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FTM: Women in Vans

(Sharon Renee Cole--AKA Erin Vans)

Henry

There's a female-to-male transperson in Philadelphia who was in the running to be a judge for the court of common please. Henry is his name. Earlier this year, it was a big deal around here in the fifth largest city in the U.S. Somewhere along the line, I found out he spent a short time living in a van. It was so long ago, some who might've crossed paths with him back then may not even recognize him today. He identified as a lesbian then. He had a partner. They both wanted to escape the Midwest and, in a dream-like fashion, take to the roads in their van, pull up on the West Coast with the sun rising and magically set roots down in The Bay Area.  They wanted San Francisco proper, but knew it would be too expensive.

 Here are a few responses to questions I asked:

"So it's true, you lived in a van," I posited. "When was this and why?"

I lived in a van for a couple of months in the Bay Area. I was dating someone, another woman (this was many years before I transitioned – I am a trans man, but at the time, I was living as a lesbian). We decided to move to the Bay Area from Kalamazoo, Michigan. We thought we had enough money between us to get an apartment and start life in the Bay Area, and we just really underestimated how hard it would be to find and afford housing there. We didn’t spend too much time sleeping in the van – for a while, we stayed in a very rough motel that had week-to-week rent. It was sort of like the motel in the film The Florida Project. We also had an opportunity to house-sit for someone that my girlfriend knew from her professional life, so for a week or so we lived in Hood River, OR. 

2. What kind of van was it? (How big, where did you sleep? Did you cook in the van or eat elsewhere?)

It was a Mercury Villager

3. What was your monetary situation, if you don't mind revealing?

We did not have much money. Probably a little over a thousand dollars, and we had no jobs, and we were trying to use what money we had to get an apartment.


Did you set out to do it? Was it totally your choice?

We set out to live in the Bay Area, but it wasn’t totally our choice. We both had some family tension because we weren’t straight, and for the woman I was living with, she was doing everything she could to disguise this fact from her family. She didn’t even want them to know that she was in the Bay Area because she was worried it would set off a huge family conflict. She was having her mail sent to a friend who lived near Salt Lake City, who would then forward the mail to us. Eventually, someone in her friend’s house informed my girlfriend’s parents that she actually lived in the Bay Area, and they were angry about it.

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