Eye of the Beholder

“This feels like homeless porn,” I said to the other women in the outreach van.

It felt like all those pictures of the ruination of Detroit, the desolation of its once ornate and grand places, the degradation of churches and train stations. Whole magazines were devoted to Detroit’s jeweled rubble, prefacing the accusation on everyone’s lips: How could they have let this happen?

The homeless encampment is in our city near a major thoroughfare, across the street and around the bend from a McDonald’s where the people who live in these tents gather for coffee and where they wait for the Street Angels outreach van to come three times a week – Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday.

When we parked on the street near McDonald’s, our ‘customers’ came out to the van one by one to get a sack with a hot dinner and a bag lunch, gloves if they needed them, or maybe a clean pair of pants or a roll of toilet paper. There were several men and two women. The men were different ages, in varying states of distress. Some were new to homelessness, you could tell, and others wore their experience like a second skin; it had become really who they are.

One of the women was a person I’d met in the warming station several weeks ago when it was bitter cold; she always looked, as I described her last night to my companions, as if she were on her way to the office. Instead, every morning, after she awoke from sleeping on the church gymnasium floor she straightened herself up and went to work at a laundromat.

I asked her once where she would have stayed had she not come to the warming room. “With my friends,” she answered and I thought to myself, maybe her pride won’t let her tell me where she would really have been staying. Because if she had friends to stay with, why would she have come to this place to sleep?

She came because it was too cold to stay in her camp with her friends.

That possibility had never occurred to me, mostly because even after so many years of studying homelessness, sifting through data, and writing long funding proposals, I am ignorant. I had ascribed to them an ‘otherness’ that set them apart from what ‘regular’ people would do. What would regular people do? They would form groups, create families, arrange mutual aid, look out for each other, have friends.

When I snapped the picture, I wondered, is this a pitiful thing? Am I taking the picture to show my friends that I’ve gone places where people are living in tents? Is this encampment shameful? Is this homeless porn? Or is this something else?

Could it be a picture of resilience? Maybe. All I know is that it isn’t the pitiful sight it would have been to me several months ago now that I know about the woman living there with her friends; it is more complex, deeper, more significant, more meaningful. And more challenging for me to understand.