River Sims

“The sense is, it’s really hard to be who you are on Polk Street now. At night the clubs are mostly young, straight kids…[and] you get a lot of homophobic stuff now. And the merchants, certainly, I don’t care what they say, they’re homophobic. And they’re acting that way. And I don’t feel safe out there…and the boys I work with don’t feel safe….There was a sense among the service providers of ‘community,’ and now there’s not. It’s this constant dog-eat-dog world.”

River Sims. Photo by Gabriela Hasbun