizing work in their neighborhoods, in their towns, in their cities, on a direct and small person-to-person level.
But I’m also really, really looking at and taking a lot of, at least personally and professionally, comfort in looking at the national organizations, and particularly the legal-focused national organizations that are immediately hitting the ground with these, with pushbacks against the presidential orders that are going to, we know, have an immediate or soon impact on marginalized populations.
Because again, it’s impossible to look at the anti-trans orders and not immediately think about the impact on homeless LGBTQ youth.
Those are folks that are going to bear the brunt of this.
And so I look at Lambda Legal, the ACLU, folks that are leading that policy-based legal charge, also for me feel where I’m putting the most of my hope alongside the people that are doing the on-the-ground checking in on their community and making sure folks have basic needs met.
You’ve pointed out that almost immediately upon finding yourself unhoused, you started writing.
I think encouragement of authentic self-expression in the face of all of this is really important because that’s how we’re going to avoid burnout and staying optimistic.
Yeah, and maintain optimism.
Can you tell us a bit about finding your voice through writing and the role that the kink community has played in providing that optimistic approach to all of this?
Yeah, for sure.
The story I often tell of where we’re writing became a center point for me is my story was a little bit complicated in that I ran away from my mom’s house when I was 17.
I went to live with an adult friend.
The first night I got to her house, she and her boyfriend were like, you’re over that gay thing, right?
I was like, yep, totally over that gay thing because I needed somewhere to stay in my conservative county.
I was like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Then five months later, they read my journal, they looked at my library books and like, oh, you are very queer.
I was like, yes, I’m sorry.
You saw that.
It really kicked me out.
So I have both the runaway version of my, or the runaway part of my story, and then also the kicked out part of my story.
So when I was kicked out is when I very quickly began to meet other homeless LGBTQ youth.
So part of that was then, well, let me back up.
Two days after I was kicked out, I also went to the library, and I was looking at all the books that were on the shelves that were in the queer section or the very small queer section.
There weren’t any books that had any, that talked at all about what I was going through.
It was the early 2000, it was 2002, early 2002, and there just weren’t.
There weren’t a lot of LGBTQ books for youth, and the ones that were there were very lovely.
It was a lovely idea.
It was trying to be in a better place of like, mom is baking cookies for my GSA, and I’m like, that is cool.
A far cry from what I’m experiencing.
I’m like, I can’t relate at all.
I don’t understand what’s happening.
I was like, well, if I figure this thing out, this life thing that I’m evidently doing now, I’m going to write a book.
At that moment, I was like, I don’t want anybody to feel as aloneness as I feel in the experience that I’m having, and then also looking at these books that do not reflect anything about my life.
Then very quickly, within days, I had started to find other homeless queer youth.
I was couchsurfing in the county that I grew up in, and I started going to a drop-in center in the city, and I met lots of queer kids, and they were doing art, and they were like, you can make art, you can put art into the world.
And so suddenly this idea that I had had like days before didn’t sound as off the wall, and I was like, oh, and I got into zine culture, and I got introduced to radical queer art, and everybody was making things, and I was like, well, if you can make things, I can make things.
And so that was very much how I started writing and getting involved in sort of like queer creative spaces, like pretty instantaneous.
And so both those things were happening at the same time.
And then to, I guess, like the second, third part of your question around Kink is that I feel like I sort of was just bounced.
I joke that I’m made of rubber and that one of the sort of consistent stories of my life is that like worlds end some often catastrophically, and I sort of just bounce my way into the next situation.
And I feel very, very, very lucky that my, the world that I bounced into was kind of this magical place.
It’s a queer youth center, drop-in center.
It was youth run, youth directed, predominantly run by youth who were homeless or precariously housed.
And by coincidence, also mostly leather kids.
And so I pounded my way, like it is a very Portland sort of story.
So I feel like, but like all of a sudden, I’m like hanging out in this drop-in center and I’m sitting on this definitely like free boxed couch next to this stage made of pallet boards where there’s like baby drag queens and baby drag kings doing I don’t even know what.
And there’s like a pool table.
And then like suddenly this little like Leather Dyke Boy walks in and like drops to their knees next to like this very, very hot person playing pool.
And I’m like, what is this?
Like who are you people and what are you doing?
And so that was very much like my first exposure to kink or leather.
And I mean, it went from there.
That sounds so supportive and so nice.
I think I also had a similar reaction when finally being in like a public kink and leather space where I’m like, what are y’all doing?
Oh my god.
I think I love it.
Exactly.
And I feel like part of like the, in some ways just like the magic of that I feel so, so lucky of my experiences.
I had no idea because this was my first queer cultural experience also.
