Stanley-Eric-Captive-Genders-Trans-Embodiment-and-Prison-Industrial-Complex

Captive GendersVanguard was first organized in 1965 under the auspices of Glide MemorialChurch, a radical congregation of the United Methodist Church.Glide was experimenting with methods of ministering to and addressingthe needs of an urban congregation, and it had identified homosexualsas a group that was suffering enormous oppression, particularly in theTenderloin, the city’s primary gay/trans neighborhood, where Glide waslocated. 3 As a result, by the mid-1960s, the church was working closelywith local homophile organizations such as Daughters of Billitis and theMattachine Society, and had helped establish a ministers’ group called theCouncil for Religion and the Homosexual.At the same time, the Church was working to convince the federalOffice of Economic Opportunity to designate the Tenderloin as a recognizedpoverty area so that the neighborhood and the programs thatGlide was creating would qualify for federal funds from the Johnsonadministration’s War On Poverty programs. 4 This strategic decision totap into federal anti-poverty programs, paired with the Church’s simultaneouswork with the homophile movement had a profound result: Itled Glide to create a space in the homophile movement for the voices ofan extremely marginalized population—young, gay, and transsexual sexworkers living and working on the streets. One of these voices was thatof Joel Roberts, an early organizer of Vanguard, who, in an oral historygiven in 1989, explains the connections he saw between sex work, youth,queerness, and radicalism:Many years ago, when I first came to San Francisco, part of my lifewas hustling and being a prostitute. It was a quick way to make money,and I didn’t have a lot of credentials and ways of making money.And I was organizing before there was anything called “gay lib” inthe streets of San Francisco, in the Tenderloin on Market Street. We’dhang out and I was organizing something that later became calledVanguard. So somehow, having some education and yet being a hustler,the mix was pretty volatile for me…. I remember storming intoGlide Methodist Church one day…. I was yelling and screaming. Iwas really angry. I was being confronted more than ever before withthe oppression of being an American. Not just being gay, but beingpoor. Being on the street and being a kid. All those things, all threethings…. Glide Methodist Church…had hired a Texas black pastornamed Cecil Williams…and I stormed in and said there’s kids on thefucking street selling their ass. There’s kids sleeping eight in a hotel42