Sam J. Miller

Lewis: [00:00:00] So, good morning.
 
Miller: Good morning.
 
Lewis: We are in East Harlem. It's November 30th, and I'm Lynn Lewis and I'm here with…
 
Miller: I'm Sam Miller.
 
Lewis: Good morning Sam!
 
Miller: Good morning.
 
Lewis: [00:00:17] This is the first—several of interviews with the person who now is the longest running staff person at Picture the Homeless.
 
Miller: Lucky thirteen, thirteen years.
 
Lewis: And so, we want to get to know you a little bit—who Sam is. And then we're going to talk a little bit about Picture the Homeless.
 
Miller: Great.
 
Lewis: [00:00:41] So, who is Sam? Sam, where are you from? Tell me about yourself.
 
Miller: I grew up in upstate New York, a small working-class town, very post-industrial, very depressed economically, and I am the last in a long line of butchers. My family owned a butcher shop for many generations until Wal-Mart came to town and put us out of business. And that's when I became a vegetarian. Twenty years ago, almost twenty-one.
 
Miller: [00:01:12] And I am also a writer and a gay guy who's been married sixteen years—well been with someone sixteen years. It's only been legal for six years. And… Yeah! I'm sure there's lots of stuff.
 
Miller: I was the most valuable swimmer on my high school swim team but only because all the other swimmers got kicked off and I was literally the only swimmer, so I was indeed the most valuable swimmer. I got a trophy and everything.
 
Lewis: Definitely the most committed swimmer.
 
Miller: Yeah, yeah, or at least the least ill behaved. [Laughter]
 
Lewis: [00:01:54] And so… Tell me—kind of a story about the swim team experience for you. [Smiles]
 
Miller: The—one story that sort of sticks with me is that I… We went to—we would do swim meets. And we went to Albany Academy, which was sort of like the very wealthy prep school… Like a private school where they wore uniforms, very wealthy. And… By the way I would get—it was the regulations that they had to provide a bus for all athletic activities. So even though many times I was literally the only player, it would be me and the coach on a bus, going on this long ride up to Albany for a meet.
 
Miller: [00:02:53] And at my first Albany Academy meet, the—they had much better equipment than us and I had been training on a starter block that was flat, which is you know, not standard. So they have starting blocks that were angled, which enables you to start much faster, sort of launches your body into the water. It had a sharper angle that enables you to get a start, or a faster start. But you have to know how to do it, right? You have to like grab onto it and lean back and then launch yourself forward, which I had never even seen one of those before, and so I didn't know anything about how to balance your body on it. So, my first—my first event at my first meet, I felt myself move, like falling forward, and I was like, “Please blow the starting whistle, please blow the starting whistle.” But they did not blow the starting whistle before my body fell off the starting block and into the water, but... They didn't disqualify me, I guess they could—it was clear [smiles] that I was not trying to get a head start I was just an idiot.
 
Miller: [00:03:58] And then at a later meet, the next year when I—when there were two swimmers on the team, my friend Jeff, who I had a big crush on, was at an Albany Academy meet with me, and he went into… These kids were so rich and so idiotic that they didn't lock their lockers. [Laughs] So we stole shit from their lockers, including a big bag of oranges that we ate on the bus back to Hudson and felt like we had gotten some kind of revenge.  
 
Lewis: [00:04:31] Nice. And so… Is there anything else from your childhood that would inform, or that you feel like informs, the community organizer that you later became?
 
Miller: I'm sure there's tons. And I do remember being in fourth grade and it was recess, at elementary school and I went into the inside to go to the bathroom. When I came out, I was looking out the window at the kids playing, and I was not in a hurry to go back outside because they were playing sports, and I was terrible at sports.
 
Miller: [00:05:17] But I was watching my friend Reece who was really popular, strong, really kind, very athletic guy who everybody liked and who I was really close friends with. And I was watching him and realizing that I—in some weird fourth grade prepubescent non-sexual way was like romantically fascinated with him. And as soon as I realized that, and as soon as I sort of saw this thing that had been—that I had sort of already been feeling, but hadn't really noticed, I immediately realized “Well that's never going to happen.” And that it was the kind of thing that, you know—was never to be spoken of, was never to be acted on, that the world was not set up to accommodate my romantic fascination with him.
 
Miller: [00:06:13] And that… It just made me really, really simultaneously really sad, and really angry in a way that I sort of like recognize now as the sort of first moment where I realized how the things that are wrong with the world are… They impact me and they sort of like, you know—limit my li—who I am and what I want to do, and that I want to... I certainly didn't think to myself, “I want to do something about this.” I just recognized that something was wrong, and that it hurt me, and that's sort of like the beginning of doing something about it.
 
Lewis: And you're in fourth grade so, nine maybe?
 
Miller: Probably.
 
Lewis: Hmmmm. And…  
 
Miller: And certainly—sorry!
 
Lewis: No, go, you!
 
Miller: [00:07:06] Another one [laughs] is that when I was seventeen and my father's store had gone out of business, and I was working at a bookstore for minimum wage, which at the time was four dollars and twenty-five cents. And I met these boys who were all vegans and like hardcore punk rockers, and went to a different school. And so, I had never met them before, and you know, we became friends because I also really liked punk rock. And I had crushes on two of them and they were really passionate and knowledgeable and angry.
 
Miller: [00:07:53] And I sort of like—that was the first time that I could sort of make the connection between the things that you see that are wrong in the world, and your ability to do something about it—or your obligation to do something about it, whatever that might be. So that was when I became a vegetarian, and that's when I sort of realized that my anger at the Wal-Mart that had put us out of business, at the economics of my town were messed up in… But not only messed up, but that there was something that I could do about it, even if it was really small.
 
Lewis: [00:08:33] And so, what were those things that you started doing?
 
Miller: Well the first one was not eating meat anymore. Because if we wanted to eat meat, like my mom, we would have to go to the people who would put us out of business to buy the meat that we would eat. So, you know it felt like the insult added to the injury was that not only did we get put out of business, but now we have to go give them money. So not eating meat.
 
Miller: [00:09:00] And… Like getting informed, reading political books... Reading Noam Chomsky, reading Karl Marx. Sort of like, learning how things worked was a sort of crucial piece of that, sort of like, doing what one can.
 
Miller: [00:09:22] And also, like you know—coming out. That was also when I was actually in an afterschool arts program for at risk youth and I was being mentored by this amazing artist who became one of my best friends. And he was the first out gay man that I ever met and ended up being the first person that I came out to. And that, you know—as much as I'd been afraid to sort of embrace that and publicly present that piece of myself, that that was one more valence of activism, one more level on which you—you know, that our everyday decisions and the work that we do in this world, can either make things better or allow things to stay the same or make things worse.  
 
Lewis: [00:10:09] Well, thanks—and you… Tell me about your decision making process to move to New York and leave your small town.
 
Miller: Well, I couldn't wait to get the hell out of the town because I hated it and because I hated everyone in it. And I was really—you know, I had—I did really well in high school, which wasn't really saying much because it wasn't a particularly [laughs] well-resourced or good school. But… And I had a bunch of dream schools, some of which I got into, but none of which I could pay for.
 
Miller: [00:10:48] And so I was really looking at the possibility of ending up at a State University in New York, and not really escaping the orbit of Hudson and was really lucky and happy to get into Rutgers in New Jersey, which is a state school—which as an out of state student would be more expensive but still significantly less than any of the private schools that I had hoped to be able to go to.
 
Miller: [00:11:20] So, I was very eager to get out of town. I didn't really want to go super far. I really, you know, I've always had a really great relationship with my parents and my sister, and I didn't want to go someplace where it would be a great expense and great difficulty to come home. So, Rutgers was just far enough away that I could sort of ignore it.
 
Miller: [00:11:45] But honestly, as soon as I left Hudson, I realized how much I loved it and how many things about it I really valued and how many of the people there I loved. Even though I had been so focused on getting the hell out and how much I hated it. So, it's always been this... I still sort of, you know, go there regularly to see my mom. I think of it as this sort of landscape of my brain—like it feels real to me in a way that New York City doesn't. It feels like familiar and home.
 
Miller: [00:12:15] So… But once I was in New Jersey, once I was going to school at Rutgers and learning about the world and learning about… You know I was a cinema studies major—I really loved movies and I started to really sort of get pulled into the orbit of New York City, of realizing that the life that I want to live is the life that can't be lived… I mean it could be lived anywhere I'm sure, but that New York City was the best place for me for a lot of reasons, including the fact that there's a bunch of movie theaters that play old movies, but also for the fact that there's a lot of gay people, and that I sort of—eventually, even though it was actually a pretty difficult decision because I had actually, always been really scared of New York City.  
 
Miller: [00:13:01] I remember going to New York City in—with my family in the eighties to visit relatives and being just, like—abjectly terrified of it and having the sort of narrative in my head about… That it was a terrifying, scary place. You know you've seen movies where there's… I was convinced that there were cannibals—there were zombies that lived in the subway tunnels, because I saw a movie where there were—where that was the case. And so, yeah—it took me a while to get over my fear of New York City, but quickly realized that was where I needed to be. So, I… When I was still in college I got an internship at Miramax, the film studio—which I hated, and realized I didn't want to work in film at all. And then I got a job in publishing, and for a while I was still living in New Jersey and commuting, and then a friend of a friend was looking to sublet her apartment and I ended up in a really big, really cheap basement apartment in the Bronx, that you visited.
 
Lewis: I remember that. [Smiles]
 
Miller: On more than one occasion. [Smiles]
 
Lewis: [00:14:15] So, I want to kind of loop back a little bit to—you mentioned values that you loved, that seemed to kind of be located in a way in Hudson, and making your life here in New York. And so, what were—what are those values and how are you able to replicate or create home in New York, and kind of bring those values into your life here?
 
Miller: Yeah.
 
Lewis: And what are they?
 
Miller: [00:14:49] Yeah, yeah—I think that… I mean, I think that the sort of like baseline answer for me is that home is love, and is loving people. So… That the life, the place where I am with my husband is home. Right? The fact that this is a city where there are a whole lot of people that I really love. That was—that’s sort of like the basic answer and that was what became very difficult for me when I left Hudson, was I realized that—not only my parents and my sister but, you know, my older relatives, a lot of the people that I knew and was friends with, and cared about… That that was what was the thing that was the hardest.
 
Miller: [00:15:44] And also the sort of small town, basic… As much as the close-knit community feel of a small town is what I hated and what made it so difficult to come of age as a gay man. There was also a level on which, you know I really, really loved it and really benefited from and got a lot out of that sort of—the enrichment of everybody knowing who I was, right? And people—everybody sort of like—acknowledging and speaking to me. You know, like this diner that I still go to, where the owner was really close friends with my dad and just like, is always happy to see me—so that kind of thing.
 