I had no idea that leather was stigmatized or that there was any kind of like taboo around it because I was just like, oh, there’s like gay people and lesbians and bisexuals and transgender people and queer people and leather people and lots of those leather people are also these people.
And like I had no idea that this wasn’t just like a thing because it was so publicly brazen in the like near youth spaces that I came out into.
If you don’t mind me asking, what cities was this?
This is Portland?
Okay, for sure.
Portland.
When I went through a very, very similar situation to you, whereas I left home, it took me a long time to leave home, so I left home multiple times.
It was considered a runaway 14, 15, and then 17.
At 17 was the final one, and I stayed in lots of different places up in Seattle, including my sister’s house where I was eventually kicked out for doing nose drugs.
Basically, she was like, did you do nose drugs?
I was like, yeah, kind of did.
She was like, well, you know, you can’t do that.
I’m like, well, I can’t guarantee that I’m not going to do that.
She was like, okay, well, you got to go.
One of the things that really stands out to me about that experience, of course, it was extremely multifaceted, but one of the things that stood out is the immediate sense of community that comes with being in downtown with a bunch of your homeless friends.
It’s something it’s so hard to describe to normal yuppies.
I’m a normal yuppie.
Because the reason, and I think upon looking back, I think it’s why people choose to be homeless thing showed up.
It’s because there is an ingrained community, a lot of trauma bonding, a lot of adversity, and social structure and social hierarchy.
All of these systems exist without anybody in leadership.
Nobody is the boss of anybody.
So it’s very hard to go from, after a certain amount of time, to go from, this is my community, back to, and you’re telling me I have to stop hanging out with my community and go to a place where there’s no guaranteed support for what I’m going through.
And nobody over here has the same experiences that I have.
And so I was homeless from 14 on and off to 17, and then from 17 to 22, which is a really long time to be homeless.
And all of it is formative years.
And from 18 to 20, I was traveling.
So I checked across the United States, from Portland down to Louisiana.
And it was the same pattern.
It was a lot of queer kids doing-
Different flavors of debauchery, whatever that is.
Yeah, especially in New Orleans.
New Orleans actually has a whole festival, a decidedly debaucherous festival.
Mardi Gras?
Is that Mardi Gras?
No.
Is that a different festival?
Yeah.
It’s a, what is it?
Southern Decadence.
That’s right.
Decadence is a very, the gay holiday.
I agree.
You know what?
I’m down.
Just side note.
I met Spider from Power Man 5000.
I realized he had a genital piercing.
Oh yeah?
How did you realize that?
No.
He told me without words.
Gotcha.
Anyway, I wouldn’t discount those experiences for the world.
But along with that trauma came a lot of community.
I think that’s where the power lies in these communities.
But once I was at a point where I needed to get out, and I had the opportunity to get out, which was very lucky and provided by a Portland drop-in service, I had to cut ties with so many pieces of my community in order to simply focus on existing in a house.
Something as simple as living in a house or acquiring a mattress, or whatever.
You have to live by that structure, that capitalist structure.
But it’s like you’re saying goodbye to all of your best friends, and all of your comrades, and you don’t know if you’re ever going to see them again.
Whole support community right there.
It’s hard not to slip back into-
I can imagine.
Yeah, especially if there’s drug use, or because there is an amount of family that comes with being addicts together.
That’s a little bit more broad, but I mean to say that one of the first times I was ever in a queer-centered homeless youth space was in Portland, and they dyed my hair pink as soon as I walked in.
It was fabulous, and it turns out it really is my color.
No, and what you’re saying is so true, and I feel like I had, in so many ways, what I often say both when I talk about youth homelessness and also about other cultures, I always will say I was found and saved by leather punks, and I feel like that was so very true for my experience, and I had a lot of privilege in that experience.
One of my first days meeting people, somebody offered me, I don’t even know what they offered me, probably literally like a cigarette, and I said, no, I come from an extremely, my mother is an extreme alcoholic, and I was very clear that I was never going to use anything, and they’re like, oh, are you a straight edge punk?
And I was like, I don’t know what that is.
Sure.
I was like, they want important.
And then somebody told me, and I was like, oh yeah, I’m straight edge.
And then suddenly, I was the straight edge kid.
And so I sort of skirted a lot of those edges of that I watched and loved so, so many of my friends and community who were really, really struggling with addiction and that I was very privileged that I was on the outskirts of that.
And I was also in the like the punk house side of, you know, I was couch surfing and then I was, I was sort of like in punk houses.
And so I was on that side of things while also like bringing home like my street homeless buddies to like grab in my room all the time.
And so I was sort of in that in between space and very much able to code switch between worlds.
