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Vol. 51 • No. 17 • April 29-May 5, 2021
Housing top concern for LGBTQ seniors
by John Ferrannini
A Rick Gerharter
Shireen McSpadden sits at a conference table in her office; she will soon lead San Francisco’s homeless agency.
SF aging director McSpadden leaves LGBTQ legacy by Matthew S. Bajko
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s she departs May 1 for the unenviable job of overseeing San Francisco’s response to homelessness, Shireen McSpadden is leaving behind a nationally recognized legacy of tackling LGBTQ aging issues as the executive director of the city’s Department of Disability and Aging Services. McSpadden, 57, who is bisexual and grew up in San Francisco, for the past five years oversaw an agency responsible for more than 70,000 seniors, adults with disabilities, caregivers, and veterans. Under her leadership DAS, as the department is known, worked to ensure that a groundbreaking report on LGBTQ aging issues was implemented and not shelved away to collect dust, as was the case with a similar report released in 2003. “She had, I think, from the very beginning of that project a deep sense of investment in LGBT senior issues, both personally and professionally,” said Bill Ambrunn, a gay man who chaired the task force that wrote the report and has now launched the LGBT Better Aging Project for California. “She was just 100% on board from the very beginning and really just did absolutely everything she could do to follow through. She has been a very gifted and adept leader on aging issues and, in particular, for our community on LGBT aging issues.” Since the issuance of the 2014 report, “LGBT Aging at the Golden Gate: San Francisco Policy Issues and Recommendations,” progress has been made on addressing nearly all 13 areas of concern it had highlighted and implementing practically all 40 of the specific steps the report suggested be taken to benefit the city’s LGBTQ senior population, estimated at roughly 22,220 residents age 60 or older as of 2020. As for the couple of suggestions from the report left to be tackled, those are outside of the purview of DAS but several, coincidentally, fall under the focus of the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, which Mayor London Breed tapped McSpadden to now oversee. One involved ensuring the city’s shelters are welcoming to LGBTQ people, while the other called for making sure the city’s stock of single-room-occupancy hotel housing is safe for LGBTQ seniors to move into. In an interview with the Bay Area Reporter this month, McSpadden pledged to work on those issues once she has settled into her new job. “It is one thing I will definitely pay attention to when I move over to the new department,” she said. “But there are so many things that need attention before that. Once I get in there, I plan to figure out with staff, community partners and all stakeholders what is happening and what the priority should be.” The programs DAS has launched focused on transgender seniors have been the first of their kind in the country. Another policy from the report that was put into place by San Francisco then statewide was an LGBTQ seniors’ bill of rights. It protects those residents of assisted living facilities from being See page 5 >>
round the country, among allies and foes alike, San Francisco often acts as a byword for progressivism and queer liberation. But the city is also the epicenter of the state’s housing crisis, and for many LGBTQ seniors – particularly those who are of color or trans – who’ve dealt with that experience, life in the City by the Bay hasn’t always been somewhere over the rainbow. Veronika Fimbres, 68, who is a former San Francisco veterans affairs commissioner and in 2018 was a Green Party candidate for California governor, has lived in the city’s Sunnyside neighborhood for a dozen years. Her experience has run the gamut of housing in San Francisco. “Although we think of San Francisco as a progressive, forward-thinking city, it’s not,” Fimbres said. “It is still racist. It is still discriminatory. I don’t know what else to call it.” Fimbres, a Black trans woman, told the Bay Area Reporter she first moved to the city in 1996 from Indiana. “I came here to save my life,” she said, noting that she’d been diagnosed with HIV and both her fiancé and brother had died of AIDS. “My brother died four days before my birthday in 1992,” Fimbres said. “There, they didn’t treat my brother accordingly.”
Rick Gerharter
Veronika Fimbres sits on a bench in the garden at Sunnyside Conservatory near her home.
