Summer Nights For Money or Just to Strut, Living Out Loud on a Transgender Stage

[MadelineB]

SUMMER NIGHTS:
For Money or Just to Strut, Living Out Loud on a Transgender Stage
By SARAH MASLIN NIR
Published: July 24, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/25/nyregion/in-west-village-living-out-loud-on-a-transgender-runway.html

But here in New York City's historic gay corridor, blocks from the Stonewall Inn — the site of the country's first gay rights uprising in 1969 and the same place where thousands spontaneously converged last June to celebrate the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York State — reducing the scene to one of vice is to get only part of the picture.

"There are Little Italys everywhere in the world, there are little Chinatowns everywhere in the world," said Mariah Lopez, 27, a transgender-rights activist who is ubiquitous after dark on Christopher. "This is the only place that we can specifically lay claim to for historical reasons."

While some of the T-girls live as women, others do so only here, fleeing for a time their homes in, say, the South Bronx or in New Jersey, where it may be too dangerous to be publicly transgender, they explain. For them, Desire said, "it's like: 'Oh my God, I can be gay? Out here in the street? And we can kiss and hug?' "