Seattle opens the nation's first transitional housing for LGBTQ+ veterans

This week advocates opened the doors of a first of its kind transitional housing program in Seattle for LGBTQ+ veterans.

Minority Veterans of America, the nonprofit tasked with running the home, has signed a 50-year contract with the county to provide housing and support for LGBTQ+ veterans.

One-point-eight million dollars came from a King County levy to purchase and renovate what Lindsay Church, executive director of Minority Vets, hopes will be home for many vets who pass through the Seattle area. The county estimates that there are 780 homeless veterans in the region.

Q’mmunity House, is a renovated five bedroom two-story home in West Seattle, where residents will have a place to stay for six to 18 months until they find more permanent housing.

The transitional housing is nestled into a cul-de-sac, walled off the main road by a canopy of trees, with close access to the veterans center and hospital.

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Until this week, that kind of home didn’t exist anywhere in the nation for LGBTQ+ veterans who need help with housing after leaving the military, Church said.

“You leave parts of yourself in the military, you leave your parts to yourself along the road somewhere, and the ability to come home, and bring all of your pieces to a space is so important,” Church said.

When people who are LGBTQ+ leave the military, there’s not often a family or community to go home to. In addition to that, Church said people often find it easier to live in the streets or in a car than to deal with homelessness programs.

LGBTQ+ service members often have had to hide parts of themselves, as their lives are politicized, in the military, and outside of it.

“Remember, it's the government who punished them for outing themselves when they were service members,” said Michael Kauth, executive director of the LGBTQ+ Health Program for Veterans Affairs.

“If you served during a time of 'don't ask, don't tell,' or during the transgender ban, if you outed yourself, you were punished by losing your career and possibly losing your benefits as a veteran," Kauth said. "So that's a lesson that they've learned and carry with them after service.”

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Those veterans can also encounter that Anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric when they enter civilian life. That is part of the reason why Q’mmunity House was established, Church said.

“Many people are looking to states like Washington and counties like King County as an opportunity for them to flee, for lack of a better word, political violence,” they said.

Now that Q’mmunity House is open, the challenge is to connect people who are LGBTQ+ veterans and in need of housing to this new resource.

That’s something Ebo Barton has been wrestling with as well. Barton directs housing services at the Lavender Right’s Project in Seattle, which serves Black, gender-diverse, and intersex communities.

Barton is also a veteran and in the middle of planning the launch of their own housing program — but finding people to connect to these housing resources can be a challenge.

“There's a lot of reasons why. One, it's not safe for folks to identify themselves in the current world we live in. So folks are not likely to be honest about their gender identities, and going with what the documents say,” he said.

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The other reason could be that people who can “pass” for the gender they’re transitioning to are able to use that privilege to navigate the world unnoticed. And finally there is also a level of mistrust towards community-based and government organizations, Barton said.

But Barton said members of the LGBTQ+ community tend to balance this external mistrust with a lot of internal support.

“I also think that there is a level of our communities that are really good at taking care of each other,” he said.

Q’mmunity House is one of several new LGBTQ+ oriented housing programs that have opened in the Seattle area in recent years, including from groups like Queer the Land, and Lavender Rights Project. The practice of community housing is part of a long standing LGBTQ+ tradition that is evolving, Barton said.

“I think that now, with the resources and the knowledge and the expertise that we have — and then learning from our histories in community — we're getting a lot further with being able to have sustainable housing,” he said.