Chapter One

School

Here’s what you see when you drive down Los Angeles’ Santa Monica Boulevard just east of La Brea: A 7-11, a Shakey’s Pizza, a low concrete building with fish painted on the side, and a taco stand. There’s a Chinese takeout place and a XXX video rental shop, a filling station and four lanes of traffic, two in each direction. Old people waiting for the bus. Young mothers dragging children in flip flops. A discount dollar store, a laundromat, and a bunch of teenagers standing around and smoking. If you stare for more than a minute, you may note that most of these teenagers are girls, and that they’re more ethnically varied than other cliques in this segregated town. But that’s it. Santa Monica Boulevard’s got the sun-bleached, chain store feeling of most of L.A.

If you’re a transgender girl (meaning you were born male but live as a female), you might notice something extra along this stretch of Santa Monica. It’s here that you’ll find girls trading secrets about how to shoot up the black market hormones purchased from the swap meets in East L.A. If the hormones don’t work fast enough to manifest your inner vision of wider hips and c-cups, you can find out about “pumping parties” out in the Valley, where a former veterinarian or a “surgeon’s wife” from Florida will shoot free floating industrial-grade silicone into hips, butts, breasts, knees—even cheeks and foreheads. Of course this is dangerous when the oils shift and form hard lumps in the armpits and thighs, but you’ll look good for a while.

On Santa Monica, you can learn which dance clubs, like Arena (with its crudely painted ocean mural on the outside), let in underage kids and have go-go boxes for dancing. You can learn which motels, one block up on Sunset, are safe and clean and have weekly rates. You can find out about the telemarketing company that hires transgender youth, no matter what they look like, to sell garbage bags and first aid kits over the telephone. Of course, for the job, you’ll have to memorize a script saying that you’re handicapped and that these household items are offered at higher prices because they provide employment to mentally handicapped people like yourself. And though it makes you sick to say it, this technically won’t be a lie; transgender people are still dubbed ‘mentally ill’ by the medical community, the way gay people were in the 70’s. This is how the telemarketing firm gets away with cheap labor.

On Santa Monica, you can walk with a friend to the Jeff Griffith Center—one of the few outreach agencies that knows about, and feeds, struggling transgender kids under 24. It’s right on the corner of Sycamore; you’ll recognize it by the thick bars on the windows and the hand-drawn sign that says No Fighting. Here, you can sign up for a shower, or get free bus tokens, or a subsidized meal on a tray that looks just like the kind served in the high school cafeteria you ran from. There’s also a big TV and a pool table with no billiard balls, and you can hang out until the place closes at six o’clock, without cars stopping you on the street and asking ‘How much?’

And when the center closes, you can traipse over to Benito’s, the 24-hour clapboard outdoor food stand and “home of the rolled taco,” for yet another dinner. Teenagers can always eat.

At Benito’s, over the sizzle and pop of day-old grease, kids preen and throw insults and drink oversize sodas from waxy paper cups and look into cars for cute boys who might roll by. As the girls wait for night, when the dance clubs open, the Benito’s parking lot fills with them, laughing and squealing and running up to one another with halfway, air-kissy hugs, like they haven’t seen each other in ages and yet don’t want to muss their clothes. Most look nothing like the drag queens or cross dressers that stereotypes dictate or outsiders expect. They’re young and soft-faced and wear jeans and t-shirts, or if it’s a Saturday night, clingy dresses and big hoop earrings.

“Tracy, girl, I haven’t seen you since like last month! You look good! Where you staying at?” This is the kind of banter one might hear as girls bump into each other buying post-taco slurpees at the 7-Eleven.

“Angel! I know, it’s been a long time—that’s cause I’m not staying in Hollywood no more, chica. I got me a husband and we moved over to Culver City.”

A husband is a stretch, but it’s a term kids commonly fling around in an attempt at permanence or stability. When Tracy asks Angel more questions about her man, Angel will likely demur unless the two are legitimately good friends. Teenagers are known for stealing one another’s boyfriends, especially when there’s a perceived scarcity, like there is in this community.

