interview at Lambert House - a down payment forward?

A little over a month ago, julzerator pointed me at Lambert House as a good place to volunteer. They're a drop-in center on Capitol Hill for people in their teens & early twenties. After one false start - missed internal communication on their part - one of their (very) part-time staff, J, interviewed me this morning to make sure I'm not an idiot or a criminal.

Next steps? I need to do a shift as a shadow volunteer, much like the CSPC. They have some pretty serious training that happens over a weekend in October, training for how to deal with fights, dope, etc. As my shrink pointed out, as things have gotten easier and options have multiplied for middle class LGBT kids, the ratio of poor & homeless kids at Lambert House has risen. A few of the questions that I got during the interview seemed to reflect that. I guess they're victims of their own success.

Indeed: the exterior of the house could use some work and, above all, money. Once you're in the house, though, you can tell that a lot of love goes into that organization. Every room in the house looks good and well thought out. There's a library with every shelf full of labeled and categorized books, a pool table, art supplies, a kitchen where they cook dinner nightly, and a computer room with half a dozen aging 'pooters. I told J I'd be a better fit for the computer lab than the kitchen, but just keeping an eye on the downstairs & yakking with the kids ("youth") is something I'd consider an honor and a privilege.

Fun fact: Lambert House shuts down for a couple of weeks in August, not least because so many of the people they serve are at Camp Ten Trees!

dinner with my younger self

On the bus to Pride I met some LGBT interns from MyCo. It turned out that a couple of them went to the same yoga class that I do, so we started doing post-yoga dinner a few weeks ago. On Monday it was just a young trans woman and I. It was eerily like having dinner with my younger self. At one point I even uttered the words, "Don't make the same mistakes I did." I meant things like believing that love would save me and disconnecting from other trans (or otherwise freaky) people for so many years.

And yet, the very fact that we met where we did puts her a long way away from where I was at her age. Trans people weren't welcome at Pride events, and being out and trans was almost unheard of. I shied away from GLB people as a youngster because a) I didn't think I was one of them, and b) there didn't seem to be much mutual understanding or empathy between the GLB folks and the T folks. That's changed a lot in the last twenty-five years.

It doesn't just get better for individuals; it's getting better for entire populations.