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Homeless gay teen survives streets, eyes college

Youth lived in D.C. abandoned buildings while on honor roll

Published

16 years ago

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Kadeem Swenson says his parents kicked him out of the house for being gay two years ago. He spent a year living in abandoned buildings in D.C. while attending Ballou STAY school. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

Kadeem Swenson looks forward to graduating from D.C.’s Ballou STAY High School in June and is applying for admission to college. He gets good grades and his principal considers him a promising student with a good future.

But the strapping, six-foot-tall 18-year-old, who came out as gay at age 16, says he spent most of the past year hiding a part of his life that became far more difficult to deal with than his sexual orientation.

Forced by his parents to leave his home in Waldorf, Md., two years ago after he told them he’s gay, Swenson stayed with friends and relatives in D.C. and North Carolina for several months. He and his grandmother then prevailed upon his mother to enroll him in Ballou STAY, one of the D.C. public school system’s vocational and academic high schools that offer classes at night.

He stayed at the D.C. home of a student friend and her mother until the family moved to Chicago last year, leaving Swenson without a place to live. Believing a return to his mother and stepfather’s home in Waldorf wasn’t an option, Swenson said he set up residence in abandoned apartment buildings in the city’s Congress Heights section near Ballou.

With some financial support from his grandmother, he managed to get through his junior and part of his senior year at Ballou while hiding the fact that he lived a secret life as a homeless person. He stayed most of the time in a debris-strewn abandoned apartment building a few blocks from his school with no electricity or running water.

“I never really told anybody because I didn’t want anybody to have pity on me,” he said.

In what school officials and LGBT homeless youth advocate Earline Budd call an extraordinary story, Swenson told the Blade how he maintained a positive outlook and an overarching desire to succeed at school under the most trying circumstances.

“I want to go to college and study business,” he said. “And I don’t want to just run a business I want to own it.”

Through the help of one of Ballou’s guidance counselors and its principal, Swenson hooked up last month with Budd and Transgender Health Empowerment, a private, non-profit group that operates the Wanda Alston House for LGBT youth.

Last week, T.H.E. placed Swenson in the Alston House, ending a chapter in his life that he says has made him a stronger person but which also has created “considerable stress.”

“His story is specifically why we opened up the Alston House, because kids are still being put out of their house because they’re gay,” said Brian Watson, T.H.E.’s director of programs.

“And he’s a really good kid. He was going to school despite the fact that he was homeless,” Watson said. “That says a lot about him.”

With the help of one of his Ballou teachers, Swenson says he has applied for admission to Colorado College, a liberal arts school in Colorado Springs, which offers the type of business program he says he’d like to enter. Earlier this year he had an interview with one of the college’s recruiters who came to the D.C. area to talk to local high school seniors.

He showed a Blade reporter and photographer the abandoned building that became his home, leading his guests up a debris-covered stairway to a third-floor, one bedroom apartment with carpeted floors that were well preserved, suggesting the building had only recently been abandoned.

He pointed to the area where he placed a small mat that became his bed. The kitchen and bathroom plumbing fixtures had been ripped out and lay on the floor in the small apartment. The unlocked apartment door was still in place, enabling Swenson to secure a small degree of privacy while staying there.

“I thought a lot about going to college in Colorado and getting away from D.C.,” he said later, recounting his thoughts while huddling at night in the abandoned flat.

Swenson said he followed a routine to get by in his unusual living arrangement. He washed at his school and used the bathrooms at nearby fast food restaurants. He cleaned his clothes at a neighborhood laundry.

He tried to sneak in and out of the abandoned building located on the 100 block of Wayne Place, S.E., through an unlocked outer door out of fear that someone might follow him inside and attack him if he were to be seen entering and leaving.

He occasionally stayed at the homes of men he met at gay bars or clubs, he said, enabling him to take a short leave from the abandoned building. But his visits to the homes of his newfound acquaintances were usually short. And a few older men he met at the clubs made it clear they wanted sexual favors.

“I didn’t want to do that,” Swenson said.

He managed to maintain a cell phone through money he earned in a part-time job as a busboy in a restaurant. But an on-the-job injury from a fall prevented him from continuing to work, he said.

In early October, running low on money and realizing he had reached a point where he might not be able to continue without a safe and more stable place to live, he approached a Ballou administrator and asked for help.

“I just walked to her office and didn’t tell her I’m homeless,” Swenson said. “I told her that my parents kicked me out and I just need somewhere to stay for a little while. I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it.”

