[...] What is gay America? It is this 17-year-old who lives with her mother and two teenage sisters in an apartment on working-class Eckert Avenue. There is a Bible on the coffee table and fish frying in the kitchen. With no cell phone to receive text messages, Felicia keeps her folded love notes in a shoe box. I just want to kick it with you, one girl writes.
In courtrooms and city halls across the country, a historic battle is being fought over the expansion of rights for gay people. Far below the revolution is Felicia Holt, whose life is as hidden from the national debate as her box of stashed love notes. She cares less about wedding bells than dodging stray bullets and storefront preachers who keep the word "abomination" on the tips of their tongues, reserved for the likes of this high school senior now pulling the brim of her hat low over one eye.
Newark. Brick City. Twenty-eight percent living in poverty, 54 percent African American, 30 percent Hispanic, Newark is just a $1.50 PATH train ride from Manhattan, but Felicia hardly ever crosses the river. Her world is Newark and she knows every inch of it, every shortcut through every vacant field. The Pabst brewery has been boarded up since her childhood, but the giant bottle on the roof is still the neighborhood North Star.
Leafy suburbs have after-school gay organizations and parent support groups. Felicia's Newark has nothing. On Friday nights, a rattletrap teen dance hall called the African Globe is the one beacon in an otherwise empty landscape for gay teenagers. They descend by the hundreds, Felicia among them, waiting to get inside their dingy sanctuary.
Felicia felt none of the windfall of victory many American gays experienced last year when the U.S. Supreme Court decriminalized homosexual relations between adults, or when the Massachusetts high court allowed gays to marry in that state. Getting married was someone else's dream. Felicia was more worried about staying alive. [...]
| Continue Anne Hull's registration-required Washington Post article "Braving the Streets Her Way"
Update: Be sure to read "Using Her Voice to Rise Above" and a Washington Post LiveOnline chat transcript with Hull
posted in articles on October 2, 2004 2:25 PM | t (0)
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