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Today I participated in the rally for St.Vincent's Hospital and the vigil for Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar. As I expected, they presented a study in contrasts, though to an even greater degree than I expected.
By the time I arrived at 25th Street and Ninth Avenue, the march to St.Vincent's was already underway. So I walked along windswept yet sun-drenched Chelsea and West Village Streets to the hospital, where about a hundred people gathered around a podium where various community activists and politicians spoke. I could immediately feel the tense anger that grew more intense when Tom Duane, the chair of the New York State Senate Health Committee, took the microphone.
Duane, at times barely audible even though he used a microphone, said what others had already said: that the people were angry and that the hospital's closure is an injustice that will lead to deaths and other tragedies and disasters. Probably anyone chosen at random from the crowd could have said exactly the same things, verbatim. Chants of "What are you going to do?" filled the air. One mustachioed man very loudly reminded him that he's up for re-election in November. That man, I'd guess, voted for him not only in the most recent State Senate election, but in earlier contests, including the one that made Duane one of the first two openly gay candidates (Antonio Pagan was the other.) to be elected to the New York City Council. I would guess that a lot of other people in that crowd voted for Duane every time he ran for office. Now they, like that man, were feeling some combination of disappointment and betrayal.
I recalled the time I met Duane in Albany. That was about seven years ago, during the time I was going to my job as Nick but socializing--and working as an advocate and volunteer--as Justine. Only a few weeks before that, the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA), which Duane sponsored, became law--about thirty years after it was first proposed. Some of us were disappointed and even upset because there was no language to protect transgenders or others whose gender identity and expression do not fit into societal expectations. We thought that perhaps SONDA would at least open the door a crack so that a more inclusive law could pass. However, meeting him made me less hopeful that would happen. Though I never met him before that day, I had the sense that the fight for SONDA took a lot out of him; today I had the sense that he still has not recovered from it. And his sense of fatigue seemed to fuel the anger and hostility of the crowd.
On the other hand, if anyone at the vigil for Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar was there to express rage, I didn't notice. It seemed that the atmosphere was the inverse of that of the St. Vincent's rally: There was a profound sense of grief, even among those of us who had never met Amanda, that unexpectedly (at least to me) found expression as empathy. Even if I weren't a trans woman, I would have been able, in some way, to identify with others who attended. Many of them knew her and were lamenting the loss of a "dear friend" and "beautiful soul." Nearly all of us has lost someone dear to us; a few of those deaths were horrific, as Amanda's was.
Now I am thinking of all of those times someone has endured a particularly violent, tragic, painful or simply protracted process of dying, and after that person died, someone said, "She's in a better place now." I certainly hope that's true for Amanda. Now I'm realizing why such a wish might seem banal to some people, and why some might deem me a simpleton or worse for echoing it: That vigil, whatever anyone may want to say about it, was probably a better "place" than any she had experienced in this life.
Perhaps her spirit was guiding us. The proceedings were free of rancor and hostility. Those of us who had never met her could feel a connection to her, and even the cops who were there seemed, if not benevolent, at least less like the ones who aid and abet the harassment and violence that too many of us experience. In fact, someone even praised their work, even though the cops we saw weren't directly involved with the capture of the man who is charged with killing her. Elizabeth Maria Rivera, who organized the vigil, said that she was orignally going to hold a protest on the steps of the local (104th) precinct house. But, upon learning that the man charged with murdering Amanda had been captured and returned to New York, she changed plans. She and I exchanged e-mail addresses and phone numbers; I did the same with a few other people there. Perhaps I will meet her, and some of the others, again some day.
Last night I was really, really tired. I am now, too. But at least I don't have an early morning class tomorrow, as I did today.
So what did I do yesterday? I rode to work, then to Chelsea (right across the street from the Fashion Institute of Technology, to be exact) for a meeting with SAGE and representatives from a few other organizations that provide services to transgendered people. Those reps numbered about a dozen; I was meeting five of them for the first time. The others included a couple of people I hadn't seen in some time and who didn't know I'd had my surgery.
Dwayne, the very first person to whom I came out, was also there. So was James, who participated in the workshop I did last month but whom I hadn't seen for at least three or four years before that. In fact, the last time I saw him before the workshop, he was a she--a "butch," to be precise--who was assigned the name "Jane" along with the "F" on his birth certificate. Some--including James himself--might argue that he hasn't changed that much. From what I saw, I'd agree, and mean it as a compliment. He's still smart and sensitive--and tough yet vulnerable. He even looks more or less as he did before: as one of those men in late middle age or early in his "golden years" who's handsome, not in a pretty-boy sort of way, but in the way of someone whose face and eyes are entirely his own and as unique as the way he sees through those eyes.
I wonder how he sees me through those eyes. In some ways. we're opposites. First, and most obvious, is that he's FTM while I'm MTF. Also, while he was living as a "butch," I was living, for all intents and purposes, as a straight man, even though I was, as some might say, a "switch hitter."
We had supper in a Mexican restaurant in the Village. Afterward, I walked with him back to his apartment on the far western part of Chelsea. Along the way, we passed St. Vincent's Hospital, which is in the process of closing. Tomorrow ambulances will no longer bring any but psychiatric patients to the emergency room; all of the inpatient services will end in the middle of the month.
Three ambulances were waiting in front of the hospital. Their drivers looked shell-shocked. They didn't look like they were new to the job: I'm sure they've seen some terrible things. The same is probably true for the two nurses we saw propped on the edge of the building. They were on a break of some sort, but they--understandably--didn't look relaxed. I leaned toward the more petite of the two and said, "I'm really sorry for what's happening to you guys."
"Thank you." A tear dripped down her gaunt cheek.
"It's nice to know people like you care," said the other.
"Yes," James replied. "You've been there for us."
The more petite nurse, who looked to be about my age, recognized James. "You were here not too long ago." James nodded.
"Where are you going to go after this?" the other, who had darker hair, wondered.
"Where are a lot of people going to go?" James sighed.
I would bet that at least half of the people in that meeting James and I attended had used, at some time or another, St.Vincent's. Dwayne said it was the "go to" hospital when he was coming out as a teenager during the early '60's. "You went out, you knew you were going to get beat up," he told me once. "And you knew you were going to end up in St. Vincent's."
Most other hospitals wouldn't have treated Dwayne, James or any number of other people. They were too poor or queer or something else for some of the other hospitals, and they didn't have insurance for any number of reasons. In Dwayne's and James's cases, it had to do with the fact that they were too busy surviving to get a job that offered insurance, or one doing anything that would make them enough money to buy a policy. They both left their home as teenagers to escape from the sexual and other kinds of abuse they experienced. That is also the case of Clarence, another trans man I know. All of them lived on the streets for long periods of time. James and Clarence came to New York with no money, no friends and no credentials, educational or otherwise. In fact, Clarence told me once, he couldn't read when he got off the bus in the Port Authority Terminal.
We talked about that, among other things, at the meeting in which James and I participated. Among LGBT people--the T's in particular--it seems that there are extremes in education. We have disproportionate numbers of people with advanced degrees, but we also have many people who didn't finish high school and even some, like Terrence when he first came to New York, are illiterate. And we also have quite a few people who have learning disabilities of one sort or another.
It's hard not to think that some of those learning disabilities and educational deficiencies have at least something to do with the violence too many of us experience. I know too many other LGBT people who stopped attending school because they were getting beat up or even were experiencing sexual violence.
A good number of those people have used St. Vincent's. Where will they go now? What will James, Clarence and Dwayne do?
What would I do?
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