Joe.My.God. LGBT News
Carl Siciliano, the founder of New York City’s Ali Forney Center for homeless LGBTQ youth, sends us a memory of their first Thanksgiving:
In 1994, I became the director of SafeSpace, a Times Square daytime drop-in program for homeless teens. At that time there was no safe shelter for LGBT youths in NYC, and most lived brutally dangerous lives out in the streets.
Every few months one of our LGBT youths would be killed as they struggled to survive on their own, most through sex work or drug dealing.
Ali Forney, a nonbinary black youth with a remarkable dedication to their friends in the streets, was killed in 1997. I loved Ali and was so devastated by their death that I considered quitting.
Instead, I decided to create housing where LGBT youths could find the safety and affirmation that Ali had been denied.
At first, I did this at SafeSpace, raising funds to house over 70 youths. Unfortunately the parent organization misused those funds, which led to my decision to found the Ali Forney Center.
What follows is an excerpt from my recently published memoir MAKING ROOM: Three Decades of Fighting for Beds, Belonging, and a Safe Place for LGBTQ Youth.
Remembering the Ali Forney Center’s first summer, I’d love to paint a picture of myself as some valiant, visionary hero, brimming with confidence as I led us into a bright new future. That would be a lie. I still felt utterly gut-punched by the implosion of SafeSpace.
At the height of my time there, SafeSpace had a medical clinic, mental health services, a twenty-four-hour drop-in center, six different sites where we provided housing, and an abundance of food and supplies. Now, in the first days of the Ali Forney Center, I had merely one room in a church basement.
Instead of a $5.4 million annual budget, I had a savings account with $35,000, which was dwindling each week. I wasn’t taking a salary, and I paid for all the food and supplies out of my pocket. Each day, dozens more young people sought shelter than we could accommodate.
They’d show up at our door, and we’d have to turn them away. It was gut-wrenching to watch their hope deflate as they headed back into the night.
I didn’t share my discouragement with our handful of staff. They needed to have confidence in me, so I put on a brave face. Meanwhile, each morning, I’d wake up anxious and immobilized, feeling too miserable to get out of bed.
In those first months I did all the food shopping at a Gristedes supermarket in the West Twenties. One September evening, I arrived loaded down with shopping bags and saw a new youth had joined us.
KJ was a seventeen-year-old transgender man who had not yet begun to transition. Their long, dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and they wore jeans and a blue plaid shirt. They offered to help me unpack the groceries, and we did so together quietly.
After dinner, they remained with me at the table and told me their story in the calm, thoughtful, somewhat sardonic way I would come to know as a hallmark of KJ’s personality.
The details weren’t easy to hear. KJ had lived in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn neighborhood that was home to many Russian immigrants—among them KJ, their younger siblings, and their mother.
For as long as KJ could remember, their mother had singled them out for abuse. But “things got much worse,” they said, “after Mother found Jesus and I found cock.”
She turned to religion when KJ was fourteen, and her attacks became more frequent and intense. “She’d say I was a sinner, I was dirty, I was shameful before God.”
Then, peering intently into my eyes, KJ continued. “One day last month, my mother totally lost it. She attacked me, she grabbed my hair and tore out a piece of my scalp.”
KJ pulled back their hair to reveal grotesque scabbing that hadn’t yet healed. “I had to get out of there. As far as I knew, she was going to kill me.”
I felt my throat clench with revulsion. What a corrosive force homophobia is, to make a mother turn on her child like that. “I pulled away from her, burst out the door, and was running as fast as I could down the stairs of our building, blood pouring from my wounds,” KJ continued.
“My mother stood at the top of the stairwell and screamed, ‘You’ll be back! The faggots will never take care of you!’” For the next month KJ couch-surfed, staying with friends. Things got scarier when they ran out of places to stay.
“I’d hang out at the piers, and other kids warned me about Covenant House, how they’d been attacked there. So I stayed in Central Park, in the Ramble. But it felt unsafe, too exposed. Then I decided to sleep under the boardwalk at Coney Island. That was better until September came and it began raining. So, I slept in the subway, which sucked because police were always harassing me. Then a cot opened for me here.”
I’ll never forget KJ sitting beside me at the dining room table, telling that vile story. I had been given outlines of similar accounts at SafeSpace, but I suspect that being in a deliberately queer shelter enabled this young person to confide in me with a directness and vividness I hadn’t heard before.
KJ left a deep impression on me, especially in my own worn-down state. They and the others had absorbed so much hatred and rejection, yet they continued to endure, continued to have hope, continued to rouse themselves from their cots to face each new day whatever adversities I’d gone through paled in comparison. I realized healing would come if I focused more on them and less on myself.
My husband, Raymond, helped cook the Ali Forney Center’s first Thanksgiving meal, preparing macaroni and cheese and collard greens and a tray of smoked turkey wings. We drove the food down to the church and added it to other dishes the staff had brought—roast turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pies.
Raymond can throw down in the kitchen, and the kids gleefully heaped seconds and thirds onto their plates. As we all sat together sharing the meal, KJ spoke up, saying how grateful they were that Raymond and I had joined them.
Our presence made it feel more like a home, they said, more like a family. Then they added, “This is the first Thanksgiving where I’ve ever been happy, because it’s the first where I’m allowed to be myself.”
I looked around at this newborn community of outcast kids eating side by side in a grubby church basement, and realized I, too, felt happy, something I hadn’t felt for many months.
Our resources might have been meager. Each person around that table might have been battered and bruised. But that night none of it mattered. We had each other and were making it through together. We had survived, we were alive. And for an hour or so, I felt I was maybe the luckiest man in New York City.
Excerpted from Making Room by Carl Siciliano. Copyright © 2024 by Carl Siciliano. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
When I think back to that first Thanksgiving, I remember how small and precarious our new endeavor felt. There was no government funding available to house LGBTQ+ youths, and even more challenging, very little awareness within our broader community of the crisis of homelessness faced by so many of our youths.
Things have certainly changed over the past 22 years, and Joe Jervis and many JoeMyGod readers were essential to the transformation. By giving me a platform to communicate our struggles to protect and house our abandoned teens, Joe was invaluable in helping awaken the LGBTQ community to their plight. And the generosity of so many of you greatly increased our capacity to offer help.
This Thanksgiving the Ali Forney Center will be feeding over 200 youths, in over a dozen housing sites and a drop-in center scattered across Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. I am so grateful for our growth, which exceeded anything I dared to dream of on that first holiday so many years ago.
But the kids continue to show up battered and bruised. Tragically, the hostilities marshalled against them by too many political and religious leaders have only increased. It is a frightening time to be an LGBTQ youth provider, but we must be there for our youths in good times and bad.
I have no doubt that we will have a more urgent need to rely on our community’s help and generosity in the next four years. But I also have no doubt that the JoeMyGod community will have our back. I wish each of you a happy and peaceful holiday season.
With love and gratitude,
Carl Siciliano
Donate to the Ali Forney Center here.
Get Carl’s memoir here.