San Francisco Auto Works, a 3,000-square-foot car repair and maintenance shop with a baby-blue storefront, is hard to overlook if you stroll down Valencia Street. The shop, situated at 21st and Valencia streets in the heart of the Mission, is owned by Kimberly Sawyers, who is also hard to overlook: She’s a 38-year-old transgender auto mechanic with short pink hair.
Sawyers loves her job as a neighborhood mechanic.
“I can’t walk down any street in this neighborhood and not go, ‘you need brakes, you need to call me for an oil change’,” she says.
“It’s so fun walking around the neighborhood, because I see all my customers, and I see all the people that I work with every day, and they are all right here.”
However, it was never easy for Sawyers to live as freely as she does now, wearing her name, Kimberly, on her work uniform while running an auto mechanic shop.
Growing up in Clovis, a conservative city near Fresno, Sawyers knew she was queer at a young age.
“Lots of heavy Christianity, conservatism, you know, ‘marriage is one man, one woman’,” Sawyers recalled. “It’s like a little piece of Oklahoma fell out of the sky in the middle of California.”
When she tried to come out to her family at the age of 13, she ended up with three broken ribs and a black eye. “The highest-end use of anybody there is, is to be varsity, like football stud,” Sawyers said, recalling the hyper-conservatism she grew up in. “If you’re anything other than that, you’re kind of useless.”
Sawyers quit high school when she was 15, and started working as a car mechanic in Fresno, holding onto the one dream that she had even before she got her first car, a 1930 Ford Model A, at eight years old.
She was soon confronted by the reality that the industry she was stepping into was a “ good old boys’ club.”
“And, if you’re not that, you’re basically going to get drummed out of industry,” she said. So, she remained in the closet.
Occasionally, she would drive three hours to San Francisco to hit up bars in the Castro and North Beach. Other days, she would simply sit at Dolores Park for an afternoon. “At least I got out of Fresno for a minute,” Sawyers said.
As hard as Sawyers tried to stay closeted, the inevitable happened. Two years into running her shop, Sawyers Vintage Service, she was outed by a member at the car club she founded. As a result, she lost a large portion of her clientele and went from having 750 customers to only 200 in about a month.
She had all her savings tied up in her shop, so she couldn’t just walk away. “It just became a little like treading water, and the best we could ever do was to break even.”
She did that for another four years.
In 2018, she mustered up the courage to leave her life in Clovis behind and move to San Francisco to work as the shop foreperson at San Francisco Auto Works.
It has been a whirlwind for her ever since. When she told the owners at the time, Kevin Hrebich and Joe Pramana, that she was queer, they simply replied, “can you fix cars?”
“Their response was, ‘we don’t give a damn what you’re doing in your spare time,’” Sawyers recalled. “‘Just ‘can you do the job we want you to do?’ So, that was refreshing.”
After Sawyers had been on the job for nine months, Hrebich and Pramana announced their retirement, and they handed the ownership of the shop to Sawyers. To her, the contrast is mind-blowing; going from suffering a business collapse after being outed to, all of a sudden, having the opportunity to be back in the ownership role again.
One of the first things she did when she took over was to hang a pride flag in the window facing Valencia Street. Already, she had decided that ”if I was ever going to do it again, I was not going to allow myself to be forced to hide or conceal who I am.”
During the pandemic, she got the time to think deeply and explore her true authentic self, which she hasn’t been able to do earlier. She finally decided to take the steps to start her transition.
In June 2020, Sawyers hung a trans pride flag at the shop. She remembered that as one of the scariest moments of her life, because she was risking losing everything again. But within 10 minutes, someone poked their head in the shop and said “huh?” — in a positive tone.
“Like, wait a minute, there’s a trans mechanic? What? Can you help me with something?” Sawyers recalled that person asking. “I got another job out of the deal. It was just so incredible to me, after having lost an entire business over stuff like this.”
Sawyers recently signed a five-year lease extension for the space, despite the looming possibility that this building will be demolished to make way for a 75-foot-tall residential structure. According to Sawyers, the project has, at the very least, been put on hold. (Note: At the time of Mission Local’s 2021 story, Sawyers was still going by her deadname, the name she used prior to transitioning.)
In the future, Sawyers is hoping to open up her art and vintage car studio, located at the basement of the shop, to the public. At present, the basement is still a little dim and grubby, but it stores Sawyers’ favorites: The dusty cars she took out to Wasteland weekend, a post-apocalyptic Mad Max-themed annual desert festival; a vintage 1930 Ford Model A, the first car she ever owned; and flyers from her now-closed shop in Clovis, featuring a photo of her standing next to a 1966 FORD GT40 MK Il that she put together.
“It’s been fantastic. San Francisco is this weird little microcosm, you know. It’s our weird little bubble here,” Sawyers said. “I’m just happy to have my silly little queer life here in San Francisco, and be able to do it and stay here.”
I about cried reading this. As a transwoman two spirit person with deep roots in the Mission I’m so happy that you settled here. Also I’ve been looking for a great mechanic so I will be coming by soon.