![]() ![]() Kids who identify as trans, or lesbian or gay, they’re no different from anybody else. Today, we have had to move kids out of a foster home, or out of a residential treatment facility because of conflict with our policy. If services didn’t join with our values, we wouldn’t place kids there. At the same time, the department in social services here was getting consultation with the Human Rights Campaign, trying to figure out how to approach policies and procedures and change policies that needed to be refreshed. The staff in our foster care and adoption unit also started showing up at Pride five years ago. There were people interested in this area of foster care and adoptions who wanted to work with the GLBTQ community to see if there was more they could do. In the last three years or so, I came into this department of Children and Family Services to take on being a manager. Talk about your vantage point working in youth social services. And I’m sure a lot hasn’t changed depending upon where you are and what situation you’re in. In a different job I was doing, I had to get people to volunteer to work on the floor of the nursing home where people went to rehab after the hospital, because finding staffing was a struggle.Ī lot has changed legally, like the national legalization of gay marriage in 2015. We ran the hotlines, helping people get to therapy and direct care and making sure they had services in the home to try to have some quality of life. I was part of the founding of OutFront Minnesota - which in 1987 had a different name, the Gay and Lesbian Community Action Council of Minnesota - because there weren’t a lot of support services at that time. Our lesbian sisters came to help their gay brothers when others wouldn’t do so. It was isolating, and making our community feel alone, but it was actually sort of unifying, too. We were sort of the pariah because of HIV. He lost a couple doctors along that way who died of it. One of my friends is still living with HIV. Friends of mine who had been diagnosed at that time were told they had two years to live. It was a scary time, because there was not a lot known about it, services weren’t available to get help. What was that like for you at the time?Īt that time, I had friends and people who I had actually dated who ended up with HIV. You mentioned arriving in the Twin Cities during the HIV and AIDS epidemic. That’s where the parade would start out from. There was sort of an area known as the gay beach, and there was a part of the beach where African-American people would gather up. It’s a different feeling now than in the 1980s. In a good year, 400,000 people come to the park. I have nothing against the parades of today, but they’re long, a huge number of people come to the park. I would never have approached the police like that in 1984, whereas I feel much more comfortable doing that today.īack in the early 1980s, how many folks would attend Pride? In these later years, I had a much different relationship with the police. Let’s work as a mental health team and change what’s happening in the community. We said hey, we have social workers, I’m a social worker. In my job life here at Ramsey County, I led a mobile crisis team for 10 years, and part of what I did was make the rounds with police. I made that leap in the late ’70s, and it was a time of HIV and AIDS awareness impacting the community hard, and a difficult journey for the next 10 years of my life. A lot more people are openly gay today than 50 years ago. It’s the 50th anniversary of Twin Cities Pride. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. Theine, a manager in Ramsey County Social Services, oversees foster care licensing for children and adults, adoptions and other family services. ![]() While social acceptance and legal rights may be more widespread than in the 1980s, Theine considers the issues confronting many GLBTQ youth to be no less profound. The parade had been canceled for two years in a row during the pandemic. Underscoring the degree to which the social landscape has changed, some 400,000 people are expected for the Ashley Rukes GLBTQ Pride Parade on Sunday down Hennepin Avenue. This weekend, during the 50th anniversary celebration of Twin Cities Pride, Theine is spending at least eight hours each day manning a Ramsey County Social Services booth in Loring Park, encouraging members of the GLBTQ community and their allies to become foster parents and open their doors to young people who may be struggling with their gender identity or who have faced rejection at home and bullying in school. “It was sort of a feeling of, ‘What kind of place did I come to?’ ” he recalled.
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