Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Jeffrey Masters, and you're listening to LGBTQ and A from The Advocate magazine.

Today, I'm talking to Karina Samala. Karina is a fixture in the trans community in Los Angeles,

and she's an amazing example of the effect that a person can have working

to change the lives of people at a local level.

One example is her work with the police and sheriff's departments.

She worked with them to create policies on how to best support trans people, to really make

sure that the police are taking violence against trans people seriously.

Now, we do discuss violence and suicide. Just a heads up there, we don't get in any specific details,

but I did want to let you know in case that's something you don't want to hear.

All right, let's get to it. You'll hear Karina begin by talking about how she discovered

pageants and balls while working as a defense contractor, and then how that led directly

to her activism. Here it is. I love bowling. I got involved with the community going to the

bars. It's a bar has a sponsor of a gay team that they have. And they

compete against his other, the bars representing the bars, have a gay bowling league team. And they

compete against each other. That's where I met, Honey Carolina. He was a past empress of the

Imperial Court of Los Angeles in Hollywood. It's a nonprofit organization.

And one of the fundraising events that they do is the closet ball.

A closet ball is a contest pageant, a fundraising pageant, and the price money is a round-trip

ticket to Hawaii.

So I entered.

The closet ball is, when you're a male,

you dress up as a male. You go on stage as a male. They interview you and walk around as a

...