River Sims

Listen to River Sims tell his story

“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