Margaret Cho's Blog

Lyon-Martin needs your help -- on the verge of closing!

Dear Queer Super Hero:

As a San Franciscan, as a progressive, as a Korean-American/person of color, as a Queer, as a fellow Cho, I’m reaching out to you to express that Lyon-Martin Health Services, a 30-year-old free-standing LGBTQ private-nonprofit clinic in San Francisco, is on the verge of closure and needs your help.

Although we’re myspace friends, I’m not sure how much you know about Lyon-Martin because it’s a small, unassuming clinic on Market Street, helping over 2500 Queer/Transgender/Lesbian patients for over 30 years. Founded by the first same-sex married couple in San Francisco (Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin) and a collective of Queer women in 1979, we opened in order to help each other, ourselves and have never looked back. We’ve expanded what we do over time mainly due to the fact that we’ve seen the utter lack of services for transgender and gender ambiguous folk. People come from all over the Bay Area and beyond to get the T-shots or therapy they need to feel like they are who they want to be, who they truly are inside.

Back to the “verge of closure” issue. Due to a combination of financial issues, unanticipated growth in services (having taken over a lot of New Leaf’s LGBTQ Mental Health patients when they closed a few months ago), and personnel issues, we are currently at a dire crossroads. We need to make a choice that requires us to either close our doors and turn away over 2500 LGBT patients who desperately need us or find an agent of change for something miraculous – i.e., being able to raise $250,000 in the next few weeks. (Please visit our web site’s front page: lyon-martin.org for the press release on why we are on the precipice of closing.)

Again, many have never heard of Lyon-Martin Health Services even while we’ve been in their backyard because we’re tucked away on the second floor of a fairly humble building on upper Market that you may have walked by 101 times without knowing what goes on inside. We may seem like a subdued and behind-the-scenes operation but that’s for a reason – helping those who need it most when they need it most without sacrificing their dignity and their well-being because our primary patients need confidentiality, privacy, and safe health care just as much as – if not more – than non-Queer-identified folk.

And it truly is about our patients. We don’t want to abandon them because we know that if all 2500 of them had even $10 or $20 in their back pocket, they’d willingly throw it our way without a second thought. Ironically, these are the folks who are the least likely to have $10 to spare, especially in this rough economy. Thirty years later, we’ve finally been able to share our message with people who need us but right now, we need help ourselves. We need people like you to raise a ruckus, crack a joke, shout our story from the rooftops. We need agents-of-change and Queer Super Heroes to help a sister or two out.

Please help if you can in any way, shape, or form.

Thank you,

G. Cho
IT Manager
Lyon-Martin Health Services
1748 Market Street, Suite 201
San Francisco, CA 94102
(415) 901-7109

The only reason I will watch this show is because you're on it. And I'm wondering how you'll be getting along with Bristol.... :)

i wish you had them up in your myspace player, so we could put them on our profiles...