It can be difficult maintaining a friendship with someone who is homeless when you are not. The relationship is unequal by nature, and the power differential is huge. Nevertheless, I have one such very close friendship, which I treasure and do my best to nurture.

My friend Aurora lost her housing a year ago and has been on the street for almost as long. She shares harrowing stories with me about trying to survive the city nights, wandering from one twenty-four hour diner to the next to keep out of the cold. She sleeps during the day, because at night there are too many bad people around and she has to be on guard. As a queer woman, she finds the streets particularly treacherous. Aurora is a resilient person who has been through hell. In return for getting to have her natural wisdom, compassion and strength in my life, I let her stay at my place when I can, cook her meals from time to time, give her warm clothes, and just try to provide a sympathetic ear.

I am acquainted, though not nearly as well, with several other homeless people. I met them when I was working at a queer youth organization. Many of these kids were thrown out of their homes by homophobic parents. Others ran away to San Francisco, fleeing Middle America, and found themselves with no place to stay but the streets once they got here.

Homelessness is a queer youth issue. Approximately twenty six percent of LGBT youth are forced to leave their homes because of their sexual orientation, and between twenty and forty percent of homeless youth are LGBT identified. That’s why I would like to devote this week’s column to Proposition L, better known as Sit/Lie, which will be on the ballot November 2nd here in San Francisco.

According to Sidewalks Are For People, “The sit/lie law, if passed, would make it a crime to sit or lie down on any sidewalk or on top of any object (blanket, lawn chair, milk crate, etc.) on any sidewalk in San Francisco between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m.” For the first offense, one can be fined up to one hundred dollars. Subsequent offenses carry a fine of up to five hundred dollars, and/or thirty days in jail. So basically, people who are too poor to have any place to rest indoors will be fined for money that they clearly don’t have. That’s not a way to get people off the street. That’s a way to push people deeper and deeper into poverty while criminalizing them for living in the only places that they can.

As I mentioned, some homeless people, like my friend, feel that it is too dangerous to sleep on the street at night. Since Sit/Lie criminalizes lying on the street between 7 A.M. and 11 P.M., they would become as vulnerable to attacks by cops during the day as they are to attacks by criminals at night. The city doesn’t have nearly enough shelters to deal with demand, and I’m told that shelters can be really scary anyway, especially for women. Actually, everyone who would know that I’ve talked to confirms that the street is safer than shelters. So basically that leaves parks. I hear that sleeping in the grass is a great way to become covered in really nasty bug bites.

The rhetoric in favor of Prop L is familiar. Most of it has to do with street punks with scary dogs who supposedly bully, harass and attack pedestrians on Haight Street. However, Sit/Lie doesn’t actually deal with harassment or assault in any way, or even with blockage of the side walk, as long as the participants are standing up. Sit/Lie just mandates that all harassment must occur at eye-level.

The image of homeless people on Haight Street as violent and aggressive is greatly exaggerated. And not all Haight Street merchants support prop L. In fact, many of them feel that the Sit/Lie campaign’s portrayal of the Haight as overrun with thugs is scaring off business. Liquor store owners in the Haight have pointed out that much of their business actually comes from street people. The homeless are part of the city’s economy, too.

But this isn’t just about Haight Street anymore. Sit/Lie applies to the entire city. But of course we know that San Francisco has a history of criminalizing homelessness, and of cutting services and resources that actually try to help people get off the street. San Francisco tends to treat homelessness as a cosmetic issue, as “urban blight,” rather than as a problem of human suffering. The callousness and shallowness of this attitude absolutely disgusts me.

In this city, we pride ourselves on being progressive. We are supposed to stand for women, for disabled people, for people of color, for queer people and trans people. We just don’t stand for them when they turn out to be disproportionately homeless. In fact, we go from “I stand with you” to “I can’t stand you” in record time. We blame homeless people for smelling strongly when they can’t shower, and for panhandling when they can’t get work (and we all know how tough the job market is these days even if you can afford a nice suit for your job interview!). We blame those of them who are mentally ill for their erratic behavior when they can’t afford anti-psychotics. We blame them for being visible reminders of suffering. We just want them out of sight and out of mind. We just want to turn away.
But we can’t and must not turn away. It is time to make a stand. If you are reading this, I beg you to rethink Prop L. Vote no on Sit/Lie on November 2nd. Let’s not take this lying down. Sit/Lie. Let’s not take this lying down.