The importance of building community and a safe spaces for queer people to get beautified.
Before Ninth Chapter, Ayesha experienced some of the pitfalls that I’ve experienced as a queer person going to barbershops. “I worked in an all-male barbershop in the city,” she says. “A great group of guys, but I still ran into the same issues, like homophobia and my gay clients being marginalized. When I decided to leave, I started at a single shop with a single chair, and then it just grew from there.
“At Ninth Chapter we did events and parties, so that’s why I got this space,” Ayesha says. “There is no gay, black and Latino staple place that we can go. We can go to Weho [West Hollywood] and Downtown [Los Angeles] sometimes, but there is no place where we can come and be unapologetically ourselves — whether we’re getting a haircut or not.”“An all-women shop was just leaps and bounds away from my experience in barbershops,” Siara, one of Ayesha’s clients tells.
But what matters most to Ayesha is the doors she’s been able to open for other queer barbers, who often find it difficult to navigate working in a traditional barber shop. “[It makes me happy], seeing the barbers relishing in the fact that they had a place to go to where they felt comfortable all day.”
“On the day that we had our name-change workshop, I started calling out names, and it turns out the first 10 people were white, and the last 10 were people of color,” Madin tells“So I was like, ‘Okay, I’m just going to flip this upside down, because this is a black and brown space, and we’re going to go first because ya’ll go first everywhere else.’ After that, a lot of the white folks left.”in a trailer to provide haircuts and a safe space for youth in areas where homophobia is more present.
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