Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans

Carl Siciliano

249 Carl Siciliano Recent estimates put the number of homeless gay youth in America at over 600,000. Ali Forney was one of them. From age thirteen until his murder when he was twenty-two, Forney lived as a homeless person in New York City. Carl Siciliano still remembers the day he met Ali. It was the day he took over as director of Safe Space, a drop-in center in Times Square whose clientele included many gay kids. “Ali was such a loving person. His gift was his heart.” Siciliano remembers the frustration of trying to get money to shelter homeless youth like Ali. And he remembers Ali’s funeral. “More than a hundred people from all over the city showed up.” It was in the wake of such tragedies that Siciliano founded the agency that bears Forney’s name. The Ali Forney Center provides emergency and transitional housing and support to homeless LGBTQ youth ages sixteen to twenty-four. The idea is to help these young adults get off the streets so that they can learn to lead healthy, independent lives. Since its founding in 2002, AFC has grown to become the largest and most comprehensive service provider for LGBTQ youth in the country. For his work, Siciliano has been recognized with numerous awards, including the New York City AntiViolence Project’s Courage Award. OUT magazine named him on its list of one hundred outstanding gay achievers. “Don’t call me a saint,” Siciliano says the day I meet him. “That’s how you write me off.” He’s quoting Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and the person he most credits with inspiring his passion for social justice work. He and I are seated around the dining table in one of the Ali Forney Center’s bright, attractive, transitional-housing apartments. One of several AFC sites in the city, it is located on Madison Avenue’s Upper East Side, not the kind of address one might associate with homeless youth. But that’s the point. Siciliano’s vision is to create homey, loving spaces that send these kids a message about themselves that is different from the one they’ve gotten from their families , on the streets, and, all too often, from the giant agencies that try to help him. The fight for these kids, he says, is about “being allowed to be open about who they are and not treated as horrible second-class citizens . When I started working with homeless youth, I was shocked. Their options were sad and degrading.” At the time Ali Forney was murdered in 1997, services for homeless gay youth were limited to places like Covenant House. Described as “the Wal-Mart of homeless youth services” by Kai Wright in Drifting toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay, and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York, Covenant House had grown to become the largest privately funded agency for runaway youth. “That kind of model of service for homeless youth is problematic ,” Siciliano tells me. “It was especially challenging for gay kids.” He points to the huge institutional setting and a staff that was not always adequately trained to be responsive to the particular needs of queer kids. “Gay kids would be seen as the problem, as too flamboyant and therefore provoking everyone else.” In the wake of an institutional culture that “froze in their presence,” gay runaways often remained on the streets, where they were susceptible to prostitution, HIV infection, and drug addiction. “When I was a teenager in the late seventies and early eighties, there was no sense that I could come out,” Siciliano says. “I saw Boys in the Band once and was terrified. In those days, there was this real sense of isolation. Now we have a society where it’s more unbearable to be in the closet. Ten times as many people under the age of seventeen are coming out now than ten years ago. Most of these kids are taking a very bold stance by saying who they are while nevertheless remaining in a state of complete dependence upon adult society to 250 Car l Siciliano 251 Car l Siciliano protect them. That’s where things break down. There is still a repugnance about homosexuality in so many communities. These kids’ honesty invites a tremendous amount of brutality upon them.” Siciliano’s heritage is Italian and Slavic, which, he says, “explains...