What Makes A Home

YouTube recommended me a video of some telco equipment once. It's totally upended my life in the year and a half since.

This is not an informative piece. There is nothing here other than me gazing out the window and daydreaming. There’s no well-timed jokes or anything like you normally find here. I’m really sorry to all my normal readers, but I needed a little catharsis, and I found that by writing.

I have always told people I’m from Pittsburgh. I’ve always lived somewhere within Western Pennsylvania, true, but to nine-tenths of people online, it’s way easier to say I’m from Pittsburgh. In actuality, for the last seven years, I’ve lived in the college town of Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, in Butler County. I attended Slippery Rock University for four and a half years and got a degree, and since then I’ve continued to live in the two-room apartment I’ve had since I was 19.

The day I moved into that apartment, my mother noticed some of the foundation I had among my bathroom things, took it, and told me “if you think you’re going to try this becoming-a-woman shit here, you’re sorely mistaken.” I had told my parents I was trans about two months earlier, after having first said it to her 2 years before that in the middle of a breakdown on the night of November 7th, 2016. Funnily enough, what she was mad about was actually stage makeup from my brief stint in the University’s musical theatre society.

Two hours after my parents left after moving my very small amount of furniture inside, I grabbed a go-bag and drove out to my then-partner’s place in Chicago. As far as I can recall, that was the first time I really was faced down with the fact that I don’t have a home. The issue was that I never really attempted too hard to fix that - the status quo is insanely hard to upset, and, more importantly, I figured I’d be dead by age 21 anyways - or, at least, certainly before I graduated college. I had already finished my freshman year (first freshman semester, even) having been physically assaulted on a street corner on campus, and that was before my roommate was overheard threatening to murder me for being trans. Despite all this, it never occurred to me to do anything to actually try and protect myself, let alone move again. So I didn’t.

I graduated in 2021 with a degree in political science. Unlike the vast majority of everyone else in my department who intended on going to law school, I immediately went to work in political campaigns. I had always kinda wanted to choose a career path that helped others via local politics, as it’s kinda the only lane of politics that matters to most people. This level of political campaigns, it turns out, does not pay shit. By mid-2022 I had ventured my way into running three counties for a state-level campaign. On that job, I was threatened and stalked by various rural conservatives who had found out there was a Democratic organizer working in their area on a near-weekly basis (yes, including with guns!) while the organization I worked for was attempting to unionbust us while providing us with insurance that didn’t actually cover anything transition-related. My intent was to work this campaign and then use my work on it as a stepping stone into an actual career with one of the candidates I had worked for, then using that as a way to move out of my apartment into Pittsburgh, a city I had found some level of comfort in over the years. This did not happen - I was passed over for any position within either of the administrations I had worked to elect. I was laid off on November 15th, and I lost access to my health insurance on November 30th. To date, that was the last political job I held, campaign or otherwise. After four months of searching, I resigned myself to getting a temporary service job while I figured out my options.

That was April 2023. It is now February 2024, and I am still working here. I decided at some point that I wanted to go to law school, something I began working towards by taking the LSAT in November, if only to try and realize some of that now-weathered dream of helping people in my own community.

But despite holding that dream, “my own community” still merely means the queer community - I don’t have a local community of any sort. Even the small number of local queer people have nearly all moved (mostly to Pittsburgh) and we’ve since lost touch. Somehow, I’m just as isolated from the rest of the world as I was the day I moved in here. Me, two of my partners, and no chance for advancement on any level, knowing that every day I wake up there’s always some chance that some right-winger’s wife just left him and he’s going to take it out on the first trans person he sees at the Sheetz in Grove City. The mayor of the town I live in is thankfully distracted with his daily routine of attempting to seduce high school girls to actually do anything, but rest assured that if he did, trans people would be public enemy #1 around here. I entered a holding pattern somewhere around late 2022, waiting for the inevitability of small town life to finally snuff me out for good.

