Transitions

 7/19/26

 

Sunday morning the air was clear, the smoke and particles having been washed away by saturday’s torrential rain.  I was getting ready for Jaysen and Jeffrey’s memorial, pulling my hair into a ponytail with some difficulty because of my problematic shoulder, when the Very Sick client called, upset because he felt that the latest new doctor was trying to rush him out of the hospital before he’s ready.  I listened to his complaints, and then he got more serious.  “It’s like a whisper telling me ‘something ain’t right, J.’ it’s almost robotic. I know because I feel it. Something’s about to be wrong.”  It’s this instinct that is responsible for his remarkable survival, prompting him to head to the hospital in the nick of time over and over.  Finishing that thought, he switched back to his less serious side. “Thank you for listening to my bullshit,” he said in the exact tone of someone saying “thank you for listening to my TED talk.”

 

Jeffrey and Jeremy’s memorial was outdoors at Delancey and Forsythe St where their org handed out supplies to the homeless every Sunday.  When I got there, the volunteers were handing out burgers and some kind of frozen dessert to the homeless from one table and backpacks full of supplies at another.  The area was swarming with way more of their volunteers than usual, mostly glad in black t-shirts memorializing the couple.  The gay man responsible for the shirts seemed to have forgotten that some people need room for breasts and wound up offering to print me one in a bigger size and send it to my office.

 

I found K, our client who volunteered with them a lot, and he introduced me to various people.  He had been asked to speak, and he had a draft of his speech on his phone.  He wrote about how he was homeless when he met Jeffrey, his two years of volunteering with them.  “Thank you, Mr. Jeffrey,” he wrote.  “You saved me from sadness and hunger and became a mentor.”  By the time the distribution was done and the memorial began, K had been called in to work so he arranged for someone to read his speech and asked me to record it for him.

 

After the distribution, about 75 people went into the nearby park, a combination of volunteers, clients, friends and family. One of the volunteers, a young woman, hopped up on a ledge at the base of the cast iron fence while everyone gathered in a semicircle around her.  My friends and I have been to and organized so many memorials that we know the elements and the rhythm of them, but she seemed a little lost.  I have a couple prayers and a poem,” she said.  “If anyone wants to read them.”  One of their clients volunteered, reading the bible verse from her phone with an easy familiarity. A volunteer read the poem.  I thought to myself that it was odd that they included a Christian prayer but not the mourner’s Kaddish, but I reminded myself that since I didn’t help organize this, I couldn’t be too critical.  Another volunteer hopped up on the ledge and read K’s poem.  Later I realized that my video had caught not just her, but also the back of the man in front of me to the right, his shoulders shaking with sobs. At the very end, an older woman with long silver hair came to the front and told us she was Jeffrey’s sister.  She thanked everyone for helping make his dream of the organization real.  Then the young organizer handed out ribbons and markers to write messages with, but I needed to get to work.

 

The unanswered question hovering unspoken at the event had been “What will happen to the organization? Will backpacks for the streets continue?”  The volunteers were pledging to keep up the distributions while they wait to hear from the Board about the future.  The immediate difficulty is that while a large number of people were involved at the warehouse and in the distributions, the infrastructure of the organization was completely managed by Jeffery and Jayson.  On the group chat, it quickly became clear that nobody was sure how many storage spaces the org has or where they are.  They also can’t access the account online donations go to, so I had to convince our Board to send our Memorial contribution to the volunteer who is accepting funds for them until they get access to the account.

 

When K had been fretting about the future of the org, I asked him if Jeffery had taken a salary for the work.  K said he thought he did, so I told him that if there are funds budgeted for salary, the Board might be able to hire a new Director, assuming he didn’t seriously underpay himself like many of us do to keep our fledgling nonprofits afloat.  Years can go by immersed in the lifesaving urgency of the work before an organization is finally financially secure enough to pay anywhere near a competitive salary and by then the accumulated sacrifices have done substantial financial damage.  Even if we weren’t in a time when runaway capitalism has all but vanquished the traditional idea of retirement, nonprofit people (and activists and artists) often wind up with a retirement plan like mine – work as long as you are at all physically able and then hope you die fast.

 

Deep in thinking mode, I started to walk west on Delancey street, and then headed up a block to Spring, which was bustling with tourists in soccer jersey and flocks of young women in variations of the same outfit – right now it’s jeans and long, completely straight hair.  I passed a line of people waiting outside an expensive clothing store and a young woman said she liked my shirt, the classic silence=death.

 

I passed the shop that has somehow stayed in business for years despite selling only rice pudding albeit in a huge number of flavors, and then the people at Balthazar’s outdoor tables eating brunches that cost more than the entire contents of my bank account.

 

Along the way, I was thinking about New Alt.  We’re older and have more infrastructure than Backpacks for the Street, more redundancy.  If something happened to our Treasurer, we could still access our accounts.  Without me, they would have to hire a grant writer.  The part that would be hardest to replicate is my work with the clients.  Our new, young social worker is strongly harm reduction focused and she connects well with most of the clients. Between me and her supervision with Jenna, she’s learning fast but the systems our clients have to navigate are labyrinthine and ever changing.

 

I think about Sylvia’s, how I spent years building it from the ground up and how it started to decline when I left – partly because volunteers and funders opted to follow me.  They never hired a Director after me, and there was nobody to fundraise for the shelter.  At first  Metropolitan Community Church was covering the shelter expenses, but then I started hearing about staff not being paid, about people pooling their food stamps to buy food.  When I would try to refer a client, they would not be able to take them because the heat was out or the plumbing was flooding.  Now Sylvia’s is just a skeleton of what it once was, a staff member and a handful of long term clients making do in the church basement and the clients I see every day who desperately need that kind of low barrier LGBTQ shelter have even fewer options.

 

I left Sylvia’s pretty abruptly.  I had been coping with the intense pressure to raise more money without any transparency about where it was actually going.  I had been coping with the Pastor’s abusive, exploitative approach to staff and volunteers.  I had been coping with the around the clock phone calls from desperate young people begging for a spot in the shelter.  What I could not tolerate was being prevented from doing what the young people needed. 

 

I often left the shelter at 1am after all the clients were tucked in and the staff on duty was at the desk watching over them.  I would head to 34^th St to catch the D train back to Brooklyn.  I knew I had to leave Sylvia’s when I found myself standing at the edge of the platform night after night reminding myself of what my childhood friend, now an MTA motorman, told me about how afraid he was of hitting people and what that trauma had done to his colleagues.

I only gave them two week’s notice to the shock of Rev Pat who was convinced that my commitment to the young people would keep me there forever.  We were already serving the Sunday dinners that would become the backbone of New Alternatives because Rev Pat had responded to a few clients misbehaving in church by shutting down the Sunday dinners that not just residents but a variety of hungry queer youth relied on.

 

I didn’t do any transition planning because, despite my issues with Rev Pat, I didn’t think she would let the shelter-her death-bed promise to Sylvia Rivera-crash and burn.  I thought they would hire a new Director and continue more or less as usual.

 

It was really hard to leave my baby, the program I had been handed in embryonic orm and grown into a full scale agency.  I didn’t tell my Dad what was going on.  By then, he was completely blind and pretty far along his slide into dementia and I didn’t want to worry him.  But one day as I was coming down the long hall of his railroad-style apartment, he said “you are walking sadly.”  I was amazed that he could tell from the sound of my steps.  Blind people often develop sensitivity in their other senses to compensate, and he had been listening to me walk since I took my first steps, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised.  Busted, I sat down next to him and explained.