My name is rev. lenny duncan (they/them) and I grew up on the sidewalks of the gayborhood. I mean the gayborhood as a concept in the United States of America, but really, almost all those places personally shaped me.
I spent 1991 through 2008 in various states of houselessness across America, and as many of us know, the scenes, hangouts, and cultural gathering spots across the country for the lost, lonely, and discarded are typically your local gayborhoods. From Castro Street on Halloween, to Duval Street in Key West on New Year’s Eve, to Thirteenth Street in Philly to kick off the summer with one of the largest and earliest pride festivals—not to be mistaken with Thirteenth Street in a few other places that fit the profile—there is a haven. There is a holy oasis in the urban landscape full of worker drones who pretend you don’t exist and ignore your request for help or change. There is a place for people like us. Every grubby punk rock/emo, anarchist, train-hopping, jam band-following young person in America knows it.
It is the local LGBT neighborhood.
It’s you.
My parents had no language, or means, to love a kid who described their gender as “angel” to their dad because that was the only non-binary being they could think of. But the gayborhood, and specifically the books I stole from Giovanni’s Closet, did.
I grew up in West Philly, a black kid with a white mom. I remember as a kid, before I had a realpolitik, but after witnessing the M.O.V.E bombings, watching armed white men tell my father just what they thought of him, his white wife, and his misbegotten children. I remember mostly just feeling sorry for my mom because she was white. This was before I understood white privilege, or why my mom was unique in her sense that her two babies would only be truly safe in their own community, and she was the one who would have to change, adjust, and live in the black community.
But other than Mom and her family, all the rest that I had encountered seemed angry for no reason, hateful, and obsessively destructive. Heavy-handed people behind desks, behind badges in my neighborhood, or the people who handed my parents their paychecks. The smiling school administrator who made me retake the standardized test because my previous score was “impossible.”
In Philadelphia the color lines are invisible, but they are still there, throughout the city like a spiderweb of socioeconomic scars raked across the face of Ben Franklin and the rest of the founding “fathers.” Before the enforcement went crazy after the 9/11 attacks you could see several houseless kids like me at the time spare-changing so we can go hang up on the street in the gayborhood less than ten feet from where John Hancock laid down that ol’ Hancock on the Declaration of Independence, around the corner from the only public restroom open to this day, the same one Benjamin Franklin insisted was part of his property, nine blocks from one of the earliest gathering spots for LGBT people in the country.
I hope you can hear the still wistful tones I use to speak of these places, the deeds done there, the promises inherent in the documents signed in my hometown, ratified, adopted, and the true belief I will someday see the promises laid in ink in the former Carpenters Union Hall, now Independence Hall, that I could never find as a houseless Black trans kid. There are of course much more black and, dare I say, accurate depictions of Philadelphia, but I think it is important for you to know the first time I had gay sex, the first time I went down a stranger (or let one go down on me after dancing all night) the first place I realized how comfy a dress was on a Saturday night in the summer, the first time I realized I was more femme in a ”them” body, was in the same place this nation was conceived, debated, and barely won. Eating out of dumpsters, couch surfing, sitting on the sidewalk all day, and annoying you as you NIMBY or DINK your way to work.
But the difference in any LGBT neighborhood is behind every exasperated teeth-sucking step-over-me was also a sweet and gentle remembrance of days when you couldn’t fit anywhere, so you made a found family.
I have wandered this land and written extensively about it in essays and even a memoir, and one thing has remained true from 1991 until 2025: The safest places for the oppressed, the downtrodden, the refused, whether they be LGBT or not, have always been and always will be our neighborhoods. I’ll say it again: our neighborhoods.
Our neighborhoods that are now under attack from authoritarian economic, political, and social forces. These forces are not just from outside our communities but also within. Many may think things are going to be bad, but it’s going to work out for them because their wealth, class, or proximity to whiteness and heteronormativity will protect them.
