Elijah was facing homelessness on Valentine’s Day last year.
He knew his parents would kick him out if he pursued gender-affirming care, so he reached out to a shelter months in advance of his 18th birthday — when he could legally leave home and not be considered a runaway minor.
Elijah would secretly squirrel a few extra items of clothes or objects away from home every day and store them at his high school. Thrive Youth Center, which is often at capacity, had a bed waiting for him.
“That was just pure luck,” he said. “And a lot of scheming on my end.”
Thrive Youth Center, located inside San Antonio’s largest homeless shelter, is the first and only shelter in the city that caters services to LGBTQ youths who have been kicked out of their homes by their parents or otherwise found themselves unhoused.
While Thrive’s founder and executive director is retiring at the end of the month, the center will maintain its services and mission under new leadership — and may look to establish a stand-alone shelter for LGBTQ youths.
Providing this safe space for this particularly vulnerable population is a deeply personal passion for Thrive founder and Executive Director Sandra Whitley, who was placed in a mental institution by her parents for being gay in a small, Texas Panhandle town in the ’70s.
When she was 13, she got caught writing a love letter to a girl classmate, she told the San Antonio Report. “This was ’75 — nobody was out as gay — so I thought I was the only one in the world that liked other girls.”
Her parents moved to San Antonio when she was 14 and she stayed with them until she went to college, when she came out to them at the age of 19. “They disowned me and we didn’t speak for 20 years.”
Whitley will retire at the end of September — but she’ll continue to raise funds for the center through the Sandy 225 Fund, named for Whitley and the day Thrive first opened: Feb. 25, 2015. The money will go toward the expenses of supporting youths that grants and other public funding can’t cover.
“It’s a little surreal — I’ll definitely miss it,” she said, sitting in Thrive’s community room among books and art supplies. “I’m sure I’ll come back. … Thrive will always have a special place in my heart. I’m just very excited that the board picked Jenny, because she has everything that it takes to keep it going.”
Whitley will be passing the reins to Jennifer Hixon, who has worked for the Texas Civil Rights Project, the City of San Antonio’s health department in violence prevention, RAICES and SAMMinistries.
“As a queer Texan, I’ve never worked for a queer organization, even though I’ve spent my entire life in advocacy,” Hixon said. “Policy work is great, but a lot of times in Texas it feels like you’re sweeping in a dust storm. … As it turns out, I like the messier work of service delivery.”
Hixon has spent the last month shadowing Whitley to get her bearings within the 20-person nonprofit.
Thrive has 13 beds, which are typically full, for LGBTQ youths in its section of the larger Haven for Hope shelter. The average length of stay is six to eight months. Thrive also provides services to 45 youths — of any orientation or identity — living in apartments through federal housing vouchers.
Once settled, Hixon said she plans on exploring a possible move out of Haven, which would allow for more beds and more flexible rules for residents.
That’s likely years away, she said, and there are many elements to consider: Would it be a stand-alone facility or would it co-locate with other nonprofit partners? Where’s the best location?
“There are a lot of benefits to being located in the downtown area, especially for youth that are trying to walk to jobs, but there are drawbacks, too,” she said. “It’s not something we can do quickly.”
‘Queer safe space’
Elijah, now 19 and living in an apartment, said he hopes the LGBTQ youth center can expand beyond Haven.
“I never had to worry about being misgendered by Thrive staff,” said Elijah, who is a transgender man.
While that was not always true for other Haven clients and staff, he said. “Thrive is a queer safe space.”
And it was one of the first places Elijah felt safe.
When he came out at 13, his parents did not accept him or allow him to express his gender identity. He suffered emotional and physical abuse until he turned 18 and was forced to leave to take testosterone as part of his gender-affirming care.
“It was honestly really, really awful,” Elijah said. “I was already getting treated bad just because of my mental health. … Me coming out as trans kind of lit the fire even more [to] straight up abuse and neglect.”
His parents never taught him how to do simple things that would allow him to be independent, such as laundry or get a driver’s license, he said. They also withheld his birth certificate.
The day after his birthday, his friends helped him move into Thrive.
“I went straight to school, got my stuff, my friend drove me down there,” he said. “Then I was in downtown San Antonio completely by myself. No family, nobody.”
It was a little awkward at first, Elijah said. He was the only transgender person there at the time and he had just begun his physical transition. To get to his high school in Cibolo, he had to wake up at 4 a.m. to catch his bus from the shelter. Eventually, he started to open up and make friends during his 10-month stay at Thrive.
Staff at Thrive provided him guidance on the public bus system, how to get to his clinic for doctor appointments, how to apply for jobs, food and housing assistance, financial literacy courses and more, he said. “Just like basic life stuff that you need to know. … Adult stuff that my mom specifically didn’t teach me.”
It gets better
Unfortunately, Elijah’s story is not uncommon, Whitley said. About 90% of the kids ages 18-24 who come to Thrive were kicked out by their parents, she said.
Sometimes youths living at Thrive will try to reconnect with parents or vice versa, and it almost never works out.
“That always touches me just because we want that so badly to have our parents accept us,” she said. “But every time we try to go back, it’s just another cut or a stab.”
That parent-child reconnection has been successful for just one Thrive client out of hundreds, she said.
The current political environment in Texas where there’s “anti-trans propaganda out there,” Hixon said, has made it even harder for many parents to accept their child’s identity.
“If you’re the kind of parent that’s looking for a justification of your belief system, there’s a very willing argument out there that convinces you that it’s the right thing to do to isolate your child,” she said, “whose the one person, as a parent, that you’re never supposed to give up on. You’re supposed to protect and take care of them.”
Overall, it has gotten better for queer youths in larger cities and towns, Whitley said, but “I don’t know if things have changed in a small town.”
People in her generation typically came out much later in life when they were more self-sufficient in college or careers, she said. “Now we’re trying to be better as a society. Kids are coming out at an earlier age. … It’s a good thing, but I think some of their parents haven’t caught up.”
Elijah has seen his parents occasionally since Valentine’s Day 2022. He still has relatively decent relationships with his siblings, but none of his interactions with his mother has been positive and it typically involves her misgendering him.
“At this point, I’m just kind of like, if you’re gonna act this way, I don’t want to try anymore,” he said.
He took a semester of courses at Northeast Lakeview College last year while at Thrive but ultimately decided to take a break from school to save money and figure out what he wants to do.
He and his dorm mate from Thrive found an apartment in the Northwest Side of town and he works at Chipotle.
“I’ve been teaching myself tattooing. … A lot of people say to me [that] it can be a really good career, because that’s never gonna go out of business.”
And “you can be yourself” at tattoo shops, he said, noting his own tattoos and piercings and interest in the punk rock culture.
Elijah is in a vastly better place today.
“I still have struggles a little bit with my dysphoria,” he said. “But I definitely do feel way better than I did when I was at home. Like at the end of the day, I’m on testosterone and I can wake up and can virtually do whatever I want.
“I don’t have to worry about coming home and not being in a safe environment anymore. I can come home and continue to feel safe and feel good.”
