A Decade of Homelessness in Oregon
by Bridget Reilly
The early writings especially should provoke at least one question in the readers' minds: What happens to the lives of homeless people while they're not being left alone to perform even the most basic life-sustaining functions in peace? When one has to spend years fighting for their right merely to SLEEP in public, let alone take care of any of their other life business? One can get caught up in these struggles to the point of becoming a virtual career activist, and almost forget about grappling with all the underlying disempowerment issues that made them homeless in the first place. People wouldn't know about those deeper layers of a homeless person's life, or even think to wonder or care about them.
This seemed in many ways to be the case with myself and my traveling companion
Rick (aka Wolfe) in the first couple years of this saga. We come across as two people very hungry for media exposure and attention, a trait many people found annoying. Rick was always the first to jump in front of the camera whenever the news crews showed up at our encampments, while I was quick to follow up negative publicity with eloquent rebuttal letters to the local press. We were both self-proclaimed spokespersons for a population that had not elected us to represent them. As a team we were labeled "professionally homeless" and accused of actively seeking to be "poster children". This was incomprehensible to the homeless people who had no wish for publicity, who ran and hid when they saw the TV cameras coming. Why on earth would anyone want to be famous for being homeless?!
Oftentimes one would have thought our entire homeless life was nothing but a spectacle staged for the benefit of the media and its hungry audiences, and that my partner and I were the most willing and eager actors in this show. The truth, however, was that we needed attention not merely for being homeless, but for the individuals we were and the talents we possessed. We would have preferred some other way of getting attention, but if being homeless was the way to get attention nowadays, it was better than nothing. And all the while I was honing my skills as a journalist, writing stories with my own slant on the homeless situation. The mainstream media was clearly inadequate to do this job for us, lacking as they were in firsthand knowledge of the problem. They filled a need for the audiences who merely wanted light entertainment and didn't wish to be educated. But people like myself were there to provide more in-depth journalism from a first-person viewpoint, for those who wanted to take a more serious look at the matter.
As I settled into the monthly routine of producing the Houseless Journal, a newsletter I did for four years in Eugene, I began permitting myself the luxury of a lot more deep, reflective philosophical writing, going into some of the psychological and personal reasons for the circumstances I'd found myself in at this midlife stage. Why my adult life had not followed its intended course and I'd ended up here instead: living in a camper in an unfamiliar city where I had no roots, parked reclusively in a residential driveway for nearly two years while I wrote endlessly and profitlessly about homelessness. I had my cheering section, but very little money was coming in. My partner who had brought me to this city deserted me during this time--and good riddance. That relationship had turned out to be the most abusive and destructive one of my entire life. I needed a lot of time alone to lick my wounds and learn about the difference between neurotic co-dependence and mature, nurturing love.
When the North American Street Newspaper Association (NASNA) was born, my stories began to take on a more national scope. The prospects of being involved in a continent-wide organization of journalists were exciting indeed. Now I could put Eugene in a national spotlight, and also turn around and report on the national homeless scene for the benefit of Eugene readers. Furthermore, I could take pride in having been part of the long history behind NASNA's founding, starting with my early attempts at homeless advocacy writing in Boston in the early 1980's. Best of all, this was a chance to gain respect as a journalist among many other journalists in the same field, to be seen not as "professionally homeless" or an intentional "poster child" or "career activist", but as an accomplished member of a legitimate profession whose work was known far and wide. This was a reward that seemed to justify all the years of agony I had lived through as a homeless person, to give them purpose and meaning. Those homeless years were not yet at an end, however; it would be some time before I finally found my way back to love and stable housing.
So, now to begin the story. When the curtain rises, the scene is Portland City Hall, January 1992.
This is one of the first articles I wrote in Portland, which was never published anywhere: (click here).