Standing on the corner of Highland and Santa Monica, you can feel positively cultured, as canned classical music is piped out of a loudspeaker and into the parking lot all night long. I heard that it was the Chinese restaurant that put this in, in an oddly misguided attempt to curb loitering. But teenagers like Vivaldi as much as anyone else and they gather there, shouting over its trills, bobbing their heads in four/four time. Gossip speeds along the sidewalk, as kids swap secrets about crushes and losses, and dish about what no-good ho stole another girl’s man. Some kids, though certainly not all, climb in and out of cars—hustling for cash. In this crowd, there’s competition for men and money and good clothes and popularity just like at any high school in America, and on the Boulevard you can find out who’s winning. The Boulevard is also where you can hear about who just got her breasts pumped and looks damn good, and who went back home to live with her mother, becoming a boy again. It’s where you can learn from the older girls that not everyone has surgery and not everyone wants it because a woman can have a penis and girl! no one tell her she can’t. It’s where you can listen to the new Pink CD on your friend’s walkman, and play video games at the all-night Donut Time. It’s where you can feel normal, connected, hip. It’s where you can be a teenager.

Around the corner from Santa Monica and up the street, on Highland, is an unremarkable, brown office building. It’s the kind of place that houses dozens of low-rent and high-turnaround businesses: limo services, temp agencies, computer repair, accounting firms. Every weekday morning, a handful of transgender kids stumble in with the rumpled brown suits and briefcased folks because in the basement of this building is a high school, of sorts. Or was when I became a teacher there.

* * *I don’t even remember how I first heard about Eagles, the small, scrappy high school for gay and transgender teenagers. Probably just from a new acquaintance in a passing conversation. But it had piqued my interest; I was curious who would go there since when I was a kid, there was no such thing as a gay school, and hardly any such thing as a gay student. Would these kids be harassed, troubled, in need? I wondered if I could help in any way. By then, I had been living in Los Angeles for six months, and an itchy boredom with the town had begun to creep up my spine. Having moved from New York so my partner Robin could get a Ph.D., I was missing an urban edge and lonesome for community beyond my dining room table. I worked at home as a freelance magazine writer, and I had extra time to volunteer, maybe once a week, maybe twice. So that winter (which didn’t really feel like a winter at all), I rang up the school.

“Eagles!” a gruff voice answered my call. And then, “Fiona! Put down that straighten-iron! The outlet is for the coffee pot!” I heard a muffled crash. “I’m sorry. Eagles Academy. Can I help you?”

‘Yes,” I said. “My name is Cris Beam. I’m a writer who just moved into town and I’m calling to find out about your school—what it’s about and whether you need—“ “Fiona!!” the person shouted, without covering the phone. The voice was masculine sounding, but without the deep tones of a man—like an adolescent boy whose voice hadn’t changed, except this person was clearly an adult. I detected a slight German accent. “I’m sorry. I’m going to have to call you back.”

I found out later that this person, whose name was also Chris, was a transman, meaning a male who was born female. Chris hadn’t started taking hormones at that time, but when he did a few years later, his voice dropped into the full male register, his face became more angular and he grew facial hair, like all men on testosterone do. When he called the next day, he was apologetic, and, when I told him I was interested in possibly volunteering, he got excited and launched into the hard sell, his accent thickening. He called himself the “volunteering office manager.” His phrasing was clearly non-English.

“Eagles, it’s a school for g-l-b-t children. Well, not children always—some students, they are like twenty years old. This is because, you understand, our students have very hard lives. They do not always have parents, and they do not always come to school. Our books, it says we have one hundred students but today, we have only five. We used to be in a church but now we are on Highland Avenue. You know Highland? You are gay too?”

I was startled by Chris’ rambling bluntness, but only for a moment. I told him yes, but that but I never would have made that public in high school. Growing up in San Francisco where I did sounds like a soft launch for a gay kid, but actually, the other students were so worried about being stained by their location that they mocked or tortured anyone remotely suspicious. Including me. I remember girls in the bathroom turning and leaving in disgust when they spotted me at the mirror. They intoned, darkly, so that I could hear, “Dyke!” And then, to each other, “Get out of here fast!” as they pushed each other, laughing, through the swinging door. “I’m amazed there is a high school for such kids,” I said. “How did it start?”

In his charming, clip-clop English, Chris explained that Eagles was founded by a former high school teacher six years back. Despite its fancy name (which was an acronym for Emphasizing Adolescent Gay Lesbian Education Services), Eagles Academy wasn’t a full-fledged school, exactly, but more of a continuation program for kids who had been—or would be—beaten up at regular schools. They were the boys who looked too girly or the girls who looked too butch, they were the homeless kids living in temporary group homes or on the street and they were, as Chris said, transgender. I said I didn’t know transsexuals could be so young.

“Transgender can be anybody,” Chris said, firmly. “You will see. Come tomorrow at twelve? Or earlier? Okay, goodbye.” And he hung up.