Miller: [00:16:34] And that's what I've been able to—that's what I've been very fortunate to be able to replicate here in New York—is a lot of people who I really love. And then, you know—I really… I'm still enough of a nature kid that I really like the fact that I can ride my bike along the Hudson River. And, you know, I just—a couple of days ago, I was riding my bike and there was a deer underneath the George Washington Bridge, by the river and I was just like, “Yeah, this works.” This—it's a urban jungle but it's also a real place that is—that has trees and things like that, so...
 
Miller: [00:17:14] You know, and then there's—I'm going to see it going see one of my favorite operas in a couple of weeks.
 
Lewis: What's that? [Smiles]
 
Miller: Norma by Bellini. It's really good. Norma is a pagan priestess in some Roman occupied part of Europe. And so, she's sort of this warrior matriarch of this nation. I think they're Gothic or something. And she falls in love with the Roman—the head of the Roman occupying forces, and of course that goes terribly wrong. It's really fun. It's really… It's like a really kick ass lady's—lady narrative.
 
Lewis: [00:17:55] So, you know, I'm hearing this theme about community where everybody knows everybody and it's making me picture you at Picture the Homeless, being there for thirteen years. And of course, most people don't stay there that long. [Laughs] So, I want to kind of back up a little bit and talk about how you first heard about Picture the Homeless, and you know, when was that, and how was that? What was that story?
 
Miller: [00:18:32] So, in 2002, 2003 I was—I had lost my job in publishing after the sort of post 9/11, economic downturn. And I had at the time, been an activist working with Jews Against the Occupation and really loved that and really valued the sort of community that I found there of predominantly queer young Jewish people, and also some not young [laughs] queer and straight Jewish people. And so, I had been doing a lot of activism and when I got laid off I wanted to find a way to do activism full time. And so I wanted to—I looked into, you know many of the members of Jews Against the Occupation were either union members or union organizers, or otherwise involved in unions.
 
Miller: [00:19:23] And that was sort of like—you know, I never probably heard much about what community organizing was before then. But I knew what labor organizing was, and so that was where I gravitated, and I volunteered for a while with the Labor Community Partnership and... It wasn't a very—it was an organization that I had a lot of problems with and was really frustrated with on a lot of levels because its mission was to organize almost exclusively low-wage immigrant workers, most of them Spanish speaking, to—who were already union members, to organize them around community things.
 
Miller: [00:20:02] So, we would go… The unions would give us their access to their members, and we would go and meet with them. And I had a couple of really amazing organizing mentors named Gladys Sanchez and Artemio Guerra, both of whom had great labor organizing and community organizing backgrounds. And so, we would meet these great people, and I would talk to them, and they were wonderful, and they would bring us into their homes and feed us and talk about what was wrong with their community and we would sort of like get excited about working with them on trying to fix their community. And then the labor union would be like, “Yeah we're not going to work on that.” And so, it was this sort of, very top-down model of...
 
Miller: [00:20:46] We thought we were organizing people, but we were really just mobilizing them and getting them to be more active in stuff the labor union had already identified as priorities. Which—there is value in that, but it wasn't fun, and it didn't do much for me.
 
Miller: [00:21:07] So… But I had heard about Picture the Homeless in the most sort of vague and general way of like—somebody reading off a list of community organizations… And, you know— I hadn’t… I knew the Picture the Homeless was a thing, but I had never looked them up online, which maybe I did, and it didn't matter [laughter] because we didn't have a website then. But it wasn't until, I guess, 2003 when I—the union paid for us, paid for me and my comrade Zaida, to attend an organizing class at the New York City Organizing Support Center, of blessed memory.  
 
Miller: [00:21:53] And that was where I met you, as well as Anthony our co-founder, and Jeff. And I… It was a great class and I really, I really loved it. But I felt like I learned a lot more on my cigarette breaks with Jeff and Anthony, than I did in the class, because for me, organizing is so much about relationships and so much about building with people.
 
Miller: [00:22:20] And so, I had—as I think most New Yorker's default is… I had no real understanding of what homelessness was like and what the real issues were with homelessness. And so, learning so much about the issue, and talking to them about the work that they were doing and how awesome it sounded, I got really excited by Picture the Homeless. It sounded really like the sort of opposite of what I was experiencing in my job of a very top-down organizing model.
 
Miller: [00:23:01] And also, you know there's a level on which, when you start to pay attention to homelessness and you start to really understand it, it sort of turns your whole understanding of the world on its end, because you sort of—I think oftentimes people slot homelessness into a box in their mind, where it's not threatening and not scary and doesn't have anything to do with them, of like, “Oh, that's that thing, and that's really sad, but that's not something that I need to think too deeply about.”  
 
Miller: [00:23:27] And so, when you start to really understand the issue and see how intimately it's connected to everything that happens in this city and in the country and how intimately it's connected to racism and the high cost of housing and so many issues that are important to lots of folks. It's kind of hard to not—not to get [long pause] simultaneously really angry and really like— resolved to do something. And so, while homelessness and housing had never been issues that were particularly important to me in my life as an activist and an organizer, I got really excited about it.
 
Miller: [00:24:10] And then, you know, several months later, Picture the Homeless was hiring and I applied, and really didn't think… I was sort of like, in a place where I really wanted to leave my job and so I was applying to a lot of organizing jobs and I remember, when I submitted my application thinking, “Well, this is stupid.” Because Anthony and Jeff had given me all this—talked to me so much about how everybody on staff at Picture the Homeless had had personal experience of homelessness and what a value that was to the organization and why that was so important. And so, I kind of even felt bad about applying because I felt like I was… Like… I don't know, trying to trying to trick somebody? Like, they would—people would think that I had personal experience of homelessness, but I didn't. And so yeah, I almost didn't apply and felt bad about doing it. But, then I did and then here we are, thirteen years later.
 
Lewis: [00:25:09] Well, I want to hear… There's two stories I really want to hear. I want to hear about the interview and what it was like when you got there. But before that, you mentioned the Organizing Support Center and so, besides Picture the Homeless being there, who all was there? What was happening there, what was that?
 
Miller: [00:25:31] Yeah, I mean, looking back on it now, I am really impressed and sort of amazed at how many of the folks that were in that class with us, are still doing awesome organizing. And how many of those organizations are still around, like FIERCE! and I think DRUM was there and there were definitely folks from CAAAV.
 
Miller: [00:25:50] And, you know it was this really great space where lots of folks, from different backgrounds, different organizations, different issues, different life experiences were coming together and sharing the knowledge and experience they had of what they had worked for and what they had fought for and what they had won and how they had won it. And so, I don't actually retain a lot of what I learned in that class on a level of like—let me tell you—we did a workshop on this, and a training on this, and a role play on this. I don't remember what those things are, but I know that I sort of carry them with me and I'm sure that they've been important parts of my organizing tool kit ever since.  
 
Lewis: [00:26:45] I was at a party a couple of weeks ago and Jesse from FIERCE! was there and we were talking about how we had met in 2001. And many people that went through the Organizing Support Center are still, as you said, in organizing. And I asked about that because, when we think about, not just Picture the Homeless but our movement, what have been some of the things and spaces that have helped sustain and build?
 
Miller: [00:27:17] Yeah, because a lot of the work that we do with folks in organizing, when we do get to talk to people from other organizations, it's in a coalition setting, or at a protest. But mostly in coalition meetings [smiles] and as much as we might love people in those settings it's not a space, it's not a hangout space. Nobody's there because it's fun.  
 
Miller: [00:27:37] Right—we're there because we're working on an issue that's important to us and we want to—we know that by working together we can achieve things that we can't on our own. But, often we—you know, we're not there as individuals, we're there representing organizations. So, we might not get—we might be on different… Even if we personally agree, we might not be—we might be on different sides of the issue or the vote or the conversation, based on what our organization's priorities are.
 
Miller: [00:28:06] And we're also often really busy, and so we’re not… I personally, and I know that this is not unique—I mean this is not universal. I know lots of folks do, as organizers, make space and time for hanging out with other organizers. That's just not part of my practice. Because, I often, when I'm not organizing, I don't want to think about oppression [laughs] and injustice and it's why I don't read nonfiction anymore. Because I want—when I'm not, when I'm sort of like turning off the organizer part of my brain, I… You know, part of my burnout prevention strategy to still be in this work thirteen years later is to, you know, do my work, and then not do my work.
 
Miller: [00:28:52] So, so anyway… Which is just to say that the Organizing Support Center provided a space to sort of have those conversations and learn from each other in a way that was like, that's what the conversation was about. It wasn't about, you know—I learn a lot in coalition meetings, and I make good friends in coalition meetings, but those are sort of byproducts, not the point, right? And that's the point of something like the Organizing Support Center or a training academy, or like when I went to the Midwest Academy’s training in Chicago in 2008, around supervising organizers.
 
Lewis: [00:29:31] Alright, and then… Thank you. The interview—so, did you get a call, did you e-mail, describe what that whole process was like.
 
Miller: Well, I was standing at the copy machine, at the—on the eighteenth floor of the 32BJ union building at 101 Avenue of the Americas, and I got a call on my cell phone from you, and you said, “Sam, this is Lynn Lewis.” And I only knew you as Lynn from Picture the Homeless. [Smiles] I didn't know what your last name was.
 
Lewis: [Laughing] It is my name.
 
Miller: [00:30:12] [Smiles] I was like, “Huh! Hi!” But then I figured it out very quickly, and you know… So, yes, I do [laughs] remember exactly where I was standing and what was happening when I got the call. And I was really surprised, and I went in for the interview and… Like I said, I was applying to a couple places, and I remember the first interview was with you and Bruce Little and I think Torrie. I don't remember if anyone else was in it. I know Jean was in the second interview, I don't remember if he was in the first.
 
Lewis: And where was it? Like what, you know…
 
Miller: [00:30:51] So, that was in the Picture the Homeless office on 116th Street, which was above the Cuchifrito restaurant. And I remember walking in, and being like, “Oh! It smells so good in here!” [Smiles] Like I don't eat meat but, you know, it smells nice sometimes, so—and then it has this sort of like, a Puerto Rican cuisine—it's not my—not smells that I was super familiar with, so I was like, “Oh, this is nice. It smells like somebody's kitchen.”
 
Miller: [00:31:24] And so, it was in this sort of narrow office space, in this meeting room where there were butcher paper pinned up to the wall with info on the work. And there were pictures of people up on the walls, and I... And there were just people hanging out and I remember I was welcomed by John Jones who was very happy to... You know, he had this huge, beautiful welcoming smile, as he would for many and many a day for many and many a person arriving at Picture the Homeless.
 
Lewis: [00:32:10] So what kind of… Who was hanging around, like what kind of folks, what were they doing?
 