In what turned out to be a lucky break, the administrator, Sharon Edwards, knew Earline Budd, the longtime transgender activist who has met with Ballou faculty and administrators on transgender and homeless youth issues.

Budd serves as an outreach official with Transgender Health Empowerment., a D.C. transgender advocacy group that, among other things, provides services to homeless youth who are gay, lesbian and bisexual as well as transgendered.

With the consent of Ballou STAY School principal Wilbert Miller and school guidance counselor Helene Miller, Edwards sent Swenson to T.H.E.’s North Capitol Street offices to meet Budd.

“Miss Edwards gave me a brochure and said I want you to call these people. She said I don’t want you to be offended by the name, Transgender Empowerment, because you don’t have to be transgendered to get services,” Swenson said.

“So I was like, O.K., I’ll go there, and I just went. And when I got there I spoke to somebody else and they introduced me to Miss Budd,” he said. “They said she’ll help you with anything you need help with, and she has.”

Budd, upon meeting Swenson, immediately sprung into action on his behalf, calling city agencies and members of the City Council to help find an emergency youth facility to provide Swenson a place to stay.

“I have a youth in crisis and is age 18, currently homeless to the streets and is sleeping in abandoned buildings,” Budd said in an Oct. 7 e-mail to Council members, city officials and members of the news media.

“I have been working with this youth since Oct. 5, 2010 and he is a very bright young man who deserves more than just talk,” she said in the e-mail. “He is currently enrolled at Ballou Stay, where he is on the honor roll and is said to be in school every day. When asked about his living conditions, he states, ‘Well, I have got to get an education and sleeping in abandoned buildings is not going to kill me.’”

Through Budd’s calls and e-mails, the Sasha Bruce House, a youth shelter in Northeast D.C. near Capitol Hill, arranged to provide Swenson with a room on a temporary basis.

Budd and Watson arranged a short time later for Swenson to be admitted to T.H.E.’s Alston House, which is located in a renovated, multi-bedroom house in Northeast D.C.  Swenson moved into the Alston House last week.

Swenson said he hopes to remain in the Alston House until he completes his course work at Ballou in January and enters college in September 2011. He will participate in Ballou’s graduation commencement ceremony in June.

At a reporter’s request, Swenson said he made an attempt to reach his mother through a family friend so the Blade could offer her an opportunity to comment on her son’s plight over the past two years.

“I just talked to my godmother and my godmother got in touch with my mom,” Swenson said. “And she said she doesn’t want any part of this,” he said.

Asked if it was his understanding that his mother did not want to talk to a reporter, Swenson said, “Yeah, that’s right.”

Miller, the Ballou STAY School principal, said he had no idea Swenson was homeless during most of his two-year tenure at the school until Swenson told Edwards about his situation in early October.

“He’s one of our most cordial and interactive students,” Miller said. “He has a great rapport with the staff and the students, and he’s always been interested in college.”

Miller said Ballou STAY High School’s teachers and staff are familiar with LGBT-related issues as they relate to the school system and would have taken immediate steps to help Swenson find a place to live had they known about his homeless status.

“He always looked well groomed,” said Miller. “He said, ‘I took care of my hygiene things before I came to school.’ He said ‘I couldn’t go around looking like I was homeless.’”

Ballou STAY High School shares the same campus but is a separate entity from Ballou Senior High School. Miller said the school system created STAY schools as an alternative educational environment to meet the special needs of a wide range of students at any age who wish to complete high school. The school offers both vocational and academic, college preparatory courses.

He said about half of the students, like Swenson, are between 16 and 18, with many in their 20s and early 30s and others as old as 60. The college-like class system allows students to take as few or as many classes each semester to accommodate their need to work or, in many cases, to raise children, he said.

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District of Columbia

Over 2,000 turn out for Hands Around the Kennedy Center protest

Drag performer Tara Hoot serves as MC, Gay Men’s Chorus of DC performs, attendees shout for Trump to keep ‘hands off’ Kennedy Center

Published

3 days ago

on

September 19, 2026

By

The Gay Men's Chorus of Washington performs at a rally in front of the Kennedy Center on Friday, Sept. 18. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

More than 2,000 supporters of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts turned out on Sept. 18, for a rally in support of the performing arts center and a vocal protest against President Donald Trump’s threats to permanently close the center and possibly demolish it.