Right early on.
Yeah.
All of my friend group now kind of winces when I go and talk to people that are clearly like experiencing trouble and it’s like, guys, it’s just a human person.
It’s not hard to talk to them and check in, you know?
No, no.
And I feel like we have this sort of this saying amongst a lot of my closest friends of street kid values run deep.
And I feel like the folks that I’m still closest to are people who have had similar experiences as I had, who have similar values around that.
Oftentimes, in some instances, people that like I met on LiveJournal chat, like in LiveJournal group at that period of time and are like the closest people in my life now, like still 23 years later.
That’s awesome.
I keep getting notifications from LiveJournal.
You’ve been here for 17 years.
It’s like, not really.
Thanks though for reminding me.
Yeah.
No, I think a lot of the community that I built, I had to cut myself off from.
The people that ended up helping me get off the streets was Pair up in Portland.
It was Beth Burns, Pippa Arendt, and Joy Cartier who were running it and ran it.
What happened was I was making art there and Pippa was getting me a little bit of work at a time doing commissions or selling work.
One of the things about Pair is that it’s a project, education, art, and recreation, so they have a whole bunch of different types of programs that they do.
I happened to paint, so the coolest part was their gallery.
They only took 10 percent of commission, and then they would talk up your pieces for you, and they were specifically selling to people trying to support the homeless youth community.
So I was able to make exactly enough for rent in group housing, which I say group housing, but what I mean is living with nine other people.
For $330 a month in an octagonal room, terribly difficult to furnish, and everybody in the house drank, which was not good for me personally, but it was somewhere to be.
I blame them all the time for me being alive.
They were really wonderful people, but I also lived in transitional housing at New F News for Youth.
I worked with Outside In doing acupuncture, therapy, case management, all kinds of stuff.
Then up in Seattle, I worked with New Horizons.
The whole time, I’m just like, how are these places existing in the first place for us?
We are so lucky.
I get so pissed off at people just running amok and acting remunctious in these programs, because it’s like you have no idea how lucky we have it.
That’s like, no, this is a place for them to deal with their trauma and actually set that stuff down and have spaghetti.
Which I cannot tolerate spaghetti anymore.
I can’t do it.
It’s so easy to make.
I think you got to have a homemade sauce.
Yes.
They don’t have that.
I’ll make you a homemade sauce, baby.
Thank you.
Somehow it’s still my big comfort food.
Yeah.
Mine’s like cup of noodles and a cigarette.
Yeah.
I’m trying really hard not to smoke anymore, but.
I’ll make you on the cup of noodles.
Yeah.
I love that.
I got all my health care outside in and I grew up with smoke.
But yeah, I ended up living in the Woodstock neighborhood and getting a job at Burgerville and meeting my now ex-wife.
We worked together at Burgerville for a long time and I was doing the Portland Poetry Slam and I just worked my way out of it and chanced my way out of it.
But I absolutely 100 percent should be dead.
Statistically and based on all of the people I feel like I’ve been, whose behavior was just off the wall, why are you following older men around?
Why are you doing that?
There’s no reason.
But that world is so insular.
When somebody disappears, they just disappear.
You know what I mean?
They’re just gone.
There’s deaths.
Somebody’s mom is able to house them in Kentucky or whatever.
I had a boyfriend that I found out later, fell off of a cliff in Nebraska and died, which is like, at least he was back in Nebraska with his family.
One of two cliffs in Nebraska.
Yeah.
Scots Bluff, Nebraska.
It’s ridiculous.
I feel like it’s so real.
I have those conversations so often with the people that I know of, how many of us made it?
Not the magic of connection with the folks who did make it and the immense, the privilege and survivor’s guilt and all of those pieces of being like, you’re so right, so many people don’t make it out of them for whatever reason, or we don’t know what happened to them because they got a Greyhound ticket and they ended up on a bus to Iowa or wherever and maybe their life is great and very normal there, or maybe it’s not.
One of the biggest, I think, culture shocks after being housed was writing the bus to work and realizing, I’m not seeing my friends anymore.
It’s crazy to me that there are people who have never been in any amount of homelessness or adversity making the rules about sitting and standing.
That’s so weird to me.
I don’t understand it.
Yeah.
It’s shocking because everybody is pre-disabled.
I heard that said once and the amount of disabled people that are also homeless is out of control.
The amount of disabled, gay, trans youth, it’s absolutely shocking that we would take such a large portion of our already disenfranchised people and feed them to wolves.
It’s weird that it does not reflect well on our society.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I agree.
So before we’d let you go, do you have any mutual aid recommendations or endorsements?
And also, what are you currently working on?