The next morning, after squabbling with a security guard who claimed to have never heard of the school, I made my way to the basement where I found a sheet of paper taped to a wall with the word “EAGLES” scrawled in a sharpie. I followed the arrow on the sign and at the first open door, I saw a person squatting, rifling through a cardboard box on the floor in a tiny room that was musty and too warm. Folding chairs leaned against piles of battered textbooks in every corner. A stack of cardboard boxes served as a table for a cracked coffee pot.

‘Hello!” the person said warmly, standing to shake my hand. He looked like a man, but I could tell he had bound his breasts. This must be Chris. He was wearing faded blue jeans, black boots, a tight white t-shirt and a black leather bomber jacket, ten years out of date. His hair was short and dark black, slicked like a skull cap to his head. He pointed to a chubby, ruddy-faced white man with a button-up collar that was far too tight, talking on the phone. This man sat at the kind of teacher’s desk that I remembered from my public school days: a green metal base with a faux-wood top, heavy as a tank. It took up most of the room. “That’s Jerry.”

“Hello, hello!” Jerry gushed, interrupting and banging down the phone. His strawberry toupee shifted back and forth as he pumped my hand. He didn’t make eye contact but instead looked at a clock on the wall, next to an enormous framed photograph of himself lying on the grass with two tiny fluffy white dogs with bows in their hair. “Oh! Chris—look at the time! We have to go get the lunch!!”

Jerry turned back to me and said, “You wouldn’t mind watching the kids, would you? I can’t remember what it is you teach, but I’m confident you’re an excellent teacher.” He pointed to a door. “They’re all in that room right now. No one’s teaching them.”

Jerry grabbed Chris by the shoulder and hustled him out. I stood for a moment, stunned. The clock ticked, I knew I could walk away if I wanted to. Instead, I crept toward the door. Loud dance music was blaring on the other side, and I heard someone shout “Girl!” like a command. I turned the handle.Inside was what looked to be an oversized storage room, windowless, furnished with a ripped orange couch, an oblong card table, and metal folding chairs scattered about. There were no books, but there were about eight teenagers, mostly hanging out in pairs in different corners of the room. One was braiding another’s hair, two were sharing headphones and doing some kind of synchronized dance. One was asleep and another was drawing patterns on her forearms like tattoos. Some kids looked like women while others looked like adolescent boys with breasts; they all were African American or Latino. One girl with dark skin and a high forehead was wearing a flowy white blouse with tight red jeans. Her makeup was flawless but her feet, in rubber flipflops, were dirty. Another kid of indeterminate gender wore oversized khaki jeans, cut off just below the knee with tube socks pulled up high. She, or he, wore a Dodgers baseball cap backwards, and was cracking up at something a short girl with black lipliner and a white tank top was whispering in his ear.When the door opened, they glanced up at me and then blandly looked away. For reasons I still don’t understand, I dropped my book bag on the table to get their attention.

“Gather around!” I said. I was buoyed by the sound of my own voice, which had, weirdly, taken on the tone of a two-bit magician. “A class like you’ve never seen is about to begin.”
The kids were curious, and bored, so six of them gathered. I had no idea what I was going to do.

“We,” I said boldly, gesturing to everyone, “are going to make a Magazine.”It was the first thing that came to me; I had worked on magazine staffs for years, it was the only thing I knew how to do. Surprisingly, the kids cocked their heads and quieted down. They liked magazines; they had some in their bags. They liked hair magazines, they said, drifting closer toward the table, the kind of thing that could teach you something useful, something practical. One girl with tight cornrows said she hated magazines that just “talked a lot of b.s.,” like politics or news, and another—the one in the cap— retorted, “Except for Vibe. That’s got news, but girl, it’s the kind of news you need.”

I knew after the first few minutes that I liked the kids. They carried fake Prada bags and wore scuff-free sneakers, and chomped on bags of Doritos dramatically and wouldn’t share. Some looked exhausted but they were boisterous and opinionated, and seemed content to tell stories to a perfect stranger who had never been properly introduced.
“In in in!” I grew accustomed to shouting at 10:30 each Thursday morning, acting as a human school bell and pushing teenagers down the hall into my classroom. After lunch that first day, Jerry had crowned me the lone writing teacher, without so much as a head toss toward the resume I had laid on his cluttered desk. Had he looked, he would have noticed I was utterly unqualified for the job (I had babysat, I had tutored, I spoke English) but he bartered with me nonetheless. He wanted me to teach two or three days a week, help him craft the bylaws and mission statement for his school, and run a weekly newspaper. I told him I could only donate a few classroom hours a week and he shook his head desolately.

