After Narrowly Surviving the LA Wildfires, This Recovery Center Has Become a Trans Refuge
Raging wildfires and cuts from the Trump administration haven’t stopped Serenity House from providing a haven for its LGBTQ patients.
Jireh Deng Photos by Jireh Deng
Serenity House had just successfully filled all 18 of its beds when the Eaton fire erupted on January 7.
As one of Los Angeles County’s only addiction treatment facilities specializing in serving transgender, gender nonconforming and intersex patients, the stakes of losing Serenity House to the wildfire were high. Miraculously, the building survived, even as clients and staff at two recovery sites next door were forced to evacuate — a fallen tree hit Start House, and the Art House burned down.
The LA fires were just the latest challenge in the uphill battle faced by Bill Tarkunian, chief strategy officer at the LA Centers for Alcohol and Drug Abuse (CADA), in creating Serenity House in August 2024. First, Tarkunian had to convince the larger addiction treatment providers that the trans community needed a space to address the community’s specific needs. Many of his colleagues had believed the trans community — struggling with higher rates of substance use associated with discrimination and trauma—was not treatable because of misperceptions related to homelessness and survival sex work.
“We dispel any notions that somehow the community is less redeemable,” Tarkunian says of Serenity Houses’s clients, who have thrived. Many of the staff members at Serenity House are former graduates of other LGBTQ sobriety support programs through CADA.
Since opening, Tarkunian has continued to keep the residential facility full, with demand sometimes exceeding available beds. Community members also rallied to help raise thousands of dollars for CADA’s damaged buildings through a benefit comedy show featuring Margaret Cho in March.
But the challenges haven’t eased up.
LA County announced it would terminate contracts with dozens of HIV prevention organizations in May, including CADA’s testing and outreach to the unhoused population on Skid Row, following the Trump administration’s elimination of many HIV prevention grants and funding earlier this year — some of which have now been restored following congressional action.
Many of the residents at Serenity House themselves have lived on the street, experiencing trauma in the form of poverty, sexual assault and anti-trans hate, which led some to substance abuse. But Tarkunian sees his clients not as victims, but survivors and fighters in a world and political moment increasingly hostile toward transgender people.
“If you can somehow access the skill set that kept you alive and the ability to survive on these mean streets with everything going against you … you [can’t] fail,” Tarkunian says. Many of his clients have completed the recovery program and moved onto independent living.
Residents at Serenity House attend daily facilitated group meetings to share stories about their addiction. For many, it’s an important part of the journey of acknowledging their past and moving forward. I sat down with six residents of Serenity House to discuss their accounts of surviving the Eaton fire and how the recovery center has become an essential safe harbor for their recovery.
Please note that some accounts below detail sexual assault.
“We lost everything,” says 30-year-old Gigi Farmer, who was living at the Art House when it burned down. Although she evacuated from the fire unscathed, Farmer found herself falling back into using crystal meth after she was discharged. That’s when she returned and sought help with Serenity House.
“I’ve gone to about three or four different rehabs in my lifetime,” Farmer says. “At each one of them before this one, I was the only transgender person that was there.” At Serenity House, she’s been able to find community and safety in not having to explain her experience to her peers.
“Being trans, it’s hard,” says Farmer, who moved to Los Angeles six years ago from Arkansas. The rejection from her conservative community and parents hit her hard when her addiction began seven years ago. “It was traumatic and was constantly driving me towards using more and more and more to escape from reality.”
At Serenity House, she’s finally realizing parts of her gender transition that were previously inaccessible. “They’ve helped me schedule an appointment with electrolysis, and they’re helping with my name and gender-marker change,” Farmer says. The staff also drives her to all of her important appointments. “I look like a totally different person now than I did when I first got here.”
“The fires had started when I was on the street,” says 30-year-old Arianna Taylor, who was in and out of recovery homes throughout November and December. “It was so windy, and I was trying to stay sober. I had nowhere to go.”
But the week the fires started, Taylor was able to get in touch with one of the staff members at Serenity House and was told a bed was waiting for her. She says it felt like a miracle.
“I didn’t think I was ever gonna get let back into society,” Taylor says of being homeless for three years and getting arrested for drunkenness and cocaine use. ”I thought I was gonna die out there.”
The LA fires rekindled Taylor’s childhood memory of seeing the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski fire burn large swaths of the White Mountain Apache reservation, where she grew up in Arizona. She now feels spiritually charged as she enters her third month of sobriety.
“There’s so much strength and resilience and spiritual wealth here with us, here at the Serenity House,” Taylor says, in contrast to the days she had to steal food to feed herself.
The fires were terrifying for Lynn Matthews, who was born in Pasadena, Calif., and had never experienced a natural disaster before.