You know, I think I don’t have any immediate sort of mutual aid endorsements other than I think, look at who is in your local area that is doing the work that is showing up and that is from and of the communities that they are serving.
You know, I think one of the…
I used to do a lot of queer youth policy stuff, and I had a keynote address that I would give people.
Because I was the successor, if you wanted to hear from me, and my keynote was, you know, don’t trust anyone over 30, even me.
It wasn’t the name of it, and now I’m 40, and I’m like, but really, like it became my head, but it still came to me, if the people who are running the programs or the mutual aid groups are not of the communities that they are serving, I have questions and concerns.
And so for me, that is sort of my, like not endorsing anybody, but sort of like literacy of how to look at who is doing the work, and who is benefiting from it, and where that’s flowing.
So that’s sort of for me, always what I look at.
There’s a lot of flaws within the systems that are already established.
I remember a lot of Janice Youth programs just shaking my head at them, just like, I don’t see what you’re doing or why you’re doing it, but it’s not working.
And it’s like, I realize now a lot of that was policy and legislature.
But I also know, like, there are some pretty evil people who are getting into, like…
There are tourists and there are people who are, like, showing up to prey on the most vulnerable.
Like, they’ll embed themselves, especially take this into consideration because we’re increasingly in this surveillance state with people who are planning on, if not already, infiltrating communities.
There are people that show up and they master the lingo just so they can pull one over and prey on people.
Just work on their own agenda.
Yeah.
Yeah.
One of the things I wanted to touch base with you about is after all your experience and everything you’re seeing currently, and, you know, I’m a little bit doomy.
I try…
I’m a recovering optimist.
It’s hard.
It’s very, very difficult.
What keeps you optimistic and why?
Yeah.
You know, I think…
It’s a good question.
I know you say, like, look for the helpers, you know, and that’s a big one, but it’s like, what within your own brain do you think of?
Yeah.
That’s a really good question.
And I think within my own brain, and I think some of this is…
I’m reading the same news everybody’s reading.
I’m looking at the same things everybody’s looking at.
And so I try to frame that for me, living in optimism isn’t about being naïve.
Like, I know how evil works and I know what evil is out there.
And I think that for me, there’s this line that always repeats for me, the only way out is through.
And there is, for me, no option but through.
And so with that sort of as the guiding principle, then there’s sort of like prongs of it for me.
Like, so it’s like the only way out is through.
We’ve done this before.
And so I’m looking to stories of both queer elders, right, who have done this.
And also, like, my own memory of, like, coming out in Bush era and remembering that a number of people who are in my community who are younger than me honestly don’t remember that.
And that, like, I was raised up by Wagon era queers.
So it’s like, we’ve been in dark places.
So, like, that for me.
And then also, I think, and this is where, for sure, like, leather intersects in my life, is that I try to look for little moments of magic.
Anywhere I can find them.
And that being able, just, like, on a personal level, to center that in my day, whether it’s, like, there’s a rainbow in that oil slick, in that pothole.
Is that, like, ultimate for the fish?
Of course it is.
I could have the, like, bad dooms rabbit hole of, like, how there’s absolutely a limit where it’s gonna flow into when it rains again.
But, like, in that moment, I’m like, look at that rainbow.
Look how magic that is.
Pretty.
Yeah.
Look at, like, the crocus that are popping up right now because the snow just melted.
Look at that cute dog over there.
Look at that weird-ass pigeon.
Like, you know, so for me, looking for small moments of joy where I can find them and centering those, and then the idea that they can’t take our joy and they can’t take queer joy.
And if they can’t take that, then we can do anything.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Fantastic.
Which doesn’t mean I don’t have first-out anxious days, but I do.
I’m reading the same thing everyone’s reading, but my baseline is remembering that there’s magic everywhere around us if we look for it.
Thank you so much.
And finally, what are you currently working on?
I’m working on a bunch of things.
I am most excited about, I am hoping to release a novella this year.
The working title is An Unkindness of Ravens.
That is a leather former street kid’s story that I’m really excited about.
And then I’m doing these mini zines of leather stories for holidays.
So I just did the Valentine’s Day one.
I am trying to get back into putting as much queer leather storytelling out into the world as I possibly can in this moment as a way of trying to send love and support and visibility in one of the only ways I can, one of the only tangible ways I feel like I can do.
Absolutely.
Flood the channels.
Flood the channels with joy and happiness and relating to each other.
I love it.
Well, thank you so much for coming on.
We’d love to have you.
Where can people follow you?
I’m at Sassafras Patterdale basically everywhere.
Thanks.
Yeah.
I make it easy.
Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
This was so much fun.
Yeah.
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