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The question of “what if it didn’t have to be like this?” is genuinely not one that had occurred to me before. I had traveled the country and the world at this point in my life - mostly with my parents, meaning most of it left a bad taste in my mouth - and the only place I had found that felt even vaguely like it could be a home to me was Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (home of Lucy, my partner whom you’ve undoubtedly heard of because I’m extremely gay for her). But that was still an area that felt less urbanized, with pretty lackluster public transit options and frequently treacherous terrain that makes walking pretty damn unhospitable for my bad-back-having ass, on top of less-than-stellar sidewalk infrastructure. And, y’know, by this point I’m pretty fucking sick of having to drive literally everywhere.

The only major metro I had spent even a modicum of time in was Chicago, and it just seemed cold and unwelcoming more than anything else. I had spent a fair amount of time in Las Vegas, but…I mean, living there? No, obviously not. I love the Mojave and Death Valley is my favorite place on Earth, but I’d much rather live 100 miles from Las Vegas in the middle of nowhere than actually in Las Vegas. A lot of trans friends had moved to D.C. recently, but mostly to take jobs with government/political firms that I, frankly, have absolutely no interest in working for anymore. Tokyo was an appealing option, but living there…yeah, not quite sure that’s going to work out for a few reasons. Nowhere ever spoke to me in a way that really hit as a place worth relocating to that would solve any of my issues - so really, what’s left?

I think I finally might’ve found out what’s left.

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In 1976, Western Electric introduced the Number 3 Electronic Switching System, colloquially called the “3ESS”. This was a mechanical telephone switch meant to service small communities. These were all decommissioned by 1996 (I think).

In the fall of 2022, one day while sitting in my dark back office with no windows on my statewide campaign job at the time, YouTube recommended me a video from the Connections Museum, a museum of telephony and telecommunications in the Georgetown neighborhood in Seattle, Washington, showing them booting up their 3ESS from a cold and dark state up to a functional one. At the time, I had a casual friend - Liz - who I had met through Twitter who either was about to or had just moved to Seattle (I’ve forgotten the specific date at this point) and had been there numerous times in the recent past. Knowing this, and that we had posted about telco stuff before, I sent her a link to this video, which opened a real, lengthy conversation for the first time since we had met over a year earlier. This would be a catalyst that sent my life in a whirlwind of different directions that I never would’ve predicted.

By December 2023, her and I are dating and I’ve booked my first trip to Seattle - December 6th through the 12th. I’m going with my other partner, Ariel, who had at that point never actually been further west than Warren, Ohio in her life.

By the end of the first day of that trip, I’ve already been called ma’am by random people more times than all of the previous 8 years I had been out as trans back home. Liz lives in an area of the city where most anything I could ask for is highly accessible - including a bus stop that’s a 1 minute walk away and two Link stations about a 10 minute walk away - and I basically have free reign of the city without even considering a car, which is the first time I have ever gotten to experience that before in my life. I walk more than in any other city before over the course of that week, with only a few problematic hills along the way. If I knew how to ride a bike - I lived in the middle of nowhere as a kid, what was I learning to ride a bike for? - I would’ve been thriving. Hell, I already pretty much was thriving. Even after Liz’s car failed us on my 3rd day out there thanks to a bizarre engineering decision by Volkswagen, I still got to do everything I wanted to thanks to the extremely favorable walkability and transit situations.

This was also the first week of my life where I really got to see a community that actually resembled me. Random trans women of all walks of life were the norm and I didn’t get bizarre looks in public. At one point, I have a brief, casual exchange that gives me an experience I never thought I’d have, which I think ended up permanently altering the way my brain works and how I view myself.

No, really. I still hope I get to see her again someday to say thanks.

Poor timing meant I didn’t even really get to be social with most of Liz’s friends (minus a few extremely brief exchanges), but even among complete and total strangers I felt more accepted than I did at any previous point since coming out. I promised myself I wouldn’t let all of this immediately go to my head.

It then immediately went to my head. After I described my feelings about this on Twitter, another friend chimed in to basically emphasize that this was basically the exact same thing that happened to her. No matter, I thought; I won’t even have the chance to visit again for a long time, so all these positive feelings will fade out before I have a chance to feel them again, harder.