Miller: I don't remember, except that they were… I don't remember who they were. I just remember that they were people that I would end up seeing a lot over the next several months and… I feel like somebody was doing somebody's hair, and somebody was in the bathroom yelling at somebody outside of the bathroom, and Tyletha I think was in the office, and she would be yelling at somebody. [Smiles]
 
Miller: [00:32:46] I just remember it being a space that felt really chaotic in a way that made me really happy, because I had been doing organizing out of a space that was really sterile and like—I would be… We had this one corner of one floor of the union building and when—on the rare occasions that we would have members come by, it was this very corporate office culture.
 
Miller: [00:33:11] So, the fact that there were folks hanging out, was sort of my first signal that this was a place that was really different, and that wasn’t… That the priority was not on decorum [laughs] which sounds rotten to say. But I mean it in a really good way. It wasn't stuffy, it didn't feel like you had to watch your mouth or lower your voice—although there will be many a day where I would really wish people would lower their voices. [Smiles] Because I would be on the phone with a city council member’s staffer trying to set up a meeting, while somebody was yelling about the Jews in the background. [Smiles]
 
Lewis: [00:33:53] [Laughs] So you came up—you came into that space and were welcomed by John Jones, and what was the interview like? What do you remember about that?
 
Miller: I remember being really… I was really nervous. And I remember being really [long pause] I don't know, I felt like the interview felt really chill and like—this is something that I think I will always love Bruce for—that... You know, I made it… I was—it was sort of like—I don't remember if it was my opening statement, but it was definitely something I said really up front, of like you know, [laughs] “I just want to be clear that I have no personal experience of homelessness.”  
 
Miller: [00:34:48] And, you know—and I talked about how my own experience of being—you know, coming of age as a gay man was certainly not the same but that that was where my drive for fighting oppression came from and that I was really eager to learn about the work and the issues, but that it wasn't something that I had personally experienced. And I remember Bruce going out of his way to validate that, and really say like, “You know, you’re family. Because you're family you get these things in a way that a lot of people don't.” So, that sort of took away my anxiety, and my feeling like I was maybe a little bit of an imposter, or just totally inappropriate for the job.
 
Miller: [00:35:38] Which was great, until the second interview when Jean made all that come back [pause] even more, because Jean was really hard on me in the interview. And I think… As I learned later… As he tells me—as he told me a couple of weeks ago, as he told me every, you know—pretty routinely for thirteen years, he voted against me getting the job and he really didn't think I was the right person for it. So—even though he says now that it was his favorite mistake.
 
Miller: [00:36:06] I definitely, in the interview, felt like Jean and I were gonna have a hard time. [Smiles] Which we never did. Like, from the day I arrived on the job, he was amazing. And I remember really early, maybe the first month that I was there, going with him to Yankee Stadium to parking lot “Thirteen B” where he picks up cans and meeting all his friends who he's been picking up cans from for years, and realizing what an awesome and special person he was and how much I was going to learn from him.
 
Lewis: [00:36:37] What was happening in that second interview, that…? What was that like? Why was it hard?
 
Miller: Well, one thing was we did a role play which I was certainly not prepared for, or familiar with.
 
Lewis: [Laughing]
 
Miller: [00:36:48] And it was an outreach role play where I was supposed to present how I would do outreach to a homeless person and I don't remember if Jean was the person I was doing outreach to, or he was just someone who was present in the scene, like if I was talking to Torrie in the park and Jean was getting in my face and yelling at me... And so, it was a lot of that. And I think it was the first, probably the first time in my life that I heard someone use the Fourteenth Amendment in conversation [smiles] and so, it was pretty rough.
 
Miller: [00:37:23] And there were a lot more people in that interview including—I'm pretty sure Tyletha was there, and she gave me some shit, which she would give me a lot of shit in the days to come. So, I—yeah. And in fact, I had—I don’t remember if it… I think it was the same day. I had had another second interview with another organization. And so, I had two second interviews the same day and I got—both offered me the job, the same day, and—I mean a different day, but on the same day, not the same day as the second interview.  
 
Miller: [00:38:03] And the other organization was something that was really… I could tell would have been a much easier job. Like, it was a smaller organization that was not doing a lot, and it was a staff of two and it was organizing a community that was institutionalized and would have involved a lot of travel and a lot of talking to folks who are probably amazing, but I could just sort of tell from the vibe that it wasn't doing the kind of real systemic organizing that I was kind of excited to try out. So, I remember really agonizing over it.
 
Miller: [00:38:40] Because, I’ve always sort of thought of myself as a writer first and an organizer second. And that like—you know Chekhov, Anton Chekhov has this quote about, you know, because he was a doctor that “medicine is his wife, but literature is his mistress.” So, I always sort of imagined that literature was my husband, but organizing was my side piece.
 
Lewis: [Laughs].
 
Miller: [00:39:09] And so, at the time, I was really thinking, “Okay, I can do this job that's going to be really easy and much less time consuming and much less—exert much less stress on me and give me a lot more time and space for writing. Or I can do this other job that is going to be a lot harder and a lot more—and ask a lot more of me, and really not allow me to do the kind of writing that I sort of had been hoping I could.”
 
Miller: [00:39:40] But [long pause] And I remember talking about this with Juancy, and realizing, and him sort of encouraging me… Drawing out of me, that Picture the Homeless was going to be the organization that would be—would give me the kind of feeling of actually doing something that was going to help everything for me… Like the ability to feel like I'm making a difference in the world.  
 
Miller: [00:40:14] The kind of life experience and breaking myself out of the sort of, you know—white Jewish working-class world view that I had had, and really coming up against the realities of what a messy world it is and many—how bad oppression really is, and what folks are dealing with and how amazing folks are in spite of all that and how much strength and power folks have as they deal with things like homelessness. So ultimately it wasn't a really hard decision, and you know obviously the right one.
 
Lewis: [00:41:00] And so, before the interview, before we started recording and we were talking about how you were changed, but also how you changed Picture the Homeless, what you shifted. And I want you to describe a little bit about this—you know, what happened in the first interview with Bruce, and that him claiming you as family and—because you're a gay man, and your recollection of how you as a gay man, coming into what Picture the Homeless was like at that time for gay men or queer people in general, and kind of, how you are part of that story.
 
Miller: [00:41:58] I mean… I don't—I know you would probably have a different and probably more objective analysis of this… Because I don't think I—the sort of… The—what I believe and what I remember having this… I still talk to folks about this as sort of an organizing lesson within Picture the Homeless. Because, oftentimes, I think of occasions where a staffer has had an issue with something a member said, or something is problematic.
 
Miller: [00:42:33] And, you know, that feeling like—in terms of our work, you know one thing about organizing is people are at different places, and they might be really smart and powerful about some issues and really get certain issues and have like a really progressive powerful vision of what the realities of an issue are, but then on another issue be terrible, [laughs] right? And that you might have folks who are really great on talking about racism in America, but then also talk about how, “Immigrants are the problem and immigrants are stealing people's jobs, and that's why we're in the situation that we're in.”
 
Miller: [00:43:17] And that… I've always felt like, what happened at Picture the Homeless in terms the—how queer folks function and are and exist in the space wasn't about me as a staffer being like, “You know you shouldn't do this, or you shouldn't say this homophobic thing.” It was about queer members like Bruce, who were like, “Fuck you, you know, this is not about—you know, I'm a queer person who's experiencing homelessness and you can be as homophobic as you want to be, but don't say that shit in meetings, and understand that we are fighting for the same thing. And that if we say some homophobic shit in meetings, then we're going to turn away a lot of really smart, powerful people who are going to hear that and be like ‘this is not the organization for me.’” So, I always felt like it was the work of members that sort of like, helped check that. 
 
Miller: [00:44:12] And that is also something that we would see again, and again, when like—a lot of times the meeting would be… There would be—there would be a lot of folks in the meeting who were not immigrants. And that sometimes some stuff would be said that was anti-immigrant, and that when immigrants… When I would do outreach, and I would meet immigrant folks and they would come to meetings they would hear that and then never come to another meeting, right?  
 
Miller: [00:44:38] And that, you know, often there would be a lot of misogynistic talk either in the office, or in the meetings and that folks would—who were women, would hear that and be like, “Okay, bye! Like, I don't need to hear this and I don't need to be in a space where that's tolerated.”
 
Miller: [00:44:53] So, you know I was really blown away by and impressed with, how many gay men were in Picture the Homeless, and how frank they were and how openly they talked about their sexual adventures in the rambles and how there were also men in the space who were not gay, and who I imagine had come from a place of homophobia or at least ignorance, who were really uncomfortable with that but still came and still were part of the work.
 
Miller: [00:45:29] So for me, that was really transformative for me in terms of the way that I own, and celebrate, and talk about, and am upfront about, my queerness. I remember in August of 2004, when I had only been at Picture the Homeless for a couple of months, and it was when the Republican National Convention was in New York City. I remember Rocio your daughter say something to me about, “How's your boyfriend?  How's your handsome boyfriend?” Which, you know, I had talked to her about and she—but I don't remember if she had met Juancy at that point and it was in a room with several members of the Housing Committee who were men who I was not out to. 
 
Miller: [00:46:16] And being like [whispers] “He’s great. Can we talk about something else?” [Laughter] But then also feel really awful about that and feeling like, you know—that I wasn't doing anybody any favors by hiding that. And that, if—like I remember, one of them was Wayne Thomas, who is a really powerful, awesome leader, who I really loved and who I really thought was—I really had a great relationship with, and he was great. And I had heard him say something homophobic about somebody—not necessarily in a way that made me think he was super homophobic, but just that the person that he was talking about was gay and he was just like, you know, that F word, because he didn't like the person. And so, you know, when you don't like somebody you'll attack the—you'll dismiss them in whatever way is easy… Often, so…
 
Miller: [00:47:15] So realizing that I wasn't being an effective organizer if I was hiding these key pieces of myself from people, because then our relationship isn't—they don't know me, and I don't know them and also, I don't want them… They might feel that way—I don't want to hear it. So, if I put this out there, then they’ll probably check themselves [laughs] before they say anything homophobic.
 
Miller: [00:47:41] So, you know, I think that this is sort of like more of the ways in which Picture the Homeless was making me a more effective organizer, but also more at home with who I was—which ended up being a key part of me becoming a better writer and being able to write about things that were real to me and I had never really found a way to tell gay stories in my writing. And it was around that time that I started to really do that and go there and own my identity and my stories in a bolder and more fearless way.  
 
Lewis: [00:48:19] My recollection of you coming with all your skills and being openly gay, was even before you started working there, gay men like Bruce in the office were just walking around like, “Okay, now we're going to have somebody who's one of us, motherfucker!” [Laughter] You know, as if that—and I think some of it's about privilege you know, that having a staff person who’s an openly gay man with a husband and an earring and painted fingernails and stuff, was
 
Miller: Well, that…
 
Lewis: providing some cover.
 