In my first few months, I learned to disregard the school district rule that teachers weren’t ever to touch their students. Any touching could be misconstrued, administrators reasoned, but for me, shoving was often the only way to get kids into my room. When I arrived each day, I never knew what I would see: kids could be loitering in the hallway, bothering Chris or Jerry to make more coffee in the dilapidated coffeepot, or staggering out of the bathrooms, high out of their minds. Kids came to school late or not at all, and they brought weapons and boomboxes and wigs and drugs and sometimes even their own children to school.

My experience, I found out, matched Eagles’ reputation. When I told people where I was working, they’d often wince, citing stories they’d heard of drug dealing or violence, or they’d shake their heads slowly, saying what a pity it was that such a good idea was handled so poorly, that of course the “gay school” was wild and administratively ignored. I discovered that GLASS (Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services), the one foster agency that specifically places gay and transgender kids in group homes and with families, wouldn’t send their teenagers to Eagles. This was because, a top GLASS employee told me later, “we haven’t had a kid yet that succeeded at that school.”

But I didn’t care, really. I simply grew to love the kids—their attitude, their will, and their immense creativity in the face of such adversity compelled me. And I thought if anybody needed writing skills, these kids did, so I stayed. I initially marveled that they came to school at all, but I came to understand that Eagles was a nest, a social safety zone, where they could re-imagine themselves and test out new identities. Lots of kids migrated weekly between “boy” and “girl,” changing their names, donning wigs or falls, and pinning together skirts made of t-shirts, breasts made of socks. It was part of the game when I took roll each morning, identifying these new characters when they wouldn’t respond to their old names.

Of course, they could just be acting insolent too. Eduardo, for example, was a student with a shock of platinum blonde curls who didn’t like his boy name, so he preferred to be called nothing at all. He marched into class with one eyebrow arrogantly lifted, and with his chin cocked at an angle high above the other students’ heads. His eyes were slightly closed as he clutched his binder, covered with cutouts of the Spice Girls, against his chest. His headphones buzzed audibly and he ignored me when I said his name.

“Okay, sit down, sit down,” I ordered. Sitting, too, was an exercise in politics. There was the whole issue of where to sit, as the wrong association could dent a reputation, and then there was the issue of how to sit: did you drop and cross your legs to show off your high boots, or did you sit with a head toss to signal a new weave?

This parade was more than a fashion show; it was a hunt for approval, and for reflection. Most of the students had little to no contact with their families of origin and, while they shuttled between shelters and group homes and court-appointed placements, they desperately needed friends to appreciate their clothing choices as they stumbled to adulthood. A very small minority of Eagles students lived with their biological parents—most of whom were too tired or overwhelmed to care that their kids were attending a dangerous and sad gay school. One of these students was a transgender girl named Shavonne (originally spelled, Chavon then CaVone, then Shawvawn). Shavonne’s mom was a legend at Eagles because she took this daughter who was born a son to get manicures (acrylics air brushed with sunsets!) and wasn’t ashamed. The kids were jealous of this parental acceptance, but Shavonne’s mother also had eleven children in a one-bedroom apartment in a bad part of town, and Shavonne often didn’t have enough to eat. Shavonne’s mom felt lucky when her children went to school—any school—at all.


There was, when I first started teaching, one exception to the ever-transient gay and trans student body: a straight boy named Miguel. Miguel was a short, green-eyed gangster who had, at seventeen, done prison time as a murder accomplice. The district thought a gay school might be the only place where Miguel’s gang loyalties wouldn’t flare, so they assigned him to Eagles. Oddly, he fit in. He was tender with the boys in heels and the girls in tats; his serious life and even more serious crime gave him a worldliness that made him overlook people’s appearances. And the kids respected Miguel for his lockdown survival; most of them had only served time in juvie or in camps for infractions like hustling or ignoring curfew.

In fact, for all their adolescent taunting, Eagles kids were broadly tolerant of one another. They were, after all, misfits themselves. Aside from Miguel and Eduardo and Shavonne, there was Nina—born in Mexico as Adelio—whose extended family had rejected her when they caught her in a dress at twelve. And Bella, a transsexual girl also from Mexico, who had run away from her mother and siblings in Tijuana to end up in the foster care system of Los Angeles. And Domineque, also in foster care, who always wore a red or black bandana folded into a triangle over her long braided hair. Domineque had sad eyes and never did any schoolwork. She also had some kind of hold over Eduardo, who rarely befriended anyone but was in love with the idea of tragic, doomed beauty, which Domineque seemed to embody. Together, Domineque and Eduardo discussed stars like Marilyn Monroe and the model Gia, women they deemed “ just too beautiful to live.”

