By Cassandra Merritt, Contributing Writer
At the age of twenty-four, Salem Lawhorn is a newly acquired security guard at Wiregrass Mall. He is an openly trans-male who will talk for hours to anyone who will listen.
“I like talking to people,” Lawhorn stated, and people seem to like talking to him.
Walking around the mall, it is clear Lawhorn thoroughly enjoys the freedom of his job and the people he encounters. He frequently stops, taking a break from his rounds, petting a dog, checking with a couple in a parked car, asking if they need any help, and popping his head into stores to see if they are closing early. All were appreciative of him and parted ways with a smile, including the dog.
Lawhorn is a storyteller. He has tons of them, and for him, the challenging part is narrowing down what stories to share. On this day, he talked about how he gotten stuck in a ditch on his drive to work one night. The car, which he calls Sheryl, was previously owned by his grandmother before she passed away last year. Everyone said the car was better off as scrap metal, but Lawhorn was determined to fix it up.
Lawhorn was on his way to pick up Sheryl from the repair shop after he got stuck in the ditch, and he stumbled into a mom-and-pop style hardware store looking to cool down after walking halfway to the repair shop in the wicked summer heat. As life goes, there was no air conditioning to be found in the store, but after the elderly man behind the counter heard of Lawhorn’s dilemma he offered to buy the younger man a drink.
“And I felt real bad ‘cause like he does not owe me anything. I walked into his store and didn’t buy anything. Why is he buying me a soda? If anything, I owed him, you know?” Lawhorn said, confused by the man’s generosity.
After the exchange, Lawhorn and the man talked for what felt like hours. He told the man about Sheryl, and when Lawhorn turned around to leave he called the man son. He immediately stopped and turned around. He didn’t usually call people son, so he apologized profusely.
“I don’t know why I called him that,” he said. “I do not call anybody son.”
However, without missing a beat, the elderly man spun around and said, “It’s okay granny, I don’t mind if you don’t.”
People seem to go along with Lawhorn’s personality and quirkiness no matter the situation, and in another story, he talked about his first Pride parade. He met several drag queens who took a liking to him right away.
“One of them grabbed my hand, and we were just confessing our love to each other,” he said.
Not only were the Drag Queens of the Saint Petersburg Pride parade of 2022 acceptive of Lawhorn’s friendliness, but so was the owner of an adult novelty shop he met on the last day of Pride. After accidently saying “I love you” over the phone, the owner responded happily with “I love you too, and I’ll see you when you get here.” Lawhorn arrived at the shop and talked animatedly with the sweet elderly man as his friends wandered around the shop, laughing and joking about the items they saw. The man was as open as Lawhorn and told him about his coming out story in the ‘70s.
Before the group left the shop, the man told Lawhorn to return. He said, “If I don’t recognize you next time I see you, just remind me that we fell in love Pride of 2022.”
It was one of the sweetest things Lawhorn had ever heard and planned to visit again soon.
“It was one of the best experiences of my life” Lawhorn declared, and he vowed to go to every future Pride parade and invites everybody to do the same: “If I’m the only trans person [on Mars], I will have my own god damn Pride parade . . . I fully intend to go to every single one I can after this, even if I’m poor and homeless and living out of my car, I’ll show up.”
Lawhorn continues to capture the attention of others with his friendly personality and shares his life of stories while adding to his collection of tales.
