Three people will appear in a Denver court to contest ‘unauthorized camping’ tickets, but one of the defendants says she was only ‘sleeping out’

Three people will appear in a Denver court on Tuesday to contest their “unauthorized camping” tickets. A press release from supporters proclaimed: “Homeless people go on trial for surviving.” There’s just one problem.

“I live in a house and have lived in a house for a while,” said Terese Howard, one of the three defendants.

She calls it “sleeping out”. A little-known practice, it is distinct from the kind of questionable role-play that model Tyra Banks once undertook for America’s Next Top Model, dressing up as a homeless woman complete with dowdy clothes and a sign that read “Will pose for change”.

Howard, 31, grew up in Montrose, Colorado and says she began sleeping out in 2011, when she was studying political philosophy at grad school and the Occupy Denver movement took root at a camp near the Colorado capitol.



It attracted both homeless and housed people, whom Howard and others jokily referred to as “houseys”. Over time, fewer houseys stayed out overnight, but Howard decided to stay and continued the practice when Denver passed its camping ban in 2012, and now might do so as many as two or three nights a week, or not at all for long periods.

“It is not camping,” she said. Instead she described nights – in sleeping bags, tents, passing out survival gear – of high tension: “Are these people going to jump us, and are they going to call the cops on us? And who else is freezing to death right now?”

In edgier corners of the homelessness advocacy world, “there’s a long history of that”, said John Parvensky, head of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless. He mentioned the example of Mitch Snyder, a legendary firebrand of the 1970s and 80s who once doused the walls of a Washington DC building with blood to protest against the city’s policies. He was said to stay overnight regularly on a grate behind the Library of Congress.

“It’s something that activists sometimes do to understand the plight of those experiencing homelessness and then to help lift their voices,” Parvensky said.

Howard, a member of a group called Denver Homeless Out Loud, does not see herself as homeless, though it is clear she deeply identifies with those who are and uses collective pronouns. Of the pending court case, she said: “The situation is that our survival is against the law.”

Indeed, she is conflicted about having a home, which she declined to discuss. She said she gets by with the $400 to $500 a month she makes by teaching gymnastics and receives help from “the supportive community”.

Outside in America: learn more about our ongoing homelessness project Read more

“It’s hard to be OK with thinking about your friends who are on the streets in a hard situation when I’m not,” she said. But she says she has realized that being an effective activist sometimes means “going to my safe space, going to the house I have the privilege of living in and getting a good night’s rest, enough that I can wake up in the morning and try to work my ass off to fight for our rights”.

But there are also examples of people who try to experience the state of homelessness per se, without any advocacy goal in mind. This raises questions.

Some Zen practitioners, for example, organize meditative “street retreats”. Critics might object that “this is a kind of voyeurism or spiritual tourism”, said Sensei Joshin Byrnes, who lives in a New Mexico monastery. But the goal is in fact “to really change our own hearts and minds and the way we view people who we commonly think of as the other”.

Participants in his programs, the shortest of which last four days, are asked not to shower for a week beforehand and arrive with little more than the clothes on their backs, $1, a form of ID, and perhaps a blanket or trash bag for protection from the weather.

Other cases are less formalized. In 2013, before he was due to became pastor of a church in Sango, Tennessee, a clergyman called Willie Lyle says he woke up at 2am and wrestled with a divine dictum. “God spoke to me, he said, ‘I want you to go and I want you to live on the streets for a week’,” he said. Eventually Lyle acceded. “It was blind obedience, really.”

He told Suzette, his wife of over 30 years and the mother of his eight children, of his plan. “I thought he was crazy,” she recalled. “I thought there was no way on earth, because he was the baby boy, his mom spoiled him rotten. And he couldn’t live without Facebook.”

Nevertheless, one Monday morning he stepped on to the streets of Clarksville, Tennessee, into a June rainstorm, wearing jeans, old tennis shoes, a T-shirt and a black trash bag with a hole cut into it. He slept on the porch of an abandoned home, ate at local charity kitchens, and discovered that homeless people used the internet at the library – so he did, too, and Facebooked his wife. On Friday, he came home.

A 47-minute video shows Lyle entering the church on Sunday and recounting his experiences to his new congregation, while his daughter-in-law, Kayla, cuts his hair, in a kind of ritualized cleansing.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pastor Willie Lyle has his hair cut at Sango United Methodist church after spending around five days living on the streets of Clarksville, Tennessee. Photograph: Sango United Methodist Church/YouTube

Lyle’s week outside changed his outlook; he says he realized that everybody, without exception, “wants to love somebody and wants to be loved and have a good life”.

But “I knew that after a period of time I would be able to get back the reality that I knew as normal,” he acknowledged.

In the end there may be ways of simulating the physical state of homelessness – being unwashed, uncomfortable, cold – but not the psychological aspect.

Paul Boden, who leads the Western Regional Advocacy Project, was homeless as a young man. “What you can’t duplicate,” he said, “is just how badly it sucks the first night.”