And then there were the genetic boys who really wanted to be girls but still came to school dressed as boys. One of these was Luis, who wanted to be called Ariel during the school day—after the mermaid in the Disney movie. Ariel was a shy one. She dwarfed herself in baggy t-shirts and khaki pants and then sat in corners giggling or staring off into space. Jadon, a student who didn’t admit his girl name, was terrified he was too fat to pass as a girl. His father caught him in the bathroom once wearing his sister’s high heels—which he promptly beat him with, after pinning Jadon to the wall. Then there were plain old gay boys, like Deshane, who wore jogging suits and iced-out chains, and sat, with arched eyebrows and pursed lips, haughtily surveying all who passed. Deshane and Nina were hustlers who lived on the streets.

There were a few genetic girls too—toughies like KC and Rosie, who bound their breasts and hid their bodies in slouchy jeans. Or Shemeka and Angel, who had both delivered babies before they realized they were lesbians, and then, because they were such young and ill-equipped mothers, had their children taken away. Pain came in waves at Eagles; you could see it shimmering and hovering at the periphery of all we did, like the horizon’s visible heat, rising up from the street.At first, I thought, my students would actually write in a writing class. Then, I learned that about half didn’t know how to turn words into sentences—and those who did, simply wouldn’t. I ended up teaching writing via acting, which was one thing my students would do as a cohesive group, occasionally. Many of my lessons looked like this:

“Okay, in stories, there’s something called a point of view. Does anyone know what that might be?” I asked one morning.

“An opinion?” Bella ventured, her Mexican accent both thick and sharp. Bella was smart.

“Something like a tower?” another student asked, spacily, twirling a pen. There was always a student like this—someone I had never seen before and would never see again, wandering into my classroom and muttering non-sequiturs.

“Uh, sort of. The point of view is the perspective from which a story is told,” I said. “You can think about it as the person telling the story, even if the person doesn’t say his name or announce he’s the one doing the telling. It’s his perspective—or, as Bella says, his opinion—coming through. So the story will change depending on who’s telling it, depending on the point of view.”

The kids were starting to glaze over. I had to work faster. “So let’s try it,” I said. “Someone name a fairy tale.”

One girl said in slow motion with dripping condescension, “The…….. Three………. Little………Pigs.” I ignored her tone and asked Eduardo to act out what the wolf’s perspective might be.

“Well, being a wolf, I get hungry,” Eduardo immediately started, standing up and getting into character. I don’t remember Eduardo’s outfit on that particular day, but he was probably wearing snug, tomboyish clothes—like tight jeans and platform white sneakers with a faded red or baby blue t-shirt that offset his platinum blonde curls. The shirt would have been cut feminine, with two-inch cap sleeves that disguised only the top of his homemade tattoo—fancy scripted letters A.T.C. “And when I get hungry, I want carnitas. Well, yesterday I got arrested by some pig cop for just being myself and going out looking for pork. Damn!”

Eduardo continued, cocking a hip: “I had found a little pig, done up in a straw house, thinking she was all beat with her hay furniture and shit. I yelled, ‘Miss Thing! What is your T? You know it’s time to go to the tea party!’” Eduardo pursed his lips and looked another student up and down, slowly, disdainfully, like he was the pig. “I was trying to get her to come outside, but she wasn’t having it. That pig thought she was too pooch for me. So I told her Bitch! I am gonna Blow Y’all’s House down if you don’t show me your business. Don’t you make me huff.”

Here Eduardo sat down, for impact, and let his face grow mournful. “You know what that pig did? She got her big-assed transsexual sister who was rich and shit, living in a big ole brick house, to try to boil my ass in a pot. In. A. Pot. And I was just hungry. Damn!”Eduardo was fifteen and transgender, on the verge of being a self-proclaimed transsexual. As my days at Eagles piled up, I learned what this meant. Transgender is an umbrella term—used to catch anybody who looks or acts outside the bounds of traditional gender norms. Transgender, for example, can be the femmy boy (gay or straight) who likes to wear makeup and sometimes even skirts. Transgender can be the genetically-female girl who goes by the name BJ and binds her breasts into a flattened mass beneath her t-shirt. And transgender can be the person who looks singularly male or female on the outside but internally feels like an amalgam of both, a person who falters in front of public restroom doors, momentarily not sure which to choose.