The event was organized by a group called Hands Off the Arts, which initially called for participants to form a “human chain” around the Kennedy Center’s main building following a rally on the plaza in front of the building.

However, due to a decision by the Trump-controlled Kennedy Center’s board of trustees to close the center earlier in the week and install fencing around part of the building, participants could only form the chain around part of the building, according to organizers.

Drag performer Tara Hoot, who co-organized the event and served as master of ceremonies for the rally preceding the “human chain,” said the large turnout could have fully surrounded the building at least twice had the fencing not prevented a full encirclement.

Drag artist Tara Hoot serves as the emcee at the Hands Around the Kennedy Center protest on Friday, Sept. 18. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

Among the musicians and singing groups that performed at the rally was the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, which, like other rally performers, had performed at the Kennedy Center in past years. They drew loud applause after singing one of their favorite songs from the Broadway musical show Ragtime, which includes the lyrics, “Will justice be demanded by 10 million men? Make them hear you. When they hear you, I’ll be near you again.”

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Prior to their performance, Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington’s artistic director, Thea Kano, spoke at the rally, reminding participants that shortly after the Trump takeover of the center last year, Kennedy Center officials cancelled a concert the chorus was scheduled to perform there for World Pride 2025.

A Kennedy Center spokesperson said the cancellation was due to a scheduling conflict, but chorus members and LGBTQ activists believe it resulted from policies put in place by Trump and his leadership team at the Kennedy Center following Trump’s statements that he would end controversial “woke” performances that he claimed the majority of Americans disapprove of.

“Now this building sits empty in silence,” Kano told the crowd at the rally. “Let us raise our voices together and bring back the Kennedy Center as it was intended, a place where American culture could be celebrated and elevated, embracing the vibrancy with the spectrum of identify without censure and without politics,” she said.

Among the others who spoke at the rally were U.S. Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), U.S. Rep. Jonathan Jackson (D-Ill.), and D.C. Councilmember Robert White (D-At-Large).

Most speakers, along with LGBTQ participants in the hands-around-the-building event expressed strong opposition to Trump’s demand that the Kennedy Center name be changed from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

At Trump’s request, his appointed board initially made that name change and placed Trump’s name on the front wall of the building along with the Kennedy name. But following legal action taken by opponents who pointed out that Congress must approve such a name change, a judge ordered the removal of Trump’s name from the building. Trump has said he will take steps to reverse that order and has said he will stop plans to renovate the Kennedy Center building and possibly demolish it if his name is not restored in the Kennedy’s Center’s official name.

Throughout the Sept. 18 rally, LGBTQ participants repeatedly responded to the Trump threats by shouting, “Hands Off!”

Chris Raleigh, one of the founders of Hands Off the Arts and a lead organizer of the Sept. 18 event at the Kennedy Center who spoke at the event told the Washington Blade that more similar events are being planned and he welcomes the support the event has received from the LGBTQ community.

“The LGBTQ community was here first, and we’re following them,” he said. “They’ve been the spearhead; they’ve been the vanguard. And I’m so thankful for heroes like Tara Hoot,” he said, adding, “It’s because they know what it means and how this is a safe place – the theater – for many LGBTQ people.”

Actress Lynda Carter speaks at the ‘Hands Off the Kennedy Center’ rally. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)
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District of Columbia

Furries take over the Metro

Shutterpaws held Fur Ride on Sept. 12

Published

4 days ago

on

September 18, 2026

By

Shutterpaws, a local furries group, held their annual Fur Ride on the D.C. Metro on Sept. 12. (Photo by Rory)

The DMV’s own furry group was on full display on the Metro on Sept. 12.

Shutterpaws is a volunteer-led 501(c)(3) non-profit organization located in Maryland.

The furry group has been doing the FurRide event since 2024 and has blown up in popularity for furries around DMV. They showcased themselves on the Silver and Blue Lines near the Smithsonian on Sept. 12. 

“A lot of careful planning goes into running these events, with the goal being a seamless and enjoyable experience for everyone who attends,” says Zayre, a Shutterpaws staff member. “There’s a lot that you learn just by trial and error, and as Shutterpaws hosts more and more events, our team of event organizers continues to learn and refine our approach to keep things running smoothly and finding new ways to engage with our community.” 

With a larger growth of participation in the community comes many challenges with the group, especially when it comes to the Metro rides and organizing. 

“The biggest challenge that we face as organizers is keeping things fresh and finding new and engaging venues to host events,” says Zayre. “Recently we saw a lot of success hosting a meet at On Target Battlezone, an indoor NERF gun battle arena where our crew was welcome to show up and play both with and without a fur suit.” 