Miller: [00:49:00] Right, I mean, that's the great thing about organizing, and about community, is that we're providing cover for each other. So, that was the narrative they had, and I had the exact opposite narrative of like, now I'm going to be hanging out with some queer people at work and I'm not going to… I mean, I just remember like—at my last job all these conversations about it, and other staffers who were really curious, and had a ton of questions about the mechanics of gay sex—but also then, in terms of working with members, not being able to talk about that, and sort of like—you know… We were all sort of encouraged to not talk about who we were, really. So yeah, we were—I imagine were reinforcing each other and we were... The more of us there were, and the more together we were, the more powerful and effective we were.  
 
Lewis: [00:49:49] So, you just said something about—in your previous job—not, with members, not being able to talk about who you were. And you had earlier mentioned that that was a different organizing model because it was more about mobilizing than organizing. And so, what is it about the organizing model at Picture the Homeless in terms of the relationship between staff and members? How would you describe it?
 
Miller: [00:50:23] You know, I think that [long pause] when we're doing [long pause] when we’re at our best as organizers, as staff at Picture the Homeless, we are really listening to people. And we are really building the kind of deep relationships that will enable them to be fully honest with us and fully… And we're pushing each other, right? That we're each [long pause] we’re all sort of like moving together outside of our comfort zones in ways that will help create change and really start to address power. So that—there's a love. There's a sort of mutual accountability that helps us do things that we're not comfortable with.
 
Miller: [00:51:09] So if I'm pressuring… I remember this woman Selina, who was one of my first housing campaign leaders, who was living at the shelter on Ward's Island—the HELP USA shelter, and who was going to be the press spokesperson at our first action and her being nervous about it, as so many folks are when they’re going to talk to the media. But that, I was working with her, and talking with her, and sort of pushing her to do something that she had never done before, or that she was—that she was nervous about, or that she maybe didn't think that she was the best person for, so you know, that kind of—those kind of relationships work both ways and that there are… 
 
Miller: [00:52:01] You know, I remember when we did the—also in 2004, in November, when we did the sleep-out—not really a sleep-out—the civil disobedience in Central Park, and when you and Jean and John were like, “We're going to do this. Do you want to do this?” And, you know, feeling like even though I was scared to put myself in an arrestable position I had thought about it a lot. Like, in my work with Jews Against the Occupation there was an occasional civil disobedience that I had never participated in a directly arrestable way, because I was really scared. But that because I had love for you guys, and I had love for John who was dealing with this stuff, of like being arrested in the park all the time, I was like, “Yeah sure, why not?”
 
Lewis: [00:52:59] Could you talk about some other examples of how… Because love—right? Love is deep, [smiles] that's a deep word. So how, within the context of Picture the Homeless, how is love created? Could you give some examples of how that happens?
 
Miller: [00:53:23] Yeah, I mean I think that… I think there's a base level on which it was always really important to who we were that we were a space where folks were—where we were happy to see people, where we welcomed people, where—when they walked in the door with their bags, or their stress from whatever they were going through, or any number of—you know, the shit they were carrying, that had been heaped upon them by the cops, or the shelter, or the system, or the newspapers. That we were smiling, that we were welcoming them, that we were happy to see them and that if they needed to take twenty minutes in the bathroom that no one was pounding on the door for them to get the hell out.
 
Miller: [00:54:09] And that if they wanted to just sit in a meeting and not say anything… That we were a space where people who didn't get a lot of respect in other places, got respect. And that where people got treated like animals, or objects, or the enemy, were treated as people, as friends, as comrades.
 
Miller: [00:54:34] So, you know I think that we were… You know, I remember there being a lot of debates around like—in meetings, where people would say, “We need to change the name, because homeless is such a bad word.” And then other homeless people being like, “Well we need to reclaim it, we need to take away the stigma. We need to make clear that this is not about you and the terrible mistakes you've made, it's about what is wrong with this city, and this world where this happens.”  
 
Miller: [00:55:04] And so, we're really loving people, and encouraging them to love themselves, and sort of getting over a lot of the internalized anger and self-blame and rage that folks really understandably feel when they're in a situation like that. 
 
Miller: [00:55:22] And that that is what has always enabled us to develop the kind of leaders who are going to feel like they can exert leadership and that they can do outreach and meet other homeless folks and bring them into the work. Or that they can march to the edge of a balcony and unfurl the banner over a protest, or any number of things that are sometimes things people don't feel super comfortable doing.
 
Miller: [00:55:49] That's sort of like the baseline, is that even if we might not say it, even if we might not always feel it, that we love them. That like, the love is there and that the respect and the celebration of each other is something that we—that was essential to how Picture the Homeless was effective in organizing.
 
Miller: [00:56:09] Because, you know—it’s—there's this narrative a lot of people had that they don't have any more, that people are unorganizable, or that they're dealing with so much shit that they can't focus on… You know, they have to deal with their personal stuff before they can make change around the systemic issues they're facing.
 
Miller: [00:56:29] And… It's true that they have a lot—people carry a lot with them, and are in a crisis, even if it's a crisis that been going on for years, right? That they’re in a shitty situation that absolutely nobody gives a shit about. And so, being able to sort of help them, and love them, and get them to see that this is not about the terrible mistakes they've made. This is about what is wrong with us as people, that this is what—this is the situation that we're in.
 
Lewis: [00:57:02] I remember… I'll tell a little story [laughs] because you were often very kind to people. And I remember one time with Charlie, who was sleeping on the street for twenty-seven years, and it was—a lot of... We created a kind space. So, I remember Nikita and Roosevelt getting him food, and they got him a little—a bottle of iced tea that wasn't big enough, so he started yelling at them, saying, “I have a raging thirst!” [Smiles] And then you and I were trying to figure out what to do. He was distraught, you know? And so we sang Me and Bobby McGee to him. [Laughs]
 
Miller: [00:57:52] Well I can't imagine that would make anybody feel better hearing me sing. But I do…
 
Lewis: Or, nor I…
 
Miller: Right… [Smiles] But yes, I do remember that, and how often the sort of like, baseline work was about helping people who were just traumatized, and who had just, or who had just dealt with something unspeakably bad.
 
Miller: [00:58:14] You know, or that—getting phone calls from people who, this is the thirtieth call they've made, right? That they were just going through the phone book, they were on the Internet, they were looking up everybody who had homeless in the name—every church, every charity, every nonprofit, and who you just know were getting everybody who is like, “I can’t help you. Goodbye.” Right? Or you know—nobody... People who they—people who were telling really harrowing stories of the things that they and their families and their kids had dealt with, and everyone is like, “Okay, bye.”  
 
Miller: [00:58:45] That's not what we do. So even just listening to people and hearing their stories and being able to be like, “That's so terrible. I'm so sorry that that happened and I’m so… And that's so terrible.” And—you know, validating something that is really—something that is just like an ongoing atrocity that is happening to tens of thousands of people, that most of the people whose jobs it is to pay attention to, are just like, “Yeah whatever, that happens to everybody like—whatever.” So, that's always been essential to who we are and how we organize.
 
Lewis [00:59:17] What's an example of one of those ongoing atrocities?
 
Miller So, the people who call us because they are living in a shelter that is funded with tax—city taxpayer dollars, where they're just dealing with the kind of abuse that if it was happening to someone who was socioeconomically privileged, would just be an outrage, right? Like people whose kids are sick because the shelter is providing such shitty food that health conditions are exacerbated. Or kids who are traumatized because of things they've seen or experienced in shelters. Or a PTH leader who had the shelter staff open up the door to the room where she and her husband were sleeping and just stand there in the doorway and watch them sleep until she yelled at them, and only knowing that happened because she was awake at the time, and not knowing how often that happens when she's not awake.  
 
Miller: [01:00:29] Right, so—you know, people in a system that's supposed to help them that—where they're just dealing with, just awfulness… And that, when they call—you know, if they try to complain to the shelter, they often get punished for it. They might get a punitive transfer where they get sent to another shelter that might be worse or might be further away from their jobs or families, or just that would just be a massive disruption, all these kinds of things that… Or they call the city, and the city doesn't do anything about it, so you know...
 
Miller: [01:01:02] The shelter system is another thing that I was completely ignorant of before I worked at Picture the Homeless, and then when I found out about it, I was like, “Oh. This is awful! Why does nobody—why does nobody… Why is everybody cool with this happening?!”  
 
Lewis: [01:01:17] So, when you started at Picture the Homeless, it was in May?
 
Miller: Mm-Hmmmm.
 
Lewis: What was your first day like? I know we’re going back a little bit but, what was that like? What was your entry like into that world?
 
Miller: Well, this is all burned really vividly into my memory. So, it was a long time ago but it's stuff that I remember really well. My first day was May 4th, 2004, and that was the day before we had a really big protest. And we had… You know, Tyletha was organizing the Women's and Families committee at the time, and they were going to do a protest at the Emergency Assistance Unit where homeless families with children have to go.
 
Miller: [01:02:01] The one—the only facility of its kind… In the Bronx where people had to go to get placed in a shelter, where they were subject to humiliating fraud investigators who would go and interview their past living conditions… The people that they had been staying with for the past couple of years and where the conditions were so bad that when—that the summer before a young man had taken his own life when his family got sent back to the EAU from their temporary shelter placement.
 
Miller: [01:02:33] And so… You know—the atmosphere in the office, as it is the day before an action was frenzied and excited, and a lot of yelling especially because it was Tyletha’s action and Tyletha yelled, a lot. [Smiles] And so, you know, it was all hands on deck when it's an action. It wasn't like, “Here's your housing committee get started.” It was like, “Sam, do whatever needs to be done to help this action out.”
 
Miller: [01:02:59] So like, for example, I remember there was a call that came in—like we were doing press calls, and somebody was like, “Oh sure, we'll do an interview. Who's there?” Right? And it being like—I was like, “Okay, let me put Tyletha on.” And not knowing that Picture the Homeless had an organizational value where like members are the ones who speak to the media. And so, you being like, “Ah, no that's not going to be Tyletha, get the person's number and we'll call them. We'll get a member to do the interview and we'll call them back.” And I was like, “But they're on the phone now… Like, what if, when I call back they’re—you know, they've moved on? How long will it take to get a…” You know, whatever...
 
Miller: [01:03:41] So, coming up against the sort of awesome but unusual, methodology that Picture the Homeless had for organizing. So then, my second day was the action, and you know—seeing how… Like, I had never seen anything like it. Where, people were so angry and so upset about the conditions that they were in that they just—I've never seen people mobilize like that. I had never seen so many people so angry and so powerful and compelling in how they talked about it. So you know, it was a ton of work, and it was kind of like horrifying and terrifying and stressful, but then it was this amazing action.
 
Miller: [01:04:26] And it was also my first experience of just how fucked up the media is when it comes to homelessness, because our good friend, Melissa Russo…  
 
Lewis: [Laughs]
 
Miller: of NBC I guess, was there and she interviewed nine different people. She talked to nine different people until she found the one person who countered the dom—like the actual narrative, right? The narrative of, “The City is doing terrible things to us.” The one person who was like, “Oh yeah, I just came from Jersey because I heard this was how I get a Section 8 voucher.” And that was the person who she quoted and included on the news.
 
