What brought you to the piers in the first place? I’ve been on my own in the world since I was 16 years old. When I was growing up in New Jersey, around the time that I became a sexual being, I started getting an intense pressure from my family to be hetereosexual, and I couldn’t do it. It got to a point where my mom basically gave me an ultimatum: prove to me that you’re straight by dating a girl, or get out. So I just left. I spent the next 10 years homeless, bouncing from couch to couch, situation to situation, until I joined the Marine Corps and started working in the Combat Camera unit.

When I had this altercation with my mom and left, I had like 20 bucks in my pocket, and I got on the train going to New York City. And I saw these three black gay men on the train laughing, reading each other, throwing shade, dressed to the nines, and it seemed like they were having the best time ever. And I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna follow them,” and they led me to the pier. When I got off the PATH train at Christopher Street, all of a sudden there were all these black gay men and trans women, and they were all excited to see me. It’s fresh meat, on one end, but I knew I had found this thing that I had lacked, this sense of belonging and having a place in the world.

How did your experiences on the street lead you to begin work on this project? After the Marines, I moved back to New York and enrolled at Columbia University. During summer break, in 2011, I was watching all these other kids who had homes to return to—and I just found myself back on Christopher Street again, looking to belong, just like I had done when I left home the first time. And I was asking myself, “Why does this feel like home to me? This is in public. This is so strange.” This time around, because of my time in the military, I had a new skill: I had a camera. So I brought my camera and starting asking people, “How did you get here? Why here, why now?” And from there, the whole project started.

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How do members of New York’s homeless LBGTQ population survive? Well, the first method of survival is just being together. On Christopher Street, before anybody knows what your class background is, whether you’re in school or not in school, they just come up to you. “Hey, who are you? What brings you down here? Do you know how to vogue?” So that idea of forming family because you’ve been abandoned by your blood family is the first survival tool—you can be eating out of garbage cans, but to know that someone loves you and cares about you, that can give you that little bit extra that you need to find a way out.