Josefina Suarez.

But that won’t last long.

As the story goes, the two women met at a San Francisco street fair when Suarez was just 12 or 13, and the idea of becoming a model was just a “game plan” for them, according to her mother, Gloria Suarez.

Over the next eight years, their bond grew as they met other young people they met online or by word of mouth.

In 2001, Suarez and her sister, Christina, moved from Colorado to the Bay Area, where Christina, now 35, is a high-school principal in Fremont. To the younger Suarez, the move had a special meaning: The two friends had gone to high school together in a neighborhood for gay, lesbian and non-conforming teens, which served as a home for a community of like-minded individuals.

“You kind of want to get that connection, and it brings you together. You feel good, you work more well together and have different interests,” said Christina Suarez, 32.

Both men lived at the Bay Area Pride Center, one in San Francisco and the other in Menlo Park. They both worked there, with Suarez mostly as a supervisor. That has allowed them to meet and interact in a new way, as a way to bond as a team.

“It’s been pretty amazing. It works both ways,” said Christina Suarez, who now owns a carport and art store in Menlo Park.

But the closeness of being in this community of like-minded individuals has its downside. “There’s always pressure to compete with each other. It can be very competitive. It’s a pressure to do well,” she said.

“The world is in our rearview mirror,” said David Schoenig, a local artist who volunteers at the Bay Area Pride Center. “We have moved on. They are in the future. They are here. We are still here.”

As a teen, Suarez didn’t have the privilege of traveling to such diverse cities as Austin, Texas. At the same time, she didn’t have the opportunity to meet strangers on the street.

At 16 or 17, the idea of meeting someone you don’t know at a parade or other community event got to be too much for her. “My friends and I were joking around like, ‘Well, we don’t know about that, so let’s just go to