Miller: [01:05:02] So, seeing not only that, like—how bad the situation is, but how invested the media is in advancing the wrong narrative. The narrative that, “The city is doing a great job. This is what needs to happen, these people are scammers. These people are terrible. They are putting themselves in this position.”
 
Lewis: [01:05:19] So, describe the action.
 
Miller: Well, we met in the park beforehand, with the leaders who were actively involved in planning and executing the protest.
 
Lewis: Who were they?
 
Miller: I don't remember. I can remember their faces, but I don't know their names. And a lot of them were people who, as amazing as they were on that day, we didn't see again. Or we saw a couple of times, but then they got placed and then they were really far away, or they were trying to deal with their situation. So, you know—we have those pictures, right? I still look at those pictures and so I'm like, that person, and that person, like I remember them, but I don't remember their names.
 
Lewis: [01:06:03] Excuse me, but they were in the EAU?
 
Miller: Yes.
 
Lewis: They were people that were...
 
Miller: These were homeless families. Most of them single mom households, but not all of them. All of them, Black and/or Latino. Except for—I think there was one lady, anyway I don't know her life. [Laughs] I don't know what her background was. But that this was a starkly racialized, starkly gendered issue where the people were really like, powerful.
 
Miller: [01:06:32] And you know—angry and—you know, went in there and got everybody to march out, and everybody marched out and I was like, “Wow they’re…” You know, like… And everyone who came out that door was taking a real risk, right? Because if they—they could get logged out, which meant they would have to start the process all over again. So the sixteen hours that they had been waiting, or whatever, would be for nothing. So, it meant something that people were marching out. It wasn't just like, “Hey guys, come on outside for a minute.” It was like, “You’re—there's going to be consequences for participating in this.” But everybody was so angry and so outraged.
 
Miller: [01:07:10] And so, we went to the place, we… They went inside. People came out. There was a press conference. There was… I did translation for one woman who was a monolingual Spanish speaker. Actually, her I do remember! I remember that her son's name was something like Leandro and I kept wanting to call him Lisardo but that's not really a name—or at least that wasn't his name. So I kept forgetting his name. So, I only remember the wrong name for him, which is terrible. But you know he was like this—probably ten year old, really scared-looking kid. But the way that people came out was so energetic and powerful.
 
Lewis: [01:07:57] That was the day that the director—was Carol David and we were—we went to give her a heart transplant. [Smiles]
 
Miller: Yeah. So, Jean was in doctor scrubs as were several other people with giant cut out hearts. [Smiles]
 
Lewis: [01:08:13] The EAU was on one corner. And do you remember what the police were doing and what was happening in terms of security outside of the action? And, you know, how…What helped people walk out of an office which was their only access to getting shelter, and then potentially housing? What was it that we were doing, if anything, that created space for people to do that?
 
Miller: [01:08:55] I mean, one of the things was that we were… You know, when you're in the situation, when you're in the system, you have no power, or the power that you have is heavily penalized. So, we were providing a way for people to vent the complaints that they had, and anger that they had, where there was no constructive outlet for it.
 
Miller: [01:09:19] And specifically, one example is that there was this security guard, or DHS Police officer, who was a fucking asshole and was super abusive to people and who was so outraged by our presence there… He got in a screaming match with Jeff… And you know that—I think that and our general awesomeness made it really clear to people that we were not the system, we were not on the side of DHS—that we were trying to call them to account for their bad behavior.
 
Miller: [01:09:58] And so, we were actually across the street, we weren’t allowed—we weren't able to be on the sidewalk right in front of it. The buses were still pulling up to take people to—or bring people back from temporary placements, while the fraud investigators did their work. And yeah, we had the giant blow ups of the pictures that people had smuggled out—of the food, and the rats and the roaches, and the filthy, filthy bathrooms.
 
Lewis: And the buses were school buses, and people had garbage bags full of their stuffed animals.
 
Miller: Yep.
 
Lewis: [01:10:42] So that was your second day, and then you were hired as the housing organizer, and we didn't have a housing campaign, right? Like everything, it grew out of civil rights meetings. So then, what did you do? How did you start the housing campaign with members?
 
Miller: So, I just started doing outreach. And I went to… And I got a lot of support from staff and members. And folks, you know—to the best of their capacity would come and do outreach with me. So, I would go to the Wards Island bus stop, or the park, or Holy Apostles and I would talk to people, and I would sort of… And you know, Picture the Homeless already had members, already had a database—so I was calling people, I was bringing people in, I was saying, “I'm the new housing organizer, I would love to meet you. I would love for you to come to this meeting.” So, we had a meeting pretty early on.
 
Miller: [01:11:41] Like, I remember Shawn, who was at the time already a PTH member, as well as some people that I had done outreach to... And just met a lot of people and started talking to them about what the issues they're facing are and like... You hear the word housing and what does that mean? Housing can be a lot of things. There's a lot of problems when it comes to housing. So, hearing from people about what they, what to them were the biggest obstacles to getting housing, and there was a lot, right?
 
Miller: [01:12:05] There's a lot of things that we, that were sort of emerging from this process of, meeting people and developing leaders and issue identification of like, you know—the fact that the city at the time, it was $600 million dollars a year the city was wasting on shelter. Now, it's like $1.6 Billion that… You know, the City is wasting all this money on shelter when it should be going into housing. Like, there's a whole campaign right there.  
 
Miller: [01:12:36] The youth are aging out of foster care and most of them—the majority of them, become homeless. There's a whole campaign right there.
 
Miller: [01:12:41] The city's public housing authority has more restrictive guidelines than the federal guidelines, in terms of who they keep off the list. So that, if you have—in some cases just a violation, not even a misdemeanor criminal encounter, you can be kept off the waiting list for public housing.
 
Miller: [01:13:04] You know, just countless issues and things that people wanted to work on. Federal legislation that people were interested in and things that—where New York State was the target, things where New York City was the target. You know, people who are like, “We should just be squatting. The policies aren't going to change. We should just do this for ourselves.” Like, just a—you meet a lot of people, you hear a lot of things. So, there were a lot of issues that people wanted to work on.
 
Lewis: [01:13:34] So, where's the bus? The Wards Island bus, where was that?
 
Miller: The Ward's Island bus stop is at Lexington and 125th, on the northwest corner of the street. Which you know, I only knew—my only experience of that, was the Velvet Underground song Waiting For My Man, which is about a drug deal, and he says, “Go to Lexington, 125…” So, as in the—whenever that song was written—ashamed to say, I don't know exactly, I think it was sixty-seven, sixty-eight.
 
Miller: [01:14:08] That's a spot—that’s a corner where there is a lot of, you know, a lot of underground economy activity taking place. You have people who are street vendors. You have people who are selling loose cigarettes. I kept wondering who the hell “Lucy”, was because people kept going, “LUCY. LUCY. LUCY. LUCY” I'm like, who the hell is Lucy? It was that they were selling loose cigarettes, which are called Loosies's and which costs fifty cents, or they did in 2004. I don't know what the price is now. You know, you had people who were selling narcotics. You had people who were… I remember, being in the—going into the McDonald's across the street to get a cup of coffee and some guy trying to buy my urine, offering to buy me a soda. I was like, really that's all my urine was worth is a soda? [Smiles]
 
Lewis: [Laughs]
 
Miller: [01:14:56] And so, that's where the bus stop is. That's where there's always, at any given moment, a ton of mostly men, but not exclusively—who are homeless, who are waiting on the bus to go to the several shelters that are on Wards Island, and you know… There’s also several methadone clinics in the area.
 
Miller: [01:15:20] It's just sort of like this very stark, horrific example of the ways that folks are forced into vulnerable situations, where they're also really heavily policed. You know, there was a heavy, heavy police presence there. There still is. The subway station is just downstairs from there, and there are always tons of cops there. More than any other station I know of. More than Times Square, which is supposedly this terrorist target hot spot. But the underground economy at 125th is more of a threat to public safety, evidently.
 
Miller: [01:16:02] So that was one place where I was doing outreach. I would also go to the park. I remember just—the weather was getting nice. I would ride my bike around. I would go to meet people. I would talk to people and then I would come back to the office, all sweaty and happy and talking about all the people that I had met and Tyletha being really skeptical and giving me shit and saying, “What? You think this is fun? Are you having fun biking around talking to people? What the hell. You're not supposed to be having fun. [Laughs] What are you even doing? What kind of organizing is this, where you're, you're just talking to people and having fun?”   
 
Miller: [01:16:34] And I was like, “Nah, I’m meeting really awesome people like, this is really, it's like amazing. It's really eye opening and exciting, and people are awesome.” And she being just like, “Pssssshhhh, this kid's not going to last long.” [Smiles] And you know, she gave me a lot of shit that first couple of months, which ended up being really amazing and I love her deeply and I think that this was an important part of me becoming the kind of organizer who could be effective and thrive at Picture the Homeless because you know—as bad as Tyletha was, Tyletha was not the worst. [Smiles] Like, the worst yelling I got was not from Tyletha.
 
Miller: [01:17:08] It was from the people who were—who I was doing outreach to, many of whom were not trying to hear what I had to say and saw this white kid come up to them and who was trying to tell them about the revolution, and they were like, “Fuck you. Leave me the fuck alone. Whatever you're selling, I'm not buying.” And you know, folks had a lot of real justifiable anger at the ways that they were exploited, and the ways that people who were supposedly there to help them were not.
 
Miller: [01:17:36] So yeah, that was my couple of months of trial by fire—of like, “Oh, I'm probably in way over my head. Like I don't know if I can do this. This is a lot.” You know, I wasn't sleeping very well. I was really like—I was under so much stress; I was all thrown off gastrointestinally… But then I like, you know—toughened up and got over it, and ended up, I think, being really good at getting people to come to meetings and to believe that they can do something about these issues.  
 
Lewis: [01:18:16] So, beyond the yelling, what were some of the other ways… What were some of the dynamics in the office that helped you get to a point of being effective and secure, in what you knew you could do?
 
Miller: So, some of it is that you have to sort of balance, right? Because on the one hand organizing it’s a, you know—the sort of like, basic… Like, the ground level tool of organizing is conversations and getting to know people and talking to about things and… So, on the one hand that's your job. On the other hand not every conversation it's a productive conversation. And not every person's opinion that you're organizing is right, or good. And sometimes, even though you know people are amazing, and you love them and they're great, and they're leaders and they're the ones shaping the work, they still need to shut the fuck up sometimes.
 
Miller: [01:19:18] So I remember, you know—the office was really just one long room, with like, a coup—you and Tyletha had doors, but they didn't… [Laughs] They weren't the world's best doors, right? There was no real privacy. There was no real—if you wanted to close your door, somebody standing by the coffee maker could probably hear what was being said in your office. So, nobody had real privacy. Nobody had real quiet ever.
 
