By Beth Greenfield
Gay social concerns, it seems, are as trend-driven as circuit DJs, sneaker styles or Bravo shows. And right now, says Carl Siciliano, executive director of the Ali Forney Center for homeless gay teens, the hottest LGBT issues are gay marriage and crystal-meth abuse. Meanwhile, the issue of gay kids who get kicked out of their homes and live on the streets—with many winding up using drugs, prostituting themselves, contracting HIV and getting brutalized—is receiving scant attention.
“It just doesn’t seem to be on anybody’s radar,” says Siciliano, who founded the shelter and counseling facility in June of 2002. “But I feel that it’s up to us, the gay community, to help these gay kids get their lives back together.” The shelter currently has 12 beds split between two locations, one in Harlem and the other in Hell’s Kitchen. Both spots are perpetually full and have a waiting list of 110, so Siciliano hopes to bring the number of beds up to 18, in part through this week’s Luscious 2004 benefit, whose lineup of performers includes Daphne Rubin-Vega and Ari Gold. The Ali Forney Center, named after a young gay man who was murdered on the streets of Manhattan in 1997, survives on a cobbled-together budget—$900,000 for the coming year—of public and private funding. And it needs more help if it is to put a dent in the soaring problem of homeless gay youth: 25 percent of LGBT teens are rejected by their families after coming out, and they make up an estimated 40 percent of the total homeless youth population.
A 21-year-old beauty, Karen Davis (not her real name) is a part of that statistic. An Ali Forney resident for three months and an M-to-F transsexual, she was kicked out of her house in Philadelphia at 16 when her mother noticed her son was turning into a young woman. “She would say, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you? You look like a faggot!’” Davis recalls. After staying with a friend to finish high school, she came to New York to become a dancer; but she wound up supporting herself through prostitution.
Siciliano explains that living as an openly queer person at such a young age can be risky business. “In some ways these kids are the victims of the gay movement,” he says. “Kids are much more emboldened to come out, but we gay adults haven’t thought through the ramifications of that: They’re coming out in a state of utter economic dependence on parents who may or may not accept them.” When they’re rejected, teens are often beaten of raped (a dismally common fate for lesbians) by family members before forging into the streets. And for many gay grown-ups, Siciliano surmises, this is a reality too brutal to face. “I think that these kids embody everybody’s worst fears,” he says. In fact, he adds, it could be a reason why the community has been reluctant to embrace the issue. “The big gay-advocacy groups like the Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force also need to step in,” he adds. “I don’t see significant change happening until they do.”
Siciliano, 39, joined the struggle through fate: As a teenage Catholic Worker activist growing up in Connecticut, he decided to join a nearby monastery, and worked in its homeless shelter. That led him to the Catholic Worker shelter in NYC, and then to other local homeless organizations, where he focused on making teen programs more gay friendly. “The dynamic in the shelter system is that, if you’re masculine or ‘on the DL [down-low, or closeted],’ you won’t have trouble. A gay boy who’s effeminate will have some trouble. And if you’re trans, you’ll have an awful lot of trouble.” He founded the Ali Forney Center—one of a handful of such programs nationwide—after seeing too many gay kids murdered. It began with just a few beds at the Metropolitan Community Church before moving into its current spaces and hiring a staff of 10; volunteers do tasks from cooking to cleaning. Folks aged 16 to 24 can stay for 30 days; that term can extend to six months if they’ll work on a long-range housing and employment plan.
One resident, Terry, 21, is an example of the program’s success. A soft-spoken, sassy Staten Islander, he arrived not long after his grandmother kicked him out. “I had to turn tricks,” he admits. Now, as a nursing student and Ali Forney protégé, he gets to map a very different route to survival.
TIME OUT NEW YORK, June 10–17, 2004