The troubling reality we ignore about queer twentysomethings

She worked hard to fit in, spending time every morning to contour her face with makeup to make her coworkers more comfortable with her presentation—even though she knew it was futile to try to meet their narrow expectations of feminine beauty.

She finally left after a humiliating incident with her boss. “I was working at the cash register and bent down to get something from under the counter,” she recalls. “He jumped back as if I was reaching for him.” She decided the job was not worth it.

“I guess it’s new for people to have trans people working in professional environments,” Williams says. “But for us to be legit—pay taxes and own property—they have to accept us.”

For visibly queer youth who live outside of the more LGBT-friendly big cities, existing and working in one’s own skin can be a daily act of bravery. Twig Deluge grew up in rural Kansas before settling down in New Mexico. The 32-year-old identifies as a working class transmasculine country queer and says it wasn’t easy being out in a rural community. “Cars were keyed, beat up twice, notes left on my parents’ doorstep,” he says. “It could have been a heck of a lot worse.”

A lot of young queers head to urban areas hoping for peace and community, but the country felt just as much a part his identity as Deluge’s queerness. Staying was non-negotiable. “I like being outside: mudding, training dogs, throwing hatchets,” he says. “I just tried hard to survive.”

He started working as a janitor and dishwasher in a tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurant when he was 16. After college, he found himself managing a bed and breakfast. He hadn’t transitioned yet but was butch-presenting with short hair and tattoos. When he showed up for the interview, highly recommended by a mutual connection, he says his future boss told him, “I wouldn’t have picked you visually.”

“Being black and queer, I’m excluded from respectability.”

Deluge worked diligently for a year and was taken aback when he was told to re-style his hair because a guest complained that it was too short. Deluge told his boss she needed to find someone else for the job.

It’s that type of confrontation Denechia Powell tries to avoid by making sure to write that she’s a black queer woman in her cover letters.

“I want to say it in the cover letter because that’s who I am,” she says. “I don’t want to erase my identities.” She knows such bravery might be costing her the jobs she knows she’s qualified for but never gets a call back—“Maybe it’s turning them off?”—but at least it weeds out bigoted employers.

Originally from Brunswick, Georgia, the 28-year-old graduated into a recession and couldn’t land a job anywhere. “The only places I got into the door, the people looked more like me,” Powell says. Without the prospect of well-paid jobs, she signed up for AmeriCorps and was paid a pittance.

After seven years of doing social justice work, focusing on HIV and AIDS “because it impacted my community, as a black queer woman from the South,” Powell says she’s “disillusioned by the nonprofit industrial complex” where marginalized people remain at the bottom of organizational charts. “I’m serving people who look like me,” she says. “But the leadership doesn’t look like me.”

Microaggressions from colleagues and superiors about race, gender and sexuality are a common experience for young queer people. At one point, a school disciplinarian advised Huey Amaru to “put more bass” in his voice when talking to students if he wanted them to respect him.

Raised on the south side of Chicago, the 24-year-old describes his gender as “unique.” He grew up on welfare and free school lunches, and started working when he was 15 because his housing situation had never been stable.

“Being black and queer, I’m excluded from respectability,” Amaru says of some of his former work environments. “It’s rooted in something false and dangerous about what it means to be valuable.” The person who’s considered “professional and respectable,” he says, is a white, straight man.

Amaru realized he was attracted to guys when he was 13 but says “it took me a while to understand myself and accept it.” It helped to read Audre Lorde’s “Outsider,” which gave him the confidence to be himself. His politicization, like many LGBT youth, was an almost inevitable response to living an openly queer life.

His family still seems ashamed of him, he thinks, recalling New Year’s Day when he was “too gay” while dancing to Beyonce’s Single Ladies. “My mom never saw me queen out before,” he remembers. “[She] thought I was influenced by the white kids.” His mom was embarrassed and told the DJ to stop the music.

It’s hard enough to escape poverty if you’re straight; 70% of people born into the bottom quintile of income distribution never make it to the middle class. But being queer in America presents an extra roadblock to upward mobility. According to a report by the National Center for Transgender Equality, transgender and genderqueer Americans are still four times more likely to live in extreme poverty compared to the general population.

“My family lives below the poverty line,” says Cleo Anderson. “I still live below the poverty line. My friends who are white, daddy is bankrolling.”

Anderson grew up working class and has lived in the same apartment with her mother, a pre-school teacher, for 23 years. She describes herself as a hard femme, born and raised in Los Angeles. The 26-year-old started working when she was 14.

Five years ago, her mother asked Anderson not to tell the rest of the family she was queer, even though Anderson was rather certain everyone could already tell. Subtly has never been her strong suit, and besides, she says, it’s hard work trying to pass. And it’s ultimately not worth the effort.

“For her it’s an image thing,” Anderson says of her mother. “I teach theater and I’m a lifeguard. I’m nowhere near what she wanted.”

Anderson grew up hanging out with runaways and queers, clubbing with gay boys. Although she was bullied because she looked like a boy, Anderson didn’t realize how “different” she was until she went to college. “I was a well-informed, very queer black girl in a Catholic college,” she remembers. “No one talked to me for two months.”

College was supposed to be the way to a better life, but it didn’t exactly work out that way. Four later, she’s still struggling to scrape together rent. “I’m resolved to be poor for the rest of my life,” she says.

Many millennials feel similarly, saddled with student loans and college degrees that didn’t quite help land them the promised jobs. But it’s far more likely to be a reality for queer youth, especially those of color, who are still being told by their bosses and colleagues and families that their queerness is the problem.

Amaru, who describes himself as “still poor with a college degree,” says he endured criticism from his family. In college, he got his septum pierced, his hand tattooed and started wearing skinny jeans. “[My grandma] told me I have to dress better if I want to find a man of a higher class,” Amaru says. “I want to find someone who accepts me.”

Acceptance: such a fundamental desire, and yet it doesn’t pay the bills. Being able to make a good living shouldn’t require hiding who you are. In Denechia Powell’s ideal world, she can have both. She isn’t interested in erasing her identity to land a better-paying job.

“I don’t want to put on a façade,” she says. “I’m feeling unapologetic these days.”

Lead image: Huey Amaru at a rally against police brutality in 2014 outside of Chicago Police Headquarters.

Laura Rena Murray is an investigative journalist who tackles public interest and accountability stories to expose corruption, abuse or human rights violations.