Miller: [01:19:56] And so, I remember being on the phone—I made a joke about this, but it was not a joke. I remember being on the phone with somebody, trying to set up a meeting with a city council member for some leaders of my housing campaign and a member who I love, saying like—some really anti-Semitic stuff about Jews and, you know, “Jews running the city, and Jews being the cause of homelessness…” And wanting to have a conversation and wanting to be like, “Okay, let's talk about this, let's—you know, develop your analysis of the situation because you are saying some things that are not true.”  
 
Miller: [01:20:29] And then also wanting them to shut the fuck up and wanting them to just like—not… That just being an inappropriate conversation and wanting folks to respect the fact that we're trying to get work done. Like, things are not going to change because of the conversations that we have. Although that's part of it, they're also going to change because we are effective in doing the work that we do.
 
Miller: [01:20:48] So really, just having to tell that person to shut up. Like, you know, “I love you, I respect you—now just stop fucking talking.” And so not having every conversation. I actually think I did try to, in that particular case, engage and have a conversation, and it didn't go well. So the next time the issue came up, which was really soon after, I was like, “Just stop.”
 
Miller: [01:21:09] So, being able to sort of like grapple with the complexity of organizing and the challenge of being member led and directed—as Tyletha likes to say, even though led and directed are the same essential word. [Smiles] You know is—you know, the sort of duality of that's true, but also we need to be able to be effective and we need to be able to work together.
 
Miller: [01:21:38] And if you're going to be a good organizer, you have to forge a path that is going to be the best path forward for the entire committee. And sometimes that means that what one person thinks is important is not—it has to be set to the side. Regardless of what your feelings are on the subject, maybe you agree that it's an important thing, but that the committee as a whole—your group, your leaders, have to be the ones to forge that. And if somebody is saying something that's outside of that and no one else is feeling it, it is what it is.
 
Miller: [01:22:08] So, you know—there was one member who was a really educated and intelligent person who had a lot of experience as a sort of like, agitator and warrior for social justice but who could not work in comradeship with other people, who could be—who could not share leadership. Right—this is something that's a common dynamic in organizing, and certainly at Picture the Homeless, of people who are amazing, but they can't accept that they're not the star of the show and they can't be accountable to each other.
 
Miller: [01:22:50] And so this person wanted to work on this issue—that was a bill that was in Congress called the Bringing America Home Act—that Picture the Homeless members had actually helped write before I came—and staff. But this person thought they had invented it, and it was their thing, and they were like, “Yeah, I want to talk about this at a meeting.” And I was like, “Great, I'll put it on the agenda.” And I put it on the agenda, and he made his pitch and there were like crickets, right? Like, nobody was feeling it. And so, you know… But then he came into office a couple times, and he wanted to make—he wanted to do things about the bill, he wanted to make some calls to legislators. I was like, “Sure.”
 
Miller: [01:23:30] And then at the next week's housing meeting he was like, “I want it on the agenda again.” And I said, “Okay.” And again, nobody was feeling it. And, you know—I don't remember what the conversation was, I don't really think there was one and I could probably parse it out a couple different ways of like, partially it was people not feeling like working on a piece of federal legislation that would involve a lot of travel to Washington and calls to legislators and things that were really beyond the scope of what Picture the Homeless’s capacity was, people not feeling like that was the most effective way to move forward, or are not feeling that the bill was likely to pass, which it really wasn't.
 
Miller: [01:24:08] But also the fact that this person was really abrasive and not super respectful of other people and got really frustrated with people when they wouldn't do what he wanted. So, it was a little bit of all that and probably more. So then, the next time he brought it to a meeting I was like, “I'm not putting this on the agenda. We have a lot of things to discuss. You know we cannot, we can't keep talking about this because we actually, we're working on this protest. We're actually doing things that… And we're not going to spend another twenty minutes of you yelling at people because they don't want to do what you think is important.”
 
Miller: [01:24:40] So then it was I'm—I’m a… Like staff is trying to silence him and that Lynn Lewis is a Stalinist [laugher] and Sam is a jellyfish because he's spineless because he just does whatever Lynn says. And so, you know… And this person had my cell phone number and was calling me all the time and being just a real asshole, and just generally it was not a great… It was really—that was really hard for me for a lot of reasons, including the fact that I, you know—liked him. He was not a bad person. There were—and he was very smart and—but really just, really mean and not accountable to others.
 
Miller: [01:25:31] And I remember actually having like—this is like the un—this is like the “Lynn Lewis is always on the clock shit” because I remember having like long… I was at Juancy's apartment in New Jersey on a weekend. So, probably like a Saturday, and calling you because I was really upset because this guy had called me again, and he was really angry. And I was feeling really guilty about the fact that I had to kind of like hold the line against him, and you having like—in my memory it was—maybe a longer conversation than it really was, but that you having to be like, “Here's what, here's why, here's how… Just—this is what it is and here's why you shouldn't be stressed out about this and here's why you did what you had to do and that's what effective organizing is. Sometimes, it's telling people that yes, we are homeless led, our work is shaped by homeless people, but that doesn't mean that every homeless person who walks in the door gets to sort of like, throw out the script and say this is what we're working on now.”
 
Lewis: [01:26:33] I remember that him being mad and calling you on the weekend was also about an Albany trip.
 
Miller: Yes.
 
Lewis: And you and Wayne and Leroy and
 
Miller: Jackie.
 
Lewis: Jackie, were going to go to Albany and this person inserted himself and y'all were driving a car, and as you mentioned he was very abrasive. So, I remember that Leroy and Wayne especially didn't want to go with him, and they were both really big men, like over six feet tall, and big. So y'all would have been like in this little, tiny capsule [laughs] zooming up to Albany.
 
Miller: We rented a car. Yeah.
 
Lewis: And if this gentleman had gone, it would have been a shitshow.
 
Miller: [01:27:28] Yeah and I remember you... You know, I'm so conflict adverse, and my sort of general approach is to sort of, you know—hope… Like try to navigate the solution, the path of least fireworks. And so, I actually remember explicitly you telling me, “He can't go. You need to call him, and you need to tell them you can't go.” And whereas, I would have probably just let him come and that probably would have gone really poorly. So I had to be like, “No you're not coming.” And he was super upset about that. But it was totally the right decision, and you know that was a really great trip.
 
Miller: [01:28:05] Even though—you know, we met with legislators, we met with the staff of Joe Bruno, who at the time was like the state legislative kingpin, later indicted for corruption.
 
Lewis: [Laughs] Aren't they all.
 
Miller: Awful person. [Laughs]
 
Lewis: Oh, New York.
 
Miller: [01:28:20] And you know—this great learning experience for these really strong leaders who ended up shaping the campaign for the next twelve months, who had this great meeting, and were like, “Oh yeah, this is great, they're listening to us, they're hearing us!” And then of course, they never returned our calls, never did any of the things they said they were going to do. So, it was this great, sort of like, “Oh yeah, these people are all liars, and terrible.” And a great learning experience—which you know, that was amazing.
 
Miller: [01:28:41] And that really shaped a lot of the stuff we were able to achieve in the next couple years. Whereas, it also could have been this moment where, two guys got into a fight and they all of them stopped coming to Picture the Homeless and I had to start from scratch because the earth was scorched, and I lost two of my most important leaders. So, yeah, it was the right call, it was just a crummy one. But I don't think that was the same one as the—I mean, maybe we—we probably had more [laughter] than one, more than one weekend phone call about that person.
 
Lewis: [01:29:15] And so—the housing campaign. A lot of what allowed us to get the resources to hire in a housing organizer was the work that members did around vacant buildings and lots in East Harlem. And even in Judson, people constantly talking about, “I get arrested for sleeping on the sidewalk in front of a vacant building, but that person can own it forever and that's not against the law. Something's wrong with that.” And so, we had done this initial count, in East Harlem, that was led by members and one of them, Mike Slater had figured out how to find out who owned the buildings.  
 
Lewis: [01:30:07] And so then, when you started, you had a small group of people and then you went and did a bunch of outreach. And what are the things that you said to people in the park? Like, what park did you go to? And what kinds of things did you say? And yeah, some people were like, “Get the fuck away from me.” But the people there came. What was it about what you said, or what was it about them, that they were happy to meet you, and would come?
 
Miller: [01:30:42] So, my opening line was always, “Are you having a housing problem?” Because, you don't want to ask, “Are you homeless?” Because homelessness is so stigmatized, people often would get really upset about that question, and not everyone hanging out in the park was homeless.
 
Miller: [01:31:03] And, you know, so I… On the one hand, it was just a pragmatic way to start a conversation with folks who are impacted, who are either homeless, or other—even if they didn't necessarily think of themselves as homeless… They might be sleeping on a friend's couch; they might be in an overcrowded situation that was with friends and family that was not sustainable.
 
Miller: [01:31:30] But also it was sort of like me in my dawning political understanding of homelessness in New York City, realizing that homelessness isn't really about who are you and what's your problem? It was about how fucking expensive housing is in New York City! And that, really everybody is having a housing problem, right? Everybody is—everybody’s who's not super rich is either paying too much money for rent or living in a situation that is like, you know—an apartment that's too small, with roommates they don't like.
 
Miller: [01:32:02] Okay, I'm not going say everybody is impacted by the housing crisis the same way but realizing that was the common ground that folks had, even if they didn't necessarily identify as homeless. Even if a person in the shelter, and a person on the street, wouldn't necessarily think of themselves as allied.
 
Miller: [01:32:21] And so, really just hearing about folks—wanting to hear from folks, what their situation was and, you know—validating that, because for many people, if they were in the park, if they were on the streets, everyone was trying to get them to go into shelter. Right? The city outreach workers, they go to HRA, whatever—everyone's like, “Go into the shelter.” You know cops are harassing them every night. People are really criminalizing them and stigmatizing them.
 
Miller: [01:32:56] And so, to be able to say to people, “I get it, I know why you don't want to go in the shelter. It's totally valid that you choose not to go into the shelter because of this thing that happened to you, or because of what you heard, or the fact that its curfew would conflict with your job, and you'd lose your job, and you need your job.”
 
Miller: [01:33:14] So, you know—being… Listening to people, validating them, but also being like really aggressively anti-bullshit. Like, “This is what I can't do.” Like, “No, I don't have a fucking drawer full of apartment keys back at the office.” Like… Because that was always the follow up, “What can you do for me? Do you have an apartment?”
 
Miller: [01:33:38] You know, being really like, real with them, of like… There’s—at the time, it was like thirty-eight thousand, now it's like sixty-six thousand people living in shelter. Every one of them wants a house as bad as you do. And so, you know—the city doesn't want to do it. They're not doing it, and they're not going to do it—until you make them. Right, that’s… Picture the Homeless is here to try to change the system but we can't do that unless people are fighting for it.
 
Miller: [01:34:09] And so, being really clear about like, you know, “Come to the office, everyone's great. We want to meet you. We want you involved.” But also like_,_ “Or just stay in your situation and feel full of anger about the fact that the cops are messing with you—that you can't do anything about it.” Right?
 