January 2024. Southwest Airlines is having their annual Week of Wow sale event. I check flights to SEA in February (during the slow season for travel) on a whim. I switch the currency from USD to Rapid Rewards points, having accumulated a decent handful of them after a few flights, cancellations, and bumps to later flights. 9,926 miles for flights out there and back from 2/14 to 2/21. In my account: 9,984.

Well, fuck.

With a slightly longer trip on the docket this time, having seen all the museums I wanted to the first time¹, I planned on this being a social visit rather than a tourism one. I made plans to hang out with all of Liz’s friends at various points, having met most of them on Twitter in the intervening two months between trips. The first plan happened that Friday evening - Liz, I, and four members of her social circle² went out to a rather aesthetically neat bar (that I now forget the name of and all other info about). Through the course of that evening, I got to banter with one of them about Cleveland vs. Pittsburgh, I got to chat about kaiju films and Super Famicom hardware. I got to get lightly mocked for getting hammered off of a single 6oz cider (this is the fault of spironolactone, I swear to G-d). They mockingly asked when I was moving out here, having known I had already been there two months prior. An evening of largely inane banter and fun that probably didn’t seem like much on the surface.

Under the surface, this was the most unequivocally accepted I had felt in an individual setting in many years and possibly ever. I didn’t feel a need to justify myself or do any sort of performative acts in order to make sure people continued wanting to hang out with me there. And over the course of the next week, this kept happening - people invited me into their houses, their (very silly) cars, they randomly asked me out for coffee or whatever, they kept “jokingly” asking when I was moving out there, they showed me places and things that were important to them or just that they wanted to show off. These are just a few examples. I was there for literally only a week, and I had found more community in that time than I had found in 7 years back home.

At one point, Liz and I drove out to the Pacific coastline, a route which took us through Olympic National Park, a place I had never been before. This was meant to be a nice day trip and date for the two of us, and instead - yet again - ended up involuntarily changing me and my outlook on life. The air was some of the freshest I’ve ever breathed. The beauty of the Pacific Northwest was not like any other place I had ever experienced before - and I’m someone that thrived in places like this even before that. Even better yet, it was only a couple hours from Seattle, including a very pretty ferry ride, meaning that if I lived there I’d have unfettered access to finally do something I have wanted to do for years - go camping with my girlfriends. This sort of beauty so close to a major metro was new to me - the closest comparable place I think I’d been was Cuyahoga Valley National Park, 25 minutes outside of Cleveland, where I once was called a faggot and threatened for wearing a dress while on a nature trail.

And then, before I knew it, it was about to be all over again. I found myself awake at 2am (5am in the timezone my body is used to!), unable to sleep, quietly slipping out of Liz’s apartment for the sort of introspective walk you take at 2 in the morning. I didn’t make it that far - I walked in the wrong direction and then had to climb back up the hill, which was a bit winding - but in that moment, underneath the very-wet-but-not-raining night sky with the lights of under-construction skyscrapers way down the hill shining before me, it basically all simultaneously hit me that this was the place. This was where I felt safer and more welcome than any place I had been previously, in a feeling I genuinely hadn’t experienced before. That was what makes a home, and this was it.

Seattle was home.

There’s a lot I have to take care of and handle before I could ever realistically start the process of relocating out there. But yes, everyone who had been joking that I was the stereotypical case of someone who will be visiting off and on before giving up and deciding to move here was correct. The morning after that 2am walk, I tweeted something along those lines, and a friend responded that she “would genuinely love to have you out here, and I think you’d thrive”. I cried on the 150 bus after reading that.

I’m forever grateful to everyone who helped me realize this, because I genuinely had no hope that such a place truly existed. With any luck, I can finally build a life for me - hopefully eventually getting to attend UW Law, as well. Plus (hopefully) getting to volunteer for the museum that unintentionally set me on this path to start with. Seems only fair to repay them for that.

With any luck, before too long, I won’t get otherworldly depressed at the phrase “This is the 1 Line to Angle Lake. Now entering: SeaTac Airport. Doors to my left.” ◽

1. obviously I was gonna see the Connections Museum again

2. there’s a network of polyamorous connections going on between the five (non-me) people involved here. just saying this is way easier than explaining it, I swear.