Transsexual is more specific, though it’s a primary category under the umbrella. A transsexual is someone who feels entirely like the opposite sex. This person doesn’t have to do anything about this feeling; she just has to feel it. Sooner or later though, most transsexuals will start to “transition.” This can mean dressing in the clothes of the opposite sex, taking hormones, having surgeries, or any combination therein.

The transsexual community of men and women is as diverse and varied as the world of genetic men and women. There are rich transsexuals and poor transsexuals, brain surgeon transsexuals and garbage collector transsexuals, transsexuals from the country, the suburbs and from the city, from religious families and secular. People who say they’ve never met a transsexual just didn’t know what they were seeing; most transsexuals blend and fit and pass.

Many of my students at Eagles were transgender in some way. Some male-to-females (MtFs) had breast implants, some took legal or illegal estrogen hormones and some did neither, living part time as a boy, part time as a girl. Contrary to popular name-calling, there were no transvestites—defined as straight men who like to wear women’s clothes for fetish. And while most of the transgender kids were genetic boys who lived as girls (transgirls), there were a few genetic girls who did the reverse (transboys). All of these kids were called the pronoun of their choice. ***Los Angeles, it’s been said, is a place where people start over. If Vegas is a city you go to to escape, and New York is where you go to establish, then L.A is where you go to emerge. You see it in the signage. “I’m New!” proclaim the giant retail ads, fighting for air space with the palm trees. “I’m Hot!” declare the billboards hawking fashion on Sunset Boulevard or restaurants on San Vicente. You’ll never see signs as big and sexy as you will in L.A., advertising things as regular and puny as copy shops or tacquerias. With ten million residents, you can be anonymous in L.A., but you don’t want to go unnoticed. Which makes it the perfect place to slip in—a small town kid from nowhere—and emerge a rock star, a celebrity, a big-city player. In Los Angeles, you can be anything you want to be.

Or so goes the promise. Of course it’s not always true, but it’s part of the prevailing mythology that makes Los Angeles a particularly potent magnet for transgender youth. While there have always been transsexuals in all pockets of the globe, never before have there been so many young ones—twelve, fourteen, seventeen years-old—collecting in the big cities, determined to live out their lives as a gender they were not born. I met over fifty transsexual kids during the five years I lived and worked in Los Angeles, and they came from as far away as Alabama and Mexico and even Hawaii. Some hailed from smaller California towns in the central valley or up north, and some grew up in L.A. proper. Most had tattered, strained family relations, and many had been kicked out when their parents caught them (their sons!) trying on a dress in the bathroom or stashing stilettos in a schoolbag. These male-to-female transgender kids, who even a generation ago may have suffered silently in their bedrooms not knowing what to call their strange feelings, were now seeing images of transsexuality on daytime talk shows or in music videos. Oprah was talking about it and so, regrettably, was Jerry Springer, with his “Your girlfriend’s a man!” exposés. RuPaul was a drag queen, but he was popular and beautiful. While these representations weren’t always positive or perfect, at least they helped the kids to know they weren’t alone. They allowed them to try out new identities—to dress up and even, sometimes, tell a few friends. Parents, however, weren’t catching up, so the kids ran away to Los Angeles in search of new community, and some help.

For all its troubles, Eagles really did try to be this help. After my first few months teaching in a storage basement, we moved to a larger space in an equally drab office building on Hollywood Boulevard. Thanks to a grant, we were able to move into offices, with windows this time, with roll-around chalkboards and more donated chair-desks. The hallway was decorated with a few rainbow flags stapled to the walls and the kind of generic inspirational messages printed on thin cardboard (“Go For It!” or “Our School Rules!”) that adorn every public classroom. In the rooms, grey industrial carpet met pale yellow and peeling walls which led to flimsy ceiling panels and fluorescent lights. One of the classrooms was for Laura, a full-time teacher hired to teach history and math and social studies, another for whatever volunteer (like me) was teaching that day, and the other, the corner office, was for Jerry. Unfortunately, because the rent was cheap, the school was positioned on a major drug block where kids in puffy black jackets whistled like birds to indicate what exactly they were selling, or to warn one another about the vice around the corner. Eagles was also situated just a few blocks away from the two major prostitution throughways, which affected the student body’s after school activities.

