For Money or Just to Strut, Living Out Loud on a Transgender Stage

So said Desire, a 20-year-old transgender woman, as she stood in a doorwell on Christopher just before midnight on a recent Thursday. Threading a comb through her long hair, she talked about the nocturnal version as scores of her friends strutted past in the dark, stopping often to air kiss, catcall or sometimes brawl. This second street belongs to Desire and her peers, who congregate here from across the region to promenade the night away on the city’s transgender runway.
The women, who refer to themselves as T-girls and go by colorful pseudonyms, take to Christopher Street each night for many reasons. Many are working as prostitutes, said Star, 22, clad in a skintight candy-striped dress, as she leaned against a prewar apartment building where some studios rent for $3,700 a month.
“Some of them come here for fun, some of them come down to make their money,” she said. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it.”
But here in New York City’s historic gay corridor, blocks from the Stonewall Inn — the site of the country’s first gay rights uprising in 1969 and the same place where thousands spontaneously converged last June to celebrate the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York State — reducing the scene to one of vice is to get only part of the picture.
“There are Little Italys everywhere in the world, there are little Chinatowns everywhere in the world,” said Mariah Lopez, 27, a transgender-rights activist who is ubiquitous after dark on Christopher. “This is the only place that we can specifically lay claim to for historical reasons.”
While some of the T-girls live as women, others do so only here, fleeing for a time their homes in, say, the South Bronx or in New Jersey, where it may be too dangerous to be publicly transgender, they explain. For them, Desire said, “it’s like: ‘Oh my God, I can be gay? Out here in the street? And we can kiss and hug?’ ”
When Bianka Van Kartier, who lives in New Jersey but is originally from St. Thomas, V.I., visited the street four years ago, it changed her life, she said. She became a fixture.
“I was just mesmerized by the freedom to be gay and to just live out loud,” she said. “I came the following day, and I stayed for hours.” This fall, she said, she plans to compete in a pageant for the title of Ms. Gay Caribbean. “I was so blown away,” she said. “I’m from the Caribbean — you have to hide.”
In platform thigh-high boots, buttocks-revealing denim shorts, red-pleather boleros with matching caps and tops of the backless, sleeveless or even frontless variety, those on the nightly parade here do anything but hide. They compete for best outfit, and for best moves in the nightly dance battles that rage beside the Hudson River to the sound of a boombox on the pier at the end of the street. The night is spent flitting from street corner to late-night pizza shop, brightly colored like flocks of exotic — if risqué — parakeets, sometimes herded along by silently flashing police patrol cars that stalk the street.
But while the T-girls are often beautiful, none deny that most nights here are fraught with ugliness, borne of both of the trade many ply and the cliquish rivalries that spiral into violence. Many have had their hair ripped and skin slashed by a rival’s brightly painted nails. “We’re fighting over ‘he said-she said,’ ” Star said. “It’s crazy; it’s petty.”
George Karam, 50, who manages Rivoli Pizza near Christopher Street, a favorite after-hours hangout, said he had drinks thrown over him by unruly customers. “Every summer, I have a lot of problems,” Mr. Karam said.
There was a violent episode at a Dunkin’ Donuts on Christopher last year. The police place giant spotlights in the warm months at two ends of the street, to discourage crime.
Nevertheless, those who prowl Christopher defend the nightly ritual. “This is historically a unique community on the planet,” said Ms. Lopez, “where a subgroup of people in a specific city have it as theirs but don’t have an economic stake.”
“The reason you buy your $2 million condo is because it is the historical West Village, and the reason it is the historical West Village is because of us,” she continued, before being cut off. A passer-by on Christopher interjected to berate her for a past slight.
It was past midnight. The screaming fight lasted for blocks, all the way to the river and into the night.