“It was a real eye-opener to what is a gift, and that gift is just having somewhere to be stable,” the 25-year-old says. Matthews grew up with instability, experiencing homelessness and sexual abuse as a child in the foster care system when her mom struggled with drug use and her father was incarcerated.
As an adult, Matthews juggled odd jobs in retail and security, but battled with depression, eventually falling down a habit of using weed, alcohol and meth to cope with her mental health struggles at age 22.
“It was an escape, until that escape became more dangerous than reality,” Matthews says of her drug use, which she adds was starting to warp her perception of reality. “You start hallucinating, and you think everything is after you.”
Matthews turned to sex work to make ends meet, sometimes compromising her safety when men would lock her in cars or hotel rooms.
“Other trans girls are doing it, and they actually were able to make the money,” Matthews says. “My thought process was, I’m gonna just get enough for a room every day. But it never worked.”
She reached a point that living off and on the streets became unsustainable and she sought help at addiction treatment centers. Before, Matthews had celebrated her weight loss when she was addicted to meth. But now, she says she’s been on a journey toward loving herself.
“I don’t find it necessary anymore,” referring to previously trying to dress her body to look more desirable. “I’m good enough. I started recently wearing my natural hair out, just loving me.”
“It was really a miracle,” Seraiyeh Versai says of the survival of Serenity House. “This space is definitely needed. We just got this program, we just got this house.”
Most of the staff at Serenity House are part of the LGBTQ community — so Versai feels the freedom to be vulnerable with strangers. “It is a big step forward to really catering towards people who have been in violence,” the 23-year-old says.
It’s here, she says, that she doesn’t have to worry about the hyper-sexualization of trans women, ignorance or hate. “I always feared for my life, from the people that had the same skin color as me, or fear from the police,” Versai says. She grew up in South LA and began living in shelters at 17, after facing rejection from her family and community.
Versai began binge drinking after the death of her father. By processing her grief, Versai is rediscovering her creative inspiration. Two years ago, she directed and edited a thriller-horror series that premiered at the LA LGBTQ Center. Currently, she’s developing a play with other women in the house. “My dream is to live on the movie lots,” she says of her aspirations to become a Hollywood filmmaker.
In the rush to evacuate from the Eaton fire that night, Brandon Jesseil Lopez hit his head, not seeing a door in front of him in the darkness of the power outage. “It was chaotic because I’ve never seen a fire,” Lopez says, in Spanish, as another resident translates. “I could only grab a blanket and my legal documents.”
For two years, Lopez has been living in the United States under asylum after escaping sex trafficking in his home country of Honduras.
“I was crossing mountains and valleys to get here,” says the 26-year-old. It was the sexual trauma he experienced as a child, sold as a girl, that led to his addiction to drugs. “Since I was 12, I was self-medicating because of the trauma of being raped for so long.”
It wasn’t easy getting here. While crossing borders, Lopez was captured by a Mexican gang and witnessed murders that left him with PTSD. It was through a migrant advocacy network that Lopez was connected to legal representation and referred to Serenity House for addiction recovery resources.
Since he was 4, Lopez says he’s known he is trans, but he had to wear dresses and grow long hair to protect himself and pretend to be a woman. At Serenity House, he’s finally found freedom as a trans man. “I just get to be myself, I’m not escaping no more,” Lopez said. “I am my authentic self.”
It was Aziza Shabbaz’s first time in a recovery center when she arrived at Serenity House a month after the wildfires broke out. Other places had turned the 28-year-old away because they didn’t consider her reliance on marijuana as needing treatment.
“They didn’t try to make me feel like my addiction was less important,” Shabbaz says of Serenity House’s staff, who welcomed her. “My addiction to marijuana was ruining my life. It was ruining my security when it came to housing and jobs. It was messing up my relationships with people.”
At Serenity House, Shabbaz says she’s being equipped with the tools to self-regulate in her sobriety. “I’m learning different ways of processing my emotions,” she says. She feels more prepared to tackle life challenges when she returns to performing drag full-time in LA’s nightlife.
Shabbaz moved to LA during the pandemic from Rochester, N.Y. Unlike other recovery centers, she has access to her phone during the day and can contact her friends and girlfriend. “I don’t think that I would have been able to get halfway to where I am now if I was in another treatment center,” she says. She adds that having access to her tight-knit support system has been essential for her road to recovery.
Jireh (they/them) is a queer Asian American writer and filmmaker born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley. Their words on L.A. appear in The Guardian, The Washington Post, Teen Vogue, NPR, The L.A. Times and more. They co-direct the Asian American Journalists Association LGBTQIA+ affinity group and serve as a national board representative for its L.A. chapter.
