“You want a popsicle?”
Kylee Ham greets two men sitting on a bench in Piatt Park in Cincinnati, despite the summer heat. They accept; one gets a blue popsicle and the other takes an orange one.
A registered nurse originally from Texas, Ham works at University of Cincinnati Medical Center’s emergency department. She is also the president of the Registered Nurses Association.
These days at age 41, Ham wears her progressive union politics on her sleeve, but she grew up in a conservative household. She started questioning the values of her upbringing as early as high school, but things changed in her 20s: She was waiting tables and witnessed her friends get detained in an immigration raid.
“I was cutting lemons in the back, and the bartender came back there and started shouting, ‘The police are here!’ ” Ham said. “They kind of came through the back kitchen, and they started pulling people out through the back parking lot and arresting them.”
No one knew what to do, who to call, where to go as the kitchen staff were forced into a van. Ham never saw most of those workers again.
“They were my friends,” Ham said. ”That was kind of a big shift for me, in the way I looked at things. And that weekend, I think it was two days later, was the first protest I ever went to for the raids that happened.”
Ham’s father, Vincent Belanger, died of AIDS-related complications when she was 8 years old. Years later, she learned her father was either gay or bisexual.
“His friend sent me his HIV blanket square,” Ham said, referring to the AIDS Memorial Quilt, formerly on display in Washington, D.C., “and it was his name, Vinny, in all rainbow colors.”
Her mother later remarried a man who ran sound at an evangelical church in Texas, where her mother still lives.
“I was raised in a very — once she remarried — a very conservative Christian household that has grown increasingly conservative,” Ham said.
Ham’s relationship with her mother has been strained over the years as Ham’s values have shifted. They aren’t currently speaking. She accepts that religion is an important piece of people’s lives, but doesn’t accept that it is the sole source of morality.
“Why are you putting your beliefs on me?” Ham said. “If you don't believe in gay marriage, then don't marry somebody of the same sex. That's kind of how I started looking at things.”
Her views didn’t change all at once, but over time she has become more confident in her own outlook and what it means for how she lives her life.
“It was more of that freedom of getting comfortable with myself, getting comfortable with what I believe and why I believe what I believe, and just being able to voice that,” Ham said.
Her patients, her neighbors
Ham is a regular at Piatt Park certain weekends of the month, where mutual aid coalitions she belongs to lead food distributions and hygiene clinics. As she walks through the urban park in downtown Cincinnati, she greets people sitting on brown benches punctuated with metal dividers. Some of the people there are experiencing homelessness, and the dividers keep them from lying down on the benches, she said.
Ham expressed frustration that institutions are unwilling to dedicate resources to solving foundational problems, such as accessible housing, instead focusing on the downwind effects of the problems. She admitted she doesn’t have long-term fixes.
“But I can at least bring meals here and take care of wounds on their feet, or get them referred to a higher level of care, try to talk them into going to the ER if I feel like it's something urgent,” she said. “I can hook them up with some of the clinics and get their medications refilled.”
Even if they are “Band-Aids,” she believes they add up to something meaningful: respect and kindness that can catch on.
“What I currently believe is that people are deserving of just dignity and compassion, and that there are fundamental rights that every human being should be afforded,” Ham said. “I'm not talking in a legal justice constitutional sense. I am talking your basic, fundamental Maslow's hierarchy of needs: food, shelter, clothing, healthcare. I truly believe those are the rights that everybody should have.”
It is her goal in so many areas of her life.
“Whether you're doing mutual aid work, whether you're fighting for a better union contract, [it’s] solidarity,” she said. “The foundation of that is love for other people and treating them with respect and dignity and love, and acting with solidarity, no matter what capacity you're acting in, I think is how we achieve the things that make us better people.”
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