From 2016 to 2018, when I was an educator in Los Angeles, I spent hundreds of hours driving young people between schools and shelters in my perpetually over-heated 2007 Volvo. This is how I learned that attempting to get your needs met without a parent or guardian’s support in the United States is a herculean task that would make the average adult balk. If you think it’s difficult to access an apartment in the current housing market, imagine being 15. While homelessness and poverty are urgent, receiving help is often tedious, stigmatizing, and slow.
Thus, when I walked into the Ali Forney Center’s (AFC) new space in midtown Manhattan and saw a vibrant painting by the celebrated artist Jonathan Kramer hanging above the receptionist's desk, I understood I had entered a new dimension. Beyond being a destination where queer and trans youth can access housing, the two story space is a rejoinder to the institutional abandonment that so many kids experience when they seek help. With its colorful murals and warm staff, the new location begs the question: What if supporting queer and trans young people during one of the most vulnerable moments of their lives could be efficient, humane, and even gentle?
After years of planning and fundraising, AFC opened the new, 40,000-square-foot headquarters last month. There, they will be able to provide homeless LGBTQ+ youth with an abundance of difficult-to-access resources, from four hot meals a day to gender-affirming care. Above all, the new center means young people will have a soft place to land after harrowing journeys that often require them to navigate the country, and even the world, alone.
In most ways, the Ali Forney Center’s work has been the same since its inception. The organization was founded in 2002 after Ali Forney, a gender-nonconforming youth, was murdered while doing survival street work in New York City. Forney was one of thousands of queer young people in the city who struggled to access housing. At the time, the landscape of services for LGBTQ+ youth was essentially barren. As Carl Siciliano explains, the majority of shelters were run by the Catholic church, which often embodied the same homophobic attitudes that young people were fleeing at home. Additionally, after Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s campaign to clean up Times Square — which Christina B. Hanhardt writes explicitly “took aim at LGBT youth and trans women of color” — many young people were forced to perform survival sex work in neighborhoods that were less safe for them than Times Square, which had developed a robust mutual aid network of sex workers and queer young people.
To ensure that such a tragedy never happened again, a grassroots group of organizers came together to provide six beds for LGBTQ+ young people in the basement of a progressive church. Since then, the need for housing has exploded. According to the Coalition for the Homeless, “the number of homeless New Yorkers sleeping each night in municipal shelters is now 68 percent higher than it was 10 years ago.” In August 2023 alone, the Coalition recorded 29,721 homeless children sleeping in New York City’s shelter system. This situation is more dire for queer and trans youth, who are 120% more likely to experience homelessness than their straight and cisgender peers. In 2018, a national survey conducted by the University of Chicago reported that LGBTQ+ youth represent up to 40% of the homeless youth population nationally.
From the original six-bed church basement, the Ali Forney team moved into a small space in Hell's Kitchen in 2003, and then into a 14,000-square-foot building in Chelsea in 2005. After Hurricane Sandy damaged that building beyond repair in 2012, they transitioned to a larger space in Harlem, which they grew out of within two months of arrival. The number of young people AFC serves has grown by 20% each year since 2016, and more than half of their young people now come from beyond New York City.
On the morning that I spoke to Alexander Roque, Ali Forney’s Executive Director, the center had just taken in 16 migrant youth in what Roque describes as a “full orchestration” with the city to provide them with shelter. “The promise is that as bad as things get, we will be there,” he says — a promise that Roque hopes will deepen and grow alongside the new space.
The new center is a few blocks away from the Port Authority, Penn Station, and Times Square, where young people land daily seeking AFC’s help. Upon arrival at 38th Street, they are provided with food, clean clothes, and an intake appointment that explores a young person’s past and their dreams for the future. This becomes a map that guides the services they might receive during their time with the agency, including high school education and housing.
From there, resources that are usually spread between dozens of social service agencies across the city are condensed into two floors. The first is for immediate drop-in needs, such as intake and housing, while the second provides everything from therapy and art-making workshops to doctors’ offices and classrooms.
As we walked through the space, I was in awe of the access young people will have to services. In the new center, a young person could theoretically go to therapy, receive a prescription for gender-affirming care, and pass their high school equivalency test on a single floor.
Indeed, according to Zachary Cohen, AFC’s Deputy Executive Director of Development, the new space was a chance to recalibrate physically as well as programmatically. “We really wanted to think about what those barriers to access care were and how we could remove as many as possible,” he says. Now, for example, instead of having to make an appointment to receive therapy or discuss housing options, consultations will be available on demand.
The building would be a dream come true for organizations around the country, who are doing their best to support queer and trans youth during one of the most antagonistic political moments against them in recent history. Centers like Tony’s Place in Houston, Texas and Time Out Youth in Charlotte, North Carolina provide essential resources like hot meals, clean clothes, and sexual health education to dozens of teenagers each year.
However, the Ali Forney Center is one of the only organizations in the country that is able to remain open for 24 hours a day. At the vast majority of drop-in centers, young people are forced to leave when the staff goes home. Unless they have secured a shelter bed, which can take days, this puts staff in the excruciating position of putting young people on the streets, where they may not have access to food or shelter until the center opens the next day.
In their new space, AFC is hoping to address this problem on a larger scale. Roque has worked with organizations around the world to imagine how they might be able to learn from AFC’s model in their home countries, from fundraising support to navigating state laws that make it illegal for young people to spend the night at sites not permitted as shelters. He points to the risks that young people have to face when crossing state lines— and the compounded trauma of family rejection and leaving your community at the same time.
I imagined 24-hour drop-in centers in Jackson, Mississippi, or Reno, Nevada, places that declare that food and shelter are human rights, but so is the experience of being a teenager. As I left the building, I walked past the Angela Davis Beauty Salon, a room where teenagers will be able to practice doing their makeup and get their hair done by professionals. I was reminded of Davis’ words in a 2020 interview: “Beauty is about freedom. Beauty is about liberation. It’s not just about surface physical appearance.” Thus, we might measure the level of our young people’s freedom by the amount of beauty they are able to access, touch, and feel. At the new AFC space, that beauty was ubiquitous.
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