Who is Jay Toole?

Jay Toole is a 76 year-old butch identified (well super butch identified) lesbian who battled addiction for 37 years, during which time she was homeless for over 25 years, and often lived on and under the streets of NYC and in the NYC shelters.

At the age of 13 Jay was thrown out of her family unit when she came home with a flat top hair cut and boys clothes and began living on the streets of The West Village. Jay remembers those days in the 60s ... the beatings by police and men who would drive in from New Jersey and Long Island and of course the arrests some for not having the 3 articles of female clothing on.

Jay is a Stonewall Survivor. She remembers those nights in June of 1969 and speaks about it all.

In 2000 Jay left The New York Shelter System for her first ever apartment in her own name.

In 2001 Jay graduated from The Resource Training Center to become an alcohol and substance abuse counselor with an award and prize for leadership in education. She worked at the NY LGBT Center as an out-reach worker to the City's Shelters. Jay always felt she needed to do more for the homeless LGBT community.In this time Jay was attending meetings with The Economic Justice Network working on poverty, Homelessness etc.

Some of the queers in that network decided to form an organization Queers for Economic Justice and Jay became a Co-Founder of it.... Little did Jay know what an impact on her life was about to happen. Jay was the second person hired there as the director of the shelter project where she stayed from beginning to end.
In that time Jay received the Richard L. Schiegel National Legion of Honor Award from the American University Washington DC for Emerging Activist in 2006. Honored for her service to the Transgender Community by The Sylvia Rivera Law Project in 2011 in 2014 Jay was honored by CAMBA (one of the largest homeless providers) for her continued work to make shelters safer for queers homeless. In 2017 Jay and Miss Major were honored by The National Lawyers Guild.

In May of 2019 Jay was honored by The Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS). Jay has also been honored by the Stonewall Foundation in June of 2019.Jay now does walking tours of the west village telling folks of what it was like being a young homeless butch from 1962 and up. Colleges and organizations and just folks come on these tours.