Known affectionately as 'Mama Gloria,' Gloria Allen was known for her charm school for young homeless transgender people at the Center on Halsted. Today we remember the Black, trans icon who died last June at the age of 76. | ✍️ aarondgettinger
The trans rights pioneer died last June in her home in the Town Hall Apartments for LGBTQ+ elders on Halsted Street in Lakeview East.“The most important thing that I want to say is well done, Gloria. This was a life well lived,” said Don Bell, her across-the-hall neighbor. “Let’s not mourn because she’s gone; let’s celebrate because she was here with all of us.”
“She was born in a time when it was very difficult to acknowledge yourself, as you say now, as an LGBTQ person without all the ridicule, harm, and misjudgment that went along with it,” Allen’s cousin, Gail Collier, said at the event at the Center on Halsted. “Gloria was in that era, and during that time that we grew up and I look back over her life, no matter what, she was just bubbling and beautiful.
“She didn’t have to make a dichotomy between the two, because her family of origin supported her in being an active part of her family of choice,” he continued. “She had the best of both worlds.” Allen’s claim to fame might be her charm school for trans youth, but Bell said she had a “special mission with youngsters of color, with young Black kids and young Brown kids who came from other sections of the city and were not welcomed by people who live here.”
“She and I were sitting at a table together, and Gloria was the only one inviting the kids over, because we would intercede on behalf of those kids, because the situation did not respect our relationship with the kids of color,” Bell, himself a Black native south sider, said. The highest-ranking gay elected official in Illinois history empathized with Allen’s childhood, recalling his own itinerant one in small towns outside of Air Force bases, where he was picked on for being a “sissy.”
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