Miller: [01:34:26] And maybe it isn’t even—maybe they're not a housing campaign leader. Maybe they're just somebody who's real issue is policing, and so, alright, “Okay, come to our civil rights meeting. Like, if that's your issue, then we're working on it.” So, treating people with respect but not bullshitting them either. Really trying to push them to acknowledge and assert their leadership and the power they have.
 
Lewis: [01:34:51] I remember Tyletha giving you shit about riding around on a bike and having your pants be torn, because we didn't have much of a dress code.
 
Miller: No.
 
Lewis: It was like, “Do you.” But her saying, “No homeless persons going to go to a meeting because you look worse than they do. [Laughs] And then suddenly you had the room—housing campaign meetings full of people that had never been to Picture the Homeless before. Standing room only. People sitting on file cabinets. And then the subsequent staff meeting, and Tyletha had called you a “wisp”, that you were just a wisp, and no one is going to pay attention to you and then her saying to you, “What are you doing out there? I might need to do that.” [Laughter] And so when did you—describe a moment for me that you felt like, “Okay, like I've hit—we’re like miners—I’ve hit gold here. Something's working.”
 
Miller: [01:36:00] I don't know if I ever really felt like that. [Laughter] I mean, even when the meeting was packed, I was more concerned about getting through the agenda. Or making sure that this person didn't say this thing that they had said to me on outreach that I really didn't want them to say in the meeting, because it was horrible. Or that, you know—worrying about whether folks were bored. Or whatever interpersonal stuff, even though of course I was always really happy to see people.
 
Miller: [01:36:29] And I remember like—really like… So many of the people who I met who were amazing, and who I was really shocked that they came to a meeting, and really happy because they were wonderful, but also I didn't think that they had been really feeling what I was saying. So, and even then—so even once we had a real critical mass of amazing people, I—the only times that I really felt like I was—that I had struck gold, or that something really amazing was happening—a lot of that was really just, you know, in one on one meetings.
 
Miller: [01:37:08] I remember talking to Rogers at a coffee shop. Rogers is an amazing, long term Picture the Homeless leader and just seeing how smart he was, and how powerful, and what a great speaker and writer he was and realizing that like—we can achieve—like, “Oh my God. What can we do with this guy! What can we achieve now, with this guy on our team? And how many different kinds of audiences can this guy talk to where he'll just rock their world and he'll change how they think about things.” So, those were the moments when I felt really good.  
 
Miller: [01:37:43] The rest of the time was really worrying about feeling like, oh my God, we have to do stuff! You know, we had all these meetings but nothing's happening and these people are—these elected officials are B.S. and… Or we have this meeting with Linda Gibbs, the Commissioner of DHS and she's a jerk and she's not doing anything… So, I was mostly stressed out, more than I was feeling good about myself as an organizer, you know.
 
Miller: [01:38:10] Tyletha and you saying nice things was great. But I was also—I think that, one thing at Picture the Homeless… There was a real—I don't want to say that—I mean there was a lot of love that members had for staff. But there was very much, whether it was coming from members or coming from other staff, very much a sense of like, “We are here, and there's hundreds and hundreds of people who work in homeless services, whether they're at shelters or at DHS or at any number of places, who have jobs because people are homeless.”
 
Miller: [01:38:47] And so, “You get paid for this. You have health insurance for this. You are fucking lucky. Like, it should be this guy, should be this guy, should be this woman. And so, you better fucking do your job, right?” [Laughs] You’re not just like… This isn't just about you and screwing the man, right? It's about your accountability to members. And you never reached a point where there weren't people coming in the office being like, “Who are you? Why do you have a job?” You know, with good reason—people were really right to be critical of that.
 
Miller: [01:39:28] So, you know—when we were doing actions—great, I felt amazing. When we were doing one on one meetings, when we were doing outreach, when we were meeting people and we were developing chants. A lot of times the work would feel amazing. But the sort of bigger picture, that never really became something where I was like, “Oh yeah, I'm good. I know what I'm doing, I'm good at it.”
 
Lewis: “I got this!”
 
Miller: Yeah.
 
Lewis: [01:39:59] So you mentioned Leroy and Rogers and Wayne and who were—and Bruce, and who were some of—Jean, Selina, who was some of the members that were some of your early teachers and what did they teach you and how did they teach you?
 
Miller: Um [long pause]
 
Lewis: And, it could be those that you’ve already mentioned.  
 
Miller: [01:40:27] Yeah, I mean like Leroy was so good at outreach and Leroy was so, you know—talk about no bullshit! He was really good at cutting through all that. People like—no one could talk to Leroy and not be impressed by his power and his gravity. Even though he might, at times—his words would get twisted. He would sometimes say things wrong. But he was just really powerful and really spoke from a place of like absolute moral confidence.
 
Lewis: Who was he? Where was he staying, what's his story?
 
Miller: [01:41:01] So, Leroy, we met through Selina. Selina had been at the Help USA shelter on Wards Island, which was—and she had brought Leroy. I don't even think he came to a meeting. I think he came to that first protest where we occupied the lobby of DHS and he was like, “Oh, this is fun!” So, then he started coming to meetings. He was a very tall African-American, West Indian, Muslim, who was a Vietnam vet. Who… Just this sweet, loving, no bullshit, call you on your shit, kind of guy, who just, you know—really like… I don’t know. We got along really well. He really respected me, and I really respected him.
 
Miller: [01:41:50] And we did a lot of outreach together, and I learned a lot about how to talk to folks. And of course, there were things that he could say to other homeless people that I couldn't say, right? Because he was in this situation and he could be like, “Get off your fucking ass.” I couldn't say that to people, [smiles] or at least not in those precise words.
 
Miller: [01:42:11] But, you know—he was also like… There were things that he did that I couldn't emulate, but a lot of things he did that I could. Like his spotting when someone was being evasive or trying really hard not to do anything, and being able to sort of like, call them out on it, but also his welcomingness and his—the way he treated folks and the way he praised them. So, Leroy was a big teacher.
 
Miller: [01:42:43] Bruce was a teacher, but—not good at outreach, or at least not with me. Like, I remember going to do outreach with him once at Penn Station and he just kept not wanting to talk to people. He's like, “Oh, that guys an asshole, or that lady’s crazy.” A lot of people that I would have talked to, and in some cases later did talk to, he was just like, “No, I don’t talk to that person, that person is not worth it.”
_ _
Miller: [01:43:12] And really realizing that he was sort of like on his circuit, like there were just like guys who he hooked up with, who he was like making signals with... So, like—you know, these are people's lives I'm stepping into briefly, so don't get too… You can be friends, but you can also not be best buddies and you can remember that you're not, that you're not the same.
 
Miller: [01:43:42] I’m—I know I had a lot of other great teachers. Jackie, who as the case with many of the people, including many of the people whose names I have said, or carefully avoided saying, ended up becoming a real problem and ended up with a lot of drama that made them walk away from the organization. Sometimes not in the best of terms and with a lot of attempted scorched earth, so... But she was, you know, she was wonderful, and she would take me to soup kitchens and do outreach with me, and like, she knew where all the best food was and knew the schedules, the really complicated schedules, and she had this little piece of paper that if you looked at it you would not recognize it as human writing because it was so densely but beautifully written.
 
Miller: [01:44:33] And so… But also that she had had this amazing and fascinating life that she would tell me about and, you know—one never knows when people tell you their story how much of it is one hundred percent real. [Smiles] Not because they’re lying but because they have a narrative that has, maybe over time, evolved to be more symbolic than literal. So… But she was someone who had come from a place of relative privilege.
 
Miller: [01:45:00] And that she had had a very different life experience than me, and lots of other homeless folks, so—you know that… Hearing her talk, and her sort of like... Many, many, many, members of Picture the Homeless had different kinds of fearlessness that I did not have and that I needed, and that I learned from. And so, her ability to go to talk to people and get them to donate—go to a restaurant and get them to donate a bunch of food. Or to placate somebody who is super stressed out.
 
Miller: [01:45:31] You know, I… Charlie was a teacher to me. Charlie was somebody who came in the office and who—my instinct was honestly to be afraid of… Because he was yelling, because he was really upset... I remember like, I approached him, as I approached many Pictures the Homeless members with like—coming at him really nicely and being like, “Hey! Do you want to come to a housing meeting?” And he just gave me this whole rant about how housing was like… he, “Didn't want housing, and housing was the government trying to control him.” You know, just really angry and so like, I—my instinct was to be like, “All right, I'm never talking to you again.” But then, you know—he was amazing.
 
Miller: [01:46:08] And I learned that a lot of the times people's exteriors are defense mechanisms. That people are dealing with so much bullshit, [smiles] not just who are homeless, right? Everybody is dealing with a lot of shit in this world, and they sometimes have—the way they respond to stuff is conditioned by that, and they're trying to protect themselves and trying to like prevent you from hurting them, possibly by hurting you first.
 
Miller: [01:46:36] And so, you know—being able to really not be afraid of people, and recognizing that even when people are behaving badly, whether they're commissioners of city agencies or street homeless folks, that they—it doesn't necessarily mean they're bad people, they might be wonderful. You just have to set the terrible stuff aside and try to deal with them as people.
 
Lewis: [01:46:59] I remember Jackie having—she only wore sandals, even in the snow.
 
Miller: And sometimes plastic bags.
 
Lewis: She would put plastic bags around her feet, under the sandals, or over the sandals? And worrying about her.
 
Miller: Yeah.
 
Lewis: [01:47:22] And I remember her making a call and threatening to kidnap the dog of the E.D. of a homeless advocacy organization if they didn't sign on to something that we were doing. [Laughing] And we had to say, “You can't make calls anymore.”
 
Miller: Right, exactly. You know like it's all homeless led and directed until [laughing] some shit like that happens where you're like, “Okay, this could be a real problem for us if you keep making threats on the loved ones of people at other organizations.”
 
Lewis: [01:47:53] But I think that's an example of—it's not each _individual _leading and directing, because other members were also like, “Oh, hell no. We can't let her call anybody.” [Laughing]
 
Miller: Right.
 
Lewis: And so, it's not so much—it's kind of staff enforcing a collective vibe of,
 
Miller: Right.
 
Lewis: “We can't do that, that's crazy!”
 
Miller: Sometimes its staff enforcing it, and sometimes its members enforcing it. And sometimes it's both. Or its members saying like, “You get paid, fucking handle this. It's your job to do this because the person's going to be upset and I don't want to be upset with me. Or, you know—you'd be more effective, they won't listen to me because I'm just a homeless person, but they'll listen to you because you're staff.” Which is real, it's still real.
 
Miller: [01:48:38] It's still this thing of like—people come to Picture the Homeless with—from institutional settings, whether they're shelters or prisons or hospitals, where they see each other as the enemy, or as similarly powerless, and therefore they can treat them any type of way. But that staff have power and that staff are to be respected because there will be consequences for not. So, a lot of times people are sort of like deferring to staff in ways that might be frustrating to me, but that I understand.  
 
