- I could shoot myself.
- [Interviewer] Oh my gosh.
Bam Bam.
- Yes.
- [Interviewer] We're out here in Sacramento.
- Yes.
- [Interviewer] You're sleeping in the doorway of a church.
- Yes.
- [Interviewer] And you've got a nice, neat setup,
but this is horrible.
- Yes, it is.
- [Interviewer] Tell me about homelessness in Sacramento.
- Well, I came a resident here, to homeless,
about 10 or 11 years ago when my husband
passed away in 2007.
Being homeless out here is very hard,
it's an adventure, for one thing,
and there's so many diverse,
of different cultures and different drug addicts
and alcoholics and apparently you blend in
if you're some side of that,
siding on that was some kind of weakness,
and mine was drugs and alcohol.
I've seen many people suffer
through the 20 years off and on
being homeless on the streets and it's hard.
It's not that you get stereotyped,
and it doesn't matter what kind of clothes you wear,
if there's any sign of conclusion that you're homeless
at any point, you get looked differently.
And me, it's harder, because I'm a transgender.
I've been this way my whole life,
and when my mom was 13, my dad was 14,
I never knew my father or my mother.
And I kind of blame myself once in a while,
you know, why was I even born?
Because I was only first born and then my sister came after.
I was born in 1963 and my sister was born in 1964,
on December 12th.
And we went through a lot, up and down in our lives,
been molested my whole life, by my father
and by my cousins and my stepbrothers
and stepsisters and me and my sister
were kind of like, mentally disturbed
because we're bilingual and the language barrier,
and my family was very hard for her to understand
because we were confused.
And in and out of foster homes our whole life.
- [Interviewer] Oh my gosh.
- I remember...
when my mom and my dad verily separated,
and she was in a paddy-wagon station-wagon.
We had a 1964 paddy-wagon station-wagon
Threw a mattress in the back of it
with all four or five or six, seven of us,
and she left our father.
That's when the journey started, on my mom's dream.
Never went to school.
I sucked my first black dick in an alley
in Oklahoma City to pay rent
for 10 nights in the Salvation Army.
And I got in trouble for it.
Waving at my mom and,
on my brother's shoulder, my stepbrother's shoulder,
the oldest one, and waving at my mom
through a jail cell, at the time
I never had a child's life,
never know what it feels like to be picked up
by your own father and thrown up in the air.
- [Interviewer] How do you survive now?
- Through God's grace.
Through God's grace.
And I'm even feeling weak about that.
I have to be strong.
I have to be strong and for who I am
because there's no one carrying my legacy,
there's no one carrying nothing about me.
And I'm so different than everyone,
and no one will accept me for who I am.
And I'm not really a bad person,
I'm a Jesus person, I love Jesus so much.
And he spiritually blesses me every day.
- [Interviewer] What's your future like?
- Being a good half again, in society.
Being more instructing.
Letting people know that there's a lot more in life
besides hating.
If they put their differences aside,
just for a few minutes of their life,
when they're on their lunch break,
and just look around.
Quit avoiding what's out there, what we can fix.
Quit making it worse than it is already,
because it's going to get worse,
and then no one can do nothing for no one.
- [Interviewer] If you had three wishes, what would they be?
- Peace, honor, and love.
- [Interviewer] Big wishes.
Well thank you very much for talking to me.
- Thank you.