Yet Obergefell is already on the chopping block. As I write this, Florida state troopers are stationed outside Pulse Nightclub to protect state highway workers as they erase the rainbow sidewalk memorial to honor the martyred and murdered that locals keep painting back on. Or as I would say to you if we were closer: “The order to the Smithsonian ain’t just for black history, fool.“
It’s overwhelming, it’s scary, and what are we to do in the face of all this? Might I suggest we do what we do best?
After the almost inevitable election results and during the deep breath America was taking from November 2024 until Inauguration Day 2025, convincing itself it won’t be that bad, my partner and I asked ourselves the same questions. We live in the Hillcrest neighborhood in San Diego. We can’t do everything, and we can’t help everyone, but what can we do? My years in the movement called by outsiders Black Lives Matter, my organizing work during the George Floyd uprisings in Portland, Oregon, having witnessed several cities fall apart over my time in this country, my partners’ invaluable organizing experience, all this wisdom over the years and we landed where we always land: Mutual aid.
We started a gathering on Tuesday mornings called Coffee and Class Solidarity. The local Donut Star on University Avenue donates fresh donuts (and a few day-old ones) every Tuesday morning. We wake up and start the coffee around 5:30 a.m. Grab the donuts, a sandwich board sign I designed, a table, and some cups, sugar, and creamer. The early item that made all the difference was a pack of Newport 100s.
Our claim to fame was that folks could stop by, have a coffee, a donut, and a smoke. A normal Tuesday morning that many of us are already so privileged to have.
Also, pro-tip: if you have a houseless neighbor who is really struggling and talking to themselves, give them a pack of smokes. Nicotine does more for late-stage schizophrenia than most modern medications; it’s why mental health units are one of the few places some people can smoke in a health care facility.
That first Tuesday was slow. We got yelled at; hot coffee was thrown in our face by a neighbor who was having a really tough time in her wheelchair and was losing her leg to infection. It was my first Coffee and Class Solidarity baptism, as I call them, but we came back the next Tuesday, and the Tuesday after that.
First, it was just our houseless neighbors, but soon we were joined by a good mix of store owners, homeowners, sweet working-class queers on their way to work, organizers, and even a few “community leaders” who have tried to scare us off, accusing us of “luring the houseless.”
We share a cup, concerns, conversation, and community and find something intangible yet palpable in one another’s shared humanity.
Many an elder member of our community has found a home with us in a trendy neighborhood that passes them by like waste on the road. We asked people what they wanted, and now we do a lot of harm prevention, connection to services, and community defense. Our houseless neighbors, who are always more tuned into dangers in the area, share information with our other neighbors about these threats and concerns, and we even come up with shared community safety solutions. We aren’t solving all their problems. We aren’t even solving one on most days.
It is illegal for us to do this in San Diego, for a pastor to feed the houseless. It has inherent risk caring for these people, in a country such as this, at a time such as this, but I believe it’s our only hope.
If we are to survive, even thrive, in the days, weeks, months to come as a lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer, pan, ace, intersex, or sexual or gender-expansive minority in this country, we will need to find solidarity with one another. We will need to get to know each other. You see, one of the great truths of humanity is that we are willing to defend what we love with our lives. Revolutionaries die for their friends, not the abstract principles they gather around.
Me, my partner, and the rest of the crew got Tuesday Mornings in Hillcrest, San Diego covered. It would be great if one of you gets Tuesdays somewhere else, and we would love to hear from you.
In the final analysis, we are the ones we have been waiting for; we are the ones who are going to turn all this awfulness around. Even if it’s one cup of coffee at a time. One neighborhood at a time. One morning at a time.
rev lenny duncan (they/them) is avoiding finishing their doctorate at the Graduate Theological Union and holds a master’s degree in divinity from United Lutheran Seminary. They are an ordained minister in the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, an author, and a content creator. They are often found in the revolutionary mix that is abolition work in America, and in their time off they can be found with their partner and family in San Diego.