Nevertheless, Shutterpaws receive overwhelming support from the community and partners. 

“Across the DMV there are so many amazing places to host a Shutterpaws event so we can pursue our mission of helping connect fur suiters and photographers, and we’re blown away with the amount of support we’ve received from our community partners,” says Zayre. 

Shutterpaws plans to do more events for anyone in the DMV who is interested.

Their next event in collaboration with DC Fur Meet will take place at Pitchers (2317 18th St., N.W.) on Saturday. Visit Shutterpaws’ website for more information.

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Delaware

Republican challenger misgenders McBride during forum, forced to leave

Jewish Federation of Delaware hosted event on Thursday

Published

4 days ago

on

September 18, 2026

By

Congresswoman Sarah McBride in her office on Capitol Hill. (Washington Blade Photo by Michael Key)

Republican “Dr. Joe” Arminio, the Republican nominee for the First State’s at-large U.S. House of Representatives seat, attempted to misgender the the country’s first and only transgender member of Congress while at a forum on Thursday.

This story was first broken by WDEL out of Wilmington, Del.

Arminio used the terms “his” and later “gentleman” when referring to U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.) during his time on the mic before he was asked to leave the forum, hosted by the Jewish Federation of Delaware at the Siegel Jewish Community Center in Talleyville on Thursday night.

At that point, the crowd of about 100 people largely started booing Arminio, who then finished, “I would like to show respect to the speaker, that would be nice.”

Moderator Ken Grant waited until Arminio was finished, then said, “this is your final warning, if you fail to show respect to anyone else on this stage, you’ll be asked to leave.”

During the answer to his next question at the forum, Arminio responded to what he called an “error.”

“I committed an error before, and I do acknowledge it,” Arminio said. “It’s not the first error I’ve made in this campaign, or at any point in my future life.”

Despite the apology and acknowledgement that he had committed what was, at the very least, a social taboo, he did it again 12 minutes later.

While talking about rising healthcare costs being a “catastrophe,” Arminio pointed to U.S. Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and McBride.

“The reason it is is because gentlemen like the two up here with me in the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party … ” Arminio said.

Despite his direct attacks on McBride’s gender identity, she responded to the situation with grace, attempting to intervene to allow Arminio to still have a chance to speak despite not heeding the moderator’s warnings.

“I don’t want this gentleman to not have the ability … ,” McBride began.

However, Republican Senate candidate Michael Katz interrupted her shortly before Arminio was removed from the forum, which was meant to inform the Delaware electorate on the candidates’ issues.

Katz had his opening statement next and directly condemned Arminio’s comments.

“I would like to apologize to everybody here and everybody else on this stage. As a physician, I believe in our common humanity and respect for each other. I feel that pain over those comments, and my apologies.”

Following the forum, Katz called for Arminio to exit the race via social media.

“Those who seek to represent Delaware must demonstrate integrity, judgment, decency, and respect — even toward people with whom they profoundly disagree,” Katz’s post read on Facebook. “For these reasons, I am calling on Joseph Arminio to withdraw his candidacy for the United States House of Representatives.”

This is not the first time McBride has been the victim of misgendering.

In 2025, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Rep. Keith Self (R-Texas) introduced the sole representative from Delaware as “Mr. McBride” during a meeting.

This is also not the first time McBride has faced vitriol from the other side of the aisle — both in terms of personal and legislative attacks on her trans identity.

In 2025, the House voted to ban trans girls and women from playing school sports with other girls, while U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) pushed for legislation barring trans women from using women’s bathrooms.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) instituted a similar rule barring McBride — and all other trans women — from women’s restrooms on Capitol Hill.

McBride has also been a vocal opponent of Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” signed by President Donald Trump on his first day in office. The directive prohibits the federal government from recognizing the gender identity of trans people.

She has criticized Executive Order 14183, “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” which would ban trans service members from serving in the Armed Forces. The directive is still being challenged in the courts to determine its constitutional legitimacy, but it has been allowed to remain in effect as the judicial system considers its legality.

The Washington Blade sat down with McBride in May to reflect on a tense year for LGBTQ politics, where she, in typical McBride fashion, answered questions about the hate she has received.

“Our politics are too often defined by hate,” McBride told the Blade. “I’m glad Delaware and Delawareans are showing that a different kind of politics is possible.”

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