Observations

Today I was schlepping my way through the hot, muggy day whem I encountered a pair of teen girls sitting on the church steps. It was well before client hours, so I gave them the usual instructions to sit on the other steps, which are not an active doorway, and then started searching for my keys. "Are you part of this?" asked one of the girls, pointing to the New Alt sign on the door. It was hot out there, so I let them in and handed them over to Danny to get some food while I got settled. Once they were upstairs in my quiet, sweaty office, the story came out. They are a lesbian couple, 15 and 16 years old, both had taken off from abusive homes, and they wanted to stay together. When I heard their ages, my heart sank. Below a certain age, there is no way to house teens without at least contacting ACS, and below 16, the youth shelters can't even take them in, they have to be placed by child welfare. Foster parents who want teens are few and far between, so most teen...

Last week, on a blazing hot day, I ducked out of work early to head down to Foley Square for the Good Trouble protest. I had written on FB that I would be there if I could get away from clients - 5pm on a workday is tough since we have client hours until 6pm. Ben replied that I should bring the clients and continue counseling on the way, and that's literally what happened. Only one client decided to come along, a trans guy in his 20s. On the way, we decided to stop for beverages, and he picked a slurpee flavored 7-11 brand drink, with a brightly colored label clearly designed to appeal to kids, It was 2 for 1, so he grabbed a second one, and I got a seltzer, and being the grown up, I paid for both. I felt even more parental when he handed me his extra drink to stow in my bag (and then later on handed me the empty bottle since there wasn't a nearby trash can). We made our way through the gathering activists, saying hi to people I knew all along the way. "This is...

Sometimes people show up at New Alt who are too old for the program but my staff remember when they were in the same position, and sometimes they bring them up to see me anyway so that I can figure out where to send them. Yesterday it was the first client of the day, a gay asylum seeker in his 30s from Venezuela. He explained that he had been in a relationship with a man who was controlling and abusive, and he had to leave with nowhere to go. NYC does not have an LGBTQ domestic violence shelter, and the system is really not set up to accomodate male survivors. It's hard even for a single woman to get into a DV shelter, because a lot of the units are for women with children, and there are nowhere near enough to meet demand. I couldn't refer him to Marsha's the LGBTQ shelter because they only take people up to age 35. After 35, there is no LGBTQ specific shelter. So I had to send this gentle, soft-spoken man who was eagerly telling me about his work as a chef and how he ...

I am sitting at my desk, sweating in my unair-conditioned office, exchanging texts in Spanish with a migrant client, R., when I see the results come in. The Senate passed the big ugly bill 51 to 50. Vance had to break the tie. I’m really disappointed in Senator Murkowski. I thought she had more sense than that. I know they bought her with things for her state, but surely she can see the bigger picture. For once, Susan Collins did the right thing after disappointing us so many times. When we were interrupting Vought, she sounded genuinely fed up with this administration, especially on the issues of public broadcasting and PEPFAR and instead of saying something dismissive or hostile as we were being taken out, she said "people feel passionate about this." This thing is such a disaster for everyone, but particularly our clients. Cuts to food assistance, Medicaid and housing are literally cuts to everything they rely on to stay alive. We already didn’t have enough of anything ...

I was getting ready for the Queer Liberation March and searching for my glasses when the phone rang and I picked it up to find a doctor from NYU. I recognized his name because he has been taking care of my very sick client, J., for the last week. "Are you his proxy?" he asked, which is not a question you ever want to hear. "Yes," I confirmed, waiting for bad news, pushing away the memory of the day that I, as proxy, made the decision to take JC off life support. "He has really low blood pressure," he said. "That’s happened before," I told him, thinking of the time a hospital in the Bronx told me that J. was stuck in the ICU beause he had to stay there as long as he was getting pressors, powerful drugs to raise his blood pressure. They asked me to decide whether to risk taking him off the pressors, so he could leave the ICU. My staff joke through their pain that J has more lives than a cat because somehow he keeps pulling through. "There ar...

6/25/25 Today Ben and I faced an unusual dilemma. Two organizations that we have both done a lot of protesting with and are deeply committed to, both wound up having civil disobedience actions on Capitol Hill today. Popular Democracy was holding a press conference and a large civil disobedience to protest cuts to Medicaid and healthcare. That action had been planned well in advance, but then Russell Vought, the despicable head of the Office of Management and Budget and also one of the primary authors of project 2025, was scheduled to speak to the Senate Appropriations Committee. The group that has been doing actions about PEPFAR, the global HIV treatment and prevention program, which includes many people from Housing Works, decided to interrupt his testimony. Ben and I were both torn, but I decided that the opportunity to directly confront Vought and challenge his lies was important. ACT UP and other organizations fought for decades for global HIV treatment, and the decision to stop...

June 18 2025 I’m doing a lot of interviews these days about the impact of federal funding cuts. The agencies that actually get federal funding are afraid to talk so it falls to me. I tell the reporter about the indirect ways we’re being impacted, the flood of intakes, the increased competition for the foundation grants and dwindling individual donations that we rely on, the spiking anxiety among the clients. I can tell this reporter gets how bad this all is, I can hear it in his voice, in his questions. I start to tell him about the fear among our our trans clients and I tear up, the tears choking my voice. I fight it off, stroke Smokey who is on the table “helping”, continue with the interview. At the end he asks me how nonprofit workers on the front lines are keeping it together and I draw a blank. Smokey nudges me, "well, I have cats," I say. "They help when they’re not being maniacs." I can pretty much hear him nodding over the phone. "I have cats too,...