Fimbres took residence in a number of downtown hotels, such as the Pacific Bay Inn at Jones and O’Farrell streets, like many when they first arrived in the city. “Crack moms everywhere,” she recalled about the experience in the mid-1990s. “People smoking crack, going up and down the stairs; everywhere people causing drama.” Fimbres, a nurse, began to get involved in politics, activism, and government. She served as the co-chair of the Re-Elect Willie Brown Lavender Group, was a volunteer client services manager with the AIDS Emergency Fund, a member
of the board of directors for the San Francisco LGBT Pride Celebration Committee, and served on the city’s veterans commission for 14 years – the first openly trans person to be appointed in the City and County of San Francisco. Yet during that time she found herself homeless. Fimbres had been living in an apartment by Bayshore Boulevard. “I loved that place,” she recalls. “Dishwasher, huge kitchen; I brought my mother and father there.” But when a roommate and the man she was dating at the time began to start a relationship of their own, Fimbres became uncomfortable. “They were having a relationship, and they shouldn’t have been because he was supposed to be my boyfriend,” Fimbres said. “But I said, ‘be together, but be somewhere else.’” The roommate went to the city’s Housing Authority, however, and told them that she was Fimbres’ caregiver. Fimbres said that she had been considering it but the roommate was not her caregiver because nothing had been agreed to. Between the dispute and the trio being behind on rental payments, Fimbres and the others were evicted, and Fimbres was without a place to live. After a month of couch-hopping and more hotels, Fimbres found the place she is living now via Craigslist in November 2009. See page 2 >>
Fairfield welcomes out police chief by John Ferrannini
D
eanna Cantrell never thought she’d be a police officer, let alone a police chief. “I did not like police growing up,” the Fairfield police chief told the Bay Area Reporter. “I grew up underprivileged in New Mexico, in a household with a lot of violence, so police came quite a few times and I didn’t care for them. So, if you ask anyone who knew me then, nobody would have thought that’d be my path.” But Cantrell, a 50-year-old lesbian, became the first woman and the first LGBTQ person in her position last October. She said her feelings toward the police began to change after a chance encounter with a stranger at a party decades ago. “He was a nice guy, and eventually it comes up: ‘what do you do?’ Cantrell said. “He said ‘I’m a police officer,’ and in all my 22-year-old wisdom I said, ‘that’s unfortunate.’” But through their discussion, Cantrell began to reassess her views. “He took it well,” Cantrell said. “He worked in domestic violence – with people whose parents had been incarcerated – and that was my story. I was like ‘I thought you just harassed people’ and he laughed; he didn’t take it personal, and we talked about the things that police actually do that I was not aware of.” (Both of Cantrell’s parents were incarcerated.) And so in 1994, when she was 23, Cantrell started the process of becoming a police officer in Mesa, Arizona. She eventually rose to the position of deputy chief there. Cantrell said that, in her experience, LGBTQ acceptance has come a long way in police departments since that time. “I think back to 1994, and even just gay rights – Ellen DeGeneres, the first lesbian I remember on TV, being canceled – that’s what it was like,” she recalled. “Mesa is a very conservative city with a very conservative police department, and I was an in-your-face lesbian because I was sick of it. I wore a rainbow necklace, Pride shirts, and I just wanted to be treated equally.” Cantrell said that she became the LGBTQ liaison for the department. She was also the chair of Mesa’s Human Rights Forum. “Chairing the human rights group – an LGBTQ group in Mesa – they asked the police de-
Courtesy City of Fairfield
Fairfield police Chief Deanna Cantrell
partment to march in Phoenix Pride with them. I was like ‘absolutely,’ and I didn’t consider it not being accepted,” Cantrell said. “The chief at the time – thank goodness – was supportive.” Yet, nonetheless, Cantrell said she received hate mail. “I got rude things in my mailbox,” she recalled. “I thought we’d come a long way, but we hadn’t and there was a lot of hate and misunderstanding of the LGBTQ community.” When Mesa police marched in Phoenix Pride, Cantrell said, Phoenix police who were providing security for the event were “shocked” to see them, and “turned their backs.” A decade later, however, “there will always be people who have biases … but now I don’t feel like it’s a thing anymore. We have come a long way.”
Move to CA Central Coast
After receiving a job offer, Cantrell became the chief of police in the Central California coastal college town of San Luis Obispo in 2016. During that time, she worked with Douglas Heumann, a trans man, on LGBTQ training for officers. “SLO is a very progressive city and really accepting,” Cantrell said. “[Doug is] such a fantastic guy. He transitioned in the 1980s, and we had discussions about what we did for training for the police department about understanding the trans community.” Heumann, an attorney, was chair of Trans Central Coast.
“They gave me about 20-30 minutes and I trained people, including dispatch, on how to interact with trans people correctly and why that’s important,” Heumann said. Heumann said that Cantrell reached out to the community to inform them about how policing worked, and is committed to diversity and inclusion. “[Deanna] put in a lot of work and police time for the whole community,” he said. “It was an education that allowed people to see what police are doing, and put a face on it.” In 2019, a woman identified only as “J” (because she was a victim of violence) said she was attacked by members of a group of men she believes were on a business trip from Fresno as she walked up the stairs to her room at a San Luis Obispo hotel, as the San Luis Obispo Tribune contemporaneously reported Heumann said there was some back and forth between the police and the San Luis Obispo County District Attorney’s office about whether to charge the incident as a hate crime. Cantrell said it eventually was. “I think there’d been a problem about some of the actions of the trans woman, but that doesn’t excuse being hit, shoved on the ground, and assaulted,” Heumann said about why there was initially hesitation. “My understanding is that a hate crime was charged.” Cantrell admits the police could have handled the situation better. “The officer that went out didn’t do everything that could have been done,” Cantrell said. The case was charged, she said. “Thankfully, the best part of that was we had a relationship with the LGBTQ community,” Cantrell said, which helped smooth over issues that could have arisen from the incident. But another incident during Cantrell’s tenure drew headlines, too – this time calling her professional conduct into question. While using the restroom at lunchtime at an El Pollo Loco in July 2019, Cantrell removed her gun – which had been in a holster. She did not put it back on when she left the restroom. According to the Los Angeles Times, Cantrell said she realized her mistake within minutes but when she returned to the restroom, the gun was gone. See page 10 >>