Lewis: [01:49:12] So, we were in the office above the Cuchifritos, on 116th.
 
Miller: Which by the way, that got old real fast. [Smiles]
 
Lewis: [Laughs]
 
Miller: It’s like my… The first day I was like, “Oh this smells so good.” Quickly metamorphed into, “This is disgusting, I hate it and I come home from work everyday stinking like pig fat [smiles] and it’s like, I'm a vegetarian and it's not kosher and it's not cool.” So that got old real fast, and I never stopped smelling it. I thought, “OK I'll get used to it.” I never really did.
 
Lewis: [01:49:45] Was there, in your experience of that office space, something about it that contributed to the organizing, either the location or the layout?
 
Miller: Yeah, I mean, the location was helpful because it was within walking distance from the Ward's Island—the M35 bus stop at 125th. So for a lot of Ward's Island folks, it was very accessible, and it was close to the six train. There were shelters in the area. It was like, the Parkview was nearby. The—what's the one on 110th? Where Captain Robinson was the… [Laughter] Anyway, there was a bunch of big shelters nearby.
 
Lewis: The Washington Hotel.
 
Miller: [01:50:36] Yeah. The Washington Hotel was on 125th. The Park View was the one on 110th. And, you know—Marcus Garvey Park, Central Park... So the location was good. We were across the hall from another community based organization that had a lot of overlap in terms of who the members were. So, a lot of times members from one organization would be active in the other, even though sometimes we found that annoying as staff, when staff from another organization is trying to get your members to come to their meeting.

Miller: [01:51:11] But also, the openness of it, the fact that folks were hanging out. The fact that folks treated it like their living room even if it was clearly an office, and not the most… I never thought it was the most comfortable space. Like, we never had the kind of comfortable chairs and couches that a lot of places had. But that folks really owned it and, you know—it was a family.
 
Miller: [01:51:33] Like, I remember at the time, there was a lot more—there was a lot of like, overlap between the civil rights and housing campaigns. Folks didn't necessarily think of themselves… Like they might have a primary organizational or campaign affiliation, but people helped each other out with actions, and sort of thought of it as like, “the work” in general. It wasn't always the case, but often it was.
 
Miller: [01:51:56] And you know, there was the… Sometimes people treated it a little too much like their living room. Like, “No. You really probably shouldn't be having sex in the bathroom. You know, maybe shouldn't be threatening people with knives [smiles] because you got in an argument.” Like…
 
Miller: [01:52:19] I remember—I don’t remember… There was a member who, at one point, I don't know if she miscarried, but she was pregnant and there was a lot of blood on the floor of the bathroom at one point, and everyone was like, freaking out. I had this intern who was picking up this woman's clothes with her bare hands and they were all bloody, and just... It got crazy at times, and I think that our ability to roll with that, and to not kick somebody out for having sex in the bathroom and not... And if somebody shows up high or drunk, not being like, “You're dead to us.” Right? We rolled with it, we didn’t...
 
Miller: [01:53:04] [Smiles] You know, I remember in 2005 I went to the World Social Forum in Brazil with Jean and Leroy and meeting somebody I don't even remember what organization it was from. It was a well-known group, at the time. It might still be… And I think they were based in Philadelphia, but I'm not sure. And they were like—you know, they said something, and it became clear from the conversation that they actually require people to be clean. That they have a lot of homeless folks who are in their organization, but they don't—you know, if they're active users they're not allowed to be part of the work. And Jean and I were just like, “What?! How does that work? [Smiles] Do they get a breathalyzer test when they walk in? How does that even, what's the point of that?”
 
Lewis: Pee in this cup. [Laughs]
 
Miller: [01:53:45] Yeah. And then, you know also like, you know—but also being like—well then again, there was that time that Jean did that public speaking engagement shitfaced. So, [laughs] I can understand why you would do that, but that just wasn't who we were.
 
Miller: [01:54:03] And any success that we achieved, as Jeff would say, “In spite of ourselves.” [Smiles] was because of them, and because we were able to you know, we sort of took it as a core value that our primary job was to make people—was to allow homeless people to become leaders and to take ownership of the work. And that everybody had the potential to do that, and everybody had something to bring to the table and it was our job to bring that out.
 
Miller: [01:54:29] And if they weren't, because of substance abuse, because of interpersonal conflict, because of anger, because of whatever, then it was our job to get around that. And to say,_ _“Okay, your behavior like this is a problem, so you need to not do that anymore. And if you can't not do that anymore, then maybe you need to take a step back.” But that was rare, that only happened a handful of times. The vast majority of it was like, “You know, so this thing happened that wasn't great. So let's make sure this doesn't happen again. Or you can't do this anymore because you've fucked it up and I don't… I can't… You can't call people anymore, because you'll threaten their dog.” [Smiles]
 
Miller: [01:55:12] You know, I… The story that I still tell, I just did this training last month for domestic violence service providers from around the country. We do this like a couple times a year now, who come to Picture the Homeless to learn from us about how we do organizing. And so, the story I still tell is about the time we were doing wheat pasting. We were going out at night to—we had designed this poster and we had printed them up in the office, that said, “Property of homeless people. Housing is a human right.”
 
Miller: [01:55:44] And we were going to go up and paste them in the windows of boarded up buildings and so, it was a civil disobedience. We had one of my friends come in and give us a little training on it, because he had done it before. And you know, members were really excited about it. It came with the risk of arrest, but it was a low risk. You know, we sort of had like a process for—somebody would go down a block ahead of time and scout for police, whatever. Somebody would be at the far end of the block and would like… I don’t remember—there was a code word they would yell out if the police turned down the block, so we could like act like we weren't vandalizing anything.  
 
Miller: [01:56:21] And then this one guy, who hadn't said much and had come from a family shelter and who was, like you know, kind of an asshole. And who also said in one meeting, “The problem—the reason the city is going to hell, and the problem with gentrification is that white people aren't afraid anymore. We need white people to be afraid because they used to be afraid to come to this neighborhood and now, they're not and now we're fucked.” So he would say things that were, you know—not politically correct and that we would probably not want an outsider, like a New York Post reporter to hear. That’s not to say that they were necessarily incorrect [laughs] but that they were—that this guy was really abrasive.
 
Miller: [01:57:03] And… And but then he was like—in the meeting and had heard us talking about it. And while we were careful to not put details out there that were sensitive if folks weren't participating in the action, he was like, “Oh well, that block that you want to go down and that block and that block, those are all blocks where I know there's a lot of drug sale activity. And I know that because I used to work that block. And so, if you show up, they might get upset because you're bringing heat, right? If you're vandalizing stuff to make a political statement they might not like that, and so they might threaten you or yell at you or worse.”
 
Miller: [01:57:43] So, he was like, “But what I can do is, I can go down the block ahead of you and talk to them and be like here's what we're doing. We are not trying to bring the heat and here's what we're doing to make sure that the police don't come. And we want to respect what you're doing and not interfere with it. So, here's how we are doing it in a way that's going to not fuck you up.”
 
Miller: [01:58:04] And so we—the action was successful, and we didn't have any problems from the police or anyone else and it was great! And he was this guy who had this skill set that ninety-nine percent of spaces would have been like, “That skill set is not only not a skill set, it's like a criminal activity that we don't want, we don't validate, or see the value in, or approve of.” But this was—Picture the Homeless was a space where he could use that knowledge and experience that he had, to achieve a productive political goal.  
 
Lewis: Transferable skills.
 
Miller: Yeah.
 
Lewis: [01:58:37] Some of those folks were interested in what we were doing, and they were like, “Yo, that's what's up.”
 
Miller: Right.
 
Lewis: “There's a whole bunch of empty buildings over there.” [Smiles]
 
Miller: Yeah. Exactly. And so…
 
Lewis: And, who got excited about it.
 
Miller: [01:58:49] Right. And these are, you know—folks who, you know—you sort of think of like who are the people that society demonizes the most and sort of sees as just pure, pure evil. Drug dealers are right at the top of the list. But they're people who are impacted by these issues and who care about them and even if we don't agree with what they're doing, many of them are in shelters, right? We would have folks who were in shelter, doing stuff that we might not have done, that we would not have chosen to do. But that didn't mean that they didn't have something to bring to the table.
 
Lewis: [01:59:26] So, we're going to wrap up soon. And I know we've stayed in the early years, and we’ve spent a lot of time talking about the vibe and stuff, and not so much about concrete actions that built the housing campaign, of which there's tons of wonderful things to talk about. But before we wrap up, wrap up, is there anything that you want to add to, about your time with Picture the Homeless at 116th Street in the early days of the housing campaign, that really stands out in your mind?
 
Miller: [02:00:19] Just that it was a tremendously exciting time, and that even if I was really stressed out by a lot of it and like, I remember I would routinely throw up the day before an action because I was so anxious, and we were working so hard and such long hours and also such like—so stressed out about it that it was really rough. But that it was also so transformative and eye opening that I always loved it, even when I hated it. Even when I was really miserable or upset, or... 
 
Miller: [02:00:53] You know, you always think that your knowledge of the scale of the oppression is such that you can’t be shocked or horrified anymore and then somebody will tell you a story where you’re like, “Holy shit!” Like, it still happens. I still hear shit and that’s like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe that that happened to you.” And so even as I’m—even as we’re constantly challenged and disturbed by what folks are dealing with that it was always such a privilege to be able to do the work and to support them in fighting back.
 
Miller: [02:01:26] That I—you know, I just remember being so excited most of the time and talking to my friends, many of whom are social workers or who are working on the same issues but in a much less transformative, social justice context and how burnt out they were and how miserable they were, and how I felt so lucky because they’d be like, “I met this person who blah blah blah blah, and oh my God it was awful.” And the, I was like, “I met this person and blah blah blah blah, and it was awful, and I was like, let’s get those motherfuckers!” Right? And so, instead of helping people accommodate and navigate and understand and function within a fucked-up system, like really helping people fix a fucked-up system.  
 
Miller: [02:02:06] And even though, you know—no matter how many victories we won, or laws we passed, or policies that we enacted or whatever, we’re still dealing with a terrible problem and we—in many cases understood that we’re not going to win everything we’re asking for and that we might not see in the next two or five or ten years see a transformed city when it comes to homelessness, that we’re still doing what we can, and helping people do what they to can to fix things.
 
Miller: [02:02:39] So, that kind of—I still feel that, and I still have that kind of privilege and feeling of honor and that was definitely something that was in the early days on 116th, felt really present and really vibrant and… Like, I was just seeing the city that I lived in but never really understood, and that I was really understanding it and even if that understanding was full of horror it was also  full of amazement and wonder at how powerful people were.
 
Lewis: Alright! Great ending!
 
Miller: Awesome.
 
END OF INTERVIEW