When the kids, with their multiple piercings and tight clothes, got on the elevator, they elicited mutterings and dark glances from the buildings’ other tenants. These people, employees of the nondescript, numbered offices that filled the other floors, were likely dismayed by the kids’ having sex in the fire escape stairwells and the rumors of drugs shared in the back area where the trash was kept. Though I don’t know this to be true, I’m sure Eagles prompted several complaint calls to the managers and landlords. I do know we only stayed in that building for a year. Most of the Eagles volunteers lasted a few weeks or months, but I taught journalism there for two and a half years. I stayed because, despite their voguing in the hallways or dropping out for weeks at a time, despite their standing up in the middle of a lesson to shout and snap, “Miss Thing’s got her work on. Down!” for no apparent reason, I liked it. I was endlessly amazed by a kid’s ability to be so desperate, sleeping in cars and tricks’ hotel rooms, and then show up at school wearing knock-off Chanel and Versace, notebook in hand. I bonded with the teenagers that kept coming back and, less valiantly, I attached myself to the thin satisfaction that came from believing I was impacting their lives in some way.

After I had taught at Eagles for a good six months, more than a few students confessed to me that, more than anything, they really wanted to graduate from high school. That this was a matter of pride. They had romantic visions of their delinquent families suddenly showing up, remorseful, at their graduation ceremonies, with carnations in hand, begging to be a part of their now-successful child’s life. This student, usually, would imagine accepting his diploma and then giving his teary parents the middle finger while shouting, “Ha! I did it despite you and now you’ll never get me back!” It was a version of the “they’ll-all-miss-me-at-my-funeral” fantasy so many of us nurse as kids, and I wanted to help them make their victory march.

Still, wanting to graduate and wanting to do the work to get there are entirely different things. I kept the promise I had made the first day to make a magazine, but it was harder than I thought.

“This is boring!”

“I don’t want to be a writer.”

“I hate you.”

As soon as we stopped planning the magazine and started working on it, these became my students’ Thursday morning battle cries. I had to play teacher-cum-circus juggler, constantly ditching my lesson plans to ignite their attention. When the kids were either particularly insolent or especially deflated, I would turn my back on them and shriek like an opera singer. Then I would whip around and make them jump up and touch their toes ten times. If I could surprise them enough with my antics, they’d often go along with me. Or I’d tell them to tilt in their seats and pretend that they were on a luge sled zipping down a mountain. Anything to get them engaged.

Whenever they could, my students, like all students, would talk about sex. It was one of the topics that kept us communicating as a cohesive group, so I usually let it slide. I think specifically of the time Shavonne came back from juvenile hall and wrote a rap about “lockdown love.” Shavonne was the transgender girl with the sunset-painted acrylic nails, the one with a mother who actually accepted her. Shavonne had been arrested for prostitution, but since it was a first offense, she was sentenced to a several days in a juvenile detention center. Because she was genetically male, Shavonne was sent to the male ward and had to revert back to her boy identity, D.X. This, for most trans girls (especially those who take hormones and have breasts) can be a major problem as “chicks with dicks” tend to inspire sexual assaults and beatings. Sometimes the more sensitive facilities will try to protect the transgender inmates by putting them in solitary confinement, but this too, can wreak psychological havoc. But Shavonne was so saucy and spirited and adaptable, that she re-donned her boy mode as though it were an outfit, and then snapped and swished her way through the ranks of the tougher boys. By the end of her time, she said, “every man in there wanted a taste of this booty. Down!”

I remember when Shavonne actually was D.X., back at the start of my Eagles tenure. She would probably hate this now, but at the time, D.X. reminded me a bit of Michael Jackson. Not the freaky, nose crumbling, mask-wearing Michael Jackson, but the prior white gloved creature with the spangled socks. I’m thinking of the Michael Jackson who seemed both cherished and somehow broken, a live spark who mitigated these inconsistencies with genuine creation—using style to rise above a complicated past. D.X. did this too.

Unlike most students, D.X. came to school every day. He was only about five foot six, but his white platform sneakers or his high-heeled zip up black boots gave him extra inches. His black hair was trashed, alternately straightened and dyed blonde and then dyed black again so it hung in dispirited little twists, like thirsty vines, down to his chin. Sometimes D.X. would tie this back with a rubber band, and sometimes he would borrow a wig from one of the trans girls and march into class, arrogant, like a runway star. Just before he reached his seat he would twist back around, flipping the blonde wig, and grin, welcoming us into the charade. Then he’d stick his bum out behind him and shake it like a rattle. A victory dance.

