At 18 and trans, this Phoenix resident was on his own—but today, he’s helping other LGBTQ+ youth find community

When he needed it most, Elliot Gilreath found love and support at a local LGBTQ+ youth center. Now, he’s paying it forward to the next generation.

Elliot Gilreath discovered one-n-ten through a friend when he was in high school. 

“I needed them in that moment,” the Phoenix resident said. “I just needed people around me [for whom] my gender wasn’t even going to come into the conversation. There wasn’t going to be any ostracization.”

“Eventually, I just started realizing how much that community valued me.”

One-n-ten is a Phoenix-based nonprofit that provides safe spaces, support, and resources for LGBTQ+ youth in Arizona.

Gilreath, 20, is currently a member of the one-n-ten Advisory Council. But for the past few years, the organization has been the place where he learned critical “adulting” skills, explored creative projects, and developed leadership abilities.

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“I just started feeling so passionate about the space and the integrity of what one-n-ten was doing for me…and I knew I was capable,” Gilreath said. “I started running programs where I would submit a proposal to their staff and then I’d run it.” 

Finding acceptance, support, and encouragement to be a leader at one-n-ten was a turning point, Gilreath said, compared to how he felt in the confusing and challenging years of his youth. 

“There was a deep cloud of—well, everything you are is not allowed,” he said. 

Growing up 

On his 18th birthday, Gilreath moved out of the home he shared with his mother and three siblings near Phoenix. 

“It felt like a miracle,” he told The Copper Courier in an interview. “I felt so blessed to be safe and to get my life back.”

Ever since Gilreath had begun to question his gender identity a few years before, he says he had been met with “a lot of pushback. My whole world started crumbling.”

“Every aspect of who I was supposed to be, to who I surround myself with, to how I like to wear my clothes—all of those things started to feel questioned.”

Even at the age of 6, he said, he’d known he was queer—but he didn’t know how to explain or work through his feelings. 

“I was told that there’s a boy and a girl and those are the perceptions of gender. And you pick one…and you check all the boxes. And I was really good at it,” he said. “It was like ‘drag.’ That’s kind of how I almost understand the performance of my gender identity for so many years.”

By his senior year of high school, Gilreath said he’d started to suffer from “incredibly painful and uncomfortable, and just mentally gruesome gender dysphoria.” Gender dysphoria refers to psychological unease and distress that can happen when the sex you were assigned at birth doesn’t align with the gender you feel.

It was during that senior year when he realized, “I know that being masculine-presenting feels empowering and feels beautiful and feels aligned with me. I’m going to do everything I can to get myself support for the dysphoria.”

Finding information and support helped Gilreath develop the language he now feels he’d been missing during most of his childhood years. 

“Once you have the language for it and you understand, like, ‘Oh—I’m trans’…it just starts to feel inescapable until you’re able to make that alignment and support your body.”

When he was 18, Gilreath began hormone therapy, which involved testosterone injections. He calls it “lifesaving health care.” 

“When I started testosterone, it was the first time in my life that I didn’t feel depressed, that I didn’t feel anxious. That I was just feeling like a normal person.”

Since then, Gilreath has transitioned to the gender that he identifies with—and he’s still never returned home.

“My family was not really understanding…they were thinking that I was confused, or somehow I was expressing something greater than them and it was a threat,” he said.

Today, he is proudly living in what he describes as an historic apartment in Phoenix, where he works at the Phoenix Art Museum as a “lifeguard for the art”—aka, gallery attendant.  

Gilreath said he hopes to train to become an “art preparator,” installing and caring for art in museums and galleries. He’s also applying for a grant to install an art vending machine in the one-n-ten youth center, which would sell his postcard-size ‘zines’—self-published booklets featuring his photography and graphic design.

Paying it Forward

Gilreath said one-n-ten offered him community and support at a time when he needed it most, and today he’s able to look back on his childhood as a place to build from.

“All of these things have led to nothing but gratitude,” he says.”I just want to help other youth and give them a dose of light.”

He said he was thrilled to be able to speak at one-n-ten’s annual fundraiser this year. The event, which marked the organization’s 30th anniversary and honored Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, raised $1.3 million and featured a few of the group’s young people telling their stories.

Gilreath shared how he’d found one-n-ten, then read a poem he’d written, entitled “My community is.” 

“And I wanted the people in that room, in that event, to feel with the same cadence—how you feel to receive this type of love and this type of support,” he said.

Though such moments of leadership may be new to this young adult, his willingness to be an advocate has remained constant throughout his life. 

“I’ve always been a loud advocate for communities that get ostracized,” he said. “I just think they’re misunderstood.”

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