D.X.’s body was amazing—all taut, sinewy muscle layered over a perfectly aligned bone structure that could fold, like a toy, in any direction. D.X. was usually dancing, even when he was sitting still: a toe pointed forward when he sat at his desk, or a shoulder jutted back like a ballerina about to pirouette. During breaks he would dance for everyone in the hallways: a unique combination of elegance and rhythm, like breakdancing merged with a model’s catwalk.

His shift to womanhood, when it came, looked from the outside like incremental variations on a theme: the wig he’d don for class would suddenly stay on all day, the mesh t-shirt would one morning reveal a sport bra beneath, and on another, a bra with hooks and lace. Soon the short shorts became a skirt (just a quick snip at the seam) and D.X. started asking us to call him Shavonne, with all those crazy spellings.

D.X./ Shavonne was good in class, eagerly answering questions and listening, head tipped, to the other students talk. When I passed out reading assignments, Shavonne would finish first and then quietly watch herself, making tiny dance moves reflected in the window. When I asked the kids to interview someone they respected, Shavonne chose her mother, and we published a story about a woman who had eleven children and no phone, but could scrounge together coins to buy Shavonne the clothes appropriate to her new gender. Shavonne actually worked on the rewrites I assigned her, as she was a perfectionist, and proud.

So we were all surprised when Shavonne got arrested. She said she had to “ho it” because she needed the money for more clothes and that she’d only hustled a few times when she got picked up. And look! she said, presenting me with her “Lockdown Love” rap, she’d even worked on her writing while she was in the hall. Glad to see Shavonne back in class and seemingly unscathed, I rode along with her enthusiasm and let her read it aloud.

I’ve scoured my files for a copy of this rap and, while I’ve found Shavonne’s essays about her mother getting pregnant and her brother getting shot, and some lighter ditties on fashion, I can’t find “Lockdown Love.” I vividly remember, though, that it was a group shower scene in the juvenile hall, where Shavonne kept dropping that damn slippery soap and had to crawl around on the tiles to find it. The rap was delivered from this vantage point, where Shavonne gazed up at her fellow captives and described the shapes she saw. Every boy in the song, it seemed, was particularly dirty that day, and needed Shavonne to hand them the soap. There was a lot of steam, and Shavonne sat on the shower floor, “accidentally” sliding the soap up thighs and backsides. There were rhymes and moans, and rhymes that rhymed with moans, and Shavonne was so outrageous and so theatrical that the whole class laughed and made her do it again. Laughter, even when it’s rooted in the raw mulch of pain, is obviously healing, so I let the x-rated delivery slide. I’m sure this is questionable pedagogy.On lucky days, one or two students would actually write something, a paragraph or two, on binder paper framed in doodles. The rest would pick up pens when prompted only by a hard stare, and then drop them when I looked away. Still, we inched along. Every week I collected what I could, after teaching basic writing skills, like when to capitalize letters and what a comma means. Some of the best writing was slipped to me after class, when other students weren’t around. One kid would hang back when the others trailed out, picking at his backpack zipper, retying his shoe. Then he’d hand me a piece of paper, folded into a tiny square, and say, ‘Here. Tell me if it sucks or not.”

Ultimately, miraculously, we managed to pull together enough pieces to make a magazine. Out and About was alternately sad and hilarious, with fashion reviews of the stores next door, obituaries of friends the kids had lost, and all sorts of advice, like transgender Hints from Heloise. We ran Bella’s medical story, called “Hormones: Are They What YOU Want?” which basically warned girls that they wouldn’t get the body of a goddess as fast as they probably wished no matter how many pills they popped. There were also large doses of angsty teenage poetry. A young lesbian named Refugia, who was homeless after her parents caught her with another girl, wrote a fantasy poem about an imaginary aunt who “loved and accepted me the way I am.” And sometimes their earnestness was comical—especially in their advice columns. In our first issue, we published two columns side by side: “Getting out of a Gang,” and “When Your Grandma Finds Your Drag Clothes.” (I’ve actually used advice from both.)

The final version of Out & About was a twenty page glossy zine (a printer donated his services) designed by a small graphic design firm I’d convinced to contribute their skills. We printed hundreds, and the kids were proud. They carried stacks of them back to their old neighborhoods, leaving them in cafes and bodegas, and sneaking into the schools where they’d been beaten up or expelled, to leave piles in the cafeterias when no one was looking.




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