Making Room

Making Room

Chapter 1

Lives of the Saints

I met Ali three years before he died, on November 30 of 1994. It was my first day as program director at SafeSpace, a recently opened daytime drop-­in center for homeless teens that provided food, medical care, support groups, and a range of other essential services.

In the very early hours of that morning, Tupac Shakur had been shot five times in the lobby of a Times Square recording studio, only two and a half blocks from SafeSpace. Some of our clients who spent their nights out in the streets had witnessed the artist being carted into a wailing ambulance. During lunch, anxiety buzzed among the dozen dining room tables. Would Tupac survive? Was Sean “Puffy” Combs behind the attack? Could it have been Biggie Smalls?

I had determined to spend my first few days immersing myself in the program’s activities and meeting the young people in its care. After lunch, I went downstairs to the large community room, where eight long tables were joined together in the shape of a Greek cross. I took my seat there, surrounded by a dozen kids ranging in age from their teens to early twenties, most of them black and Latino, many decked out in bulky winter coats. I introduced myself and asked if they would speak to me about their experiences at SafeSpace. What did they like? What could we improve?

One young woman wasted no time in taking up my invitation. “This place sucks!” she said, her voice shrill and electric with anger. “The staff don’t care. None of you care about us! You’re all just here for a paycheck. You talk down to us, you won’t lift a finger to help us. And the food is shit. You don’t care! None of you care!”

I looked around the room and saw some of the young people squirming in discomfort. Not wanting to respond defensively, I forced myself to remain calm and asked the young woman her name.

“Tangie,” she said.

“Tangie, I’m so sorry to hear you’ve had such negative experiences at SafeSpace,” I said softly. “I’ll see what I can do to make it better. But I’m curious, how long have you been coming here?”

“Since eleven-­thirty.”

“Eleven-­thirty today?” I asked.

“Yeah, I came in for my intake just before lunch.”

It was a few minutes past one o’clock. I didn’t know what Tangie had experienced in the ninety minutes she’d been with us, but it was hardly enough time to make an accurate assessment of SafeSpace and the dedication of its staff. More likely, I was listening to the agony born of a lifetime of trauma.

By then, I’d spent twelve years serving homeless people in soup kitchens, shelters, and residential facilities. I had come to understand that entering their lives meant opening yourself to heartbreak, to people battered by poverty, abuse, mental illness, oppression, and the inevitable rage born of it all. It also meant looking past the surface and seeking to understand more of who they were. When I listened to Tangie without rebutting, it seemed to defuse her anger. She sat attentively as other youths talked about SafeSpace’s medical care, food, showers, and laundry facilities. None were especially effusive, but they made it plain that we met some of their most urgent needs.

Afterward, reflecting on Tangie’s eruption, I thought about how the hagiographies that led me to this work had not prepared me for its reality. As a teenager and a Catholic convert, I had immersed myself in the lives of the saints. Inspiration poured through me when I read of Saint Martin of Tours cutting off half his cloak to give to a naked beggar, or Saint Francis of Assisi physically embracing a rotting-­fleshed leper. In both legends, after the saint gave aid, the person in need subsequently vanished, and the saint realized that they had actually been God. In real life, however, I quickly learned that people in distress rarely disappear for any good reason, and their needs are far too vast to be resolved with half a cloak or a hug.

Over the next month, Tangie returned to SafeSpace sporadically, until one day she vanished. She had gotten herself a boyfriend, though the word around the center was that she’d just been hooking up with him for a place to stay out of the cold. A couple days later, we heard from her friends that Tangie and her boyfriend had gotten into a huge argument. Tangie was dead. The boyfriend had killed her.

I learned little of her story in the month I knew her, but if Tangie’s experiences were similar to those of other displaced youths, there’s a good chance she would have been abused by parents struggling with poverty, addiction, mental illness, or all three. She might have been sexually assaulted while living in foster care. She could have been forced to do sex work to survive in a city that terrorized its homeless youth with its police force, whose primary offering of shelter was incarceration. In the end, her being killed was something else she shared with far too many of our clients. Tangie’s death appalled me. How could someone sizzling with so much life force be extinguished so easily? But as I look back, I realize that Tangie was one of three young people I met that day who would go on to be murdered.

After my meeting in the community room, I went downstairs to sit in on the transgender support group. As I crossed the crowded lobby, Inkera, whom I hadn’t yet met, loudly remarked that the new program director was “the sexiest white man alive, except for Jean-­Claude Van Damme.” My face grew hot. I continued on to the basement, wondering what I was getting myself into.

The group got off to a colorful start. Six transgender youths lined up along the opposite wall, and each took turns sashaying across the room like they were strutting down a runway. Whenever one of them reached me, they would strike an elegant pose and announce their chosen name—­“Inkera,” “Regine,” “Kiki,” “Coco”—­before plopping themselves down in a metal folding chair.

The last young person was different. She wore masculine clothes and no makeup, though her head was crowned by a wig. As she walked the imaginary runway, her wrists and elbows bounced about, at once gangly and elegant, and her head swayed slowly back and forth. Pausing in front of me at the end of her walk, she fixed her gaze on me with a conspiratorial smile, like we were in on some cosmic joke. Then she introduced herself in a deep, melodious voice: “My name is Ali Forney.”

When the flamboyant introductions were done, I asked the kids for their impressions of SafeSpace. “This is just about the only program in the city where we are treated with respect,” said Coco. A few years older than the others, she seemed to have appointed herself the spokeswoman. The other young people nodded in agreement, and I was relieved to hear of their approval. “But the food sucks,” Regine added. (She was correct about that. Later that week, our clearly inexperienced chef served up plates of undercooked, bloody chicken, and I realized he needed to be replaced.)

I’d come out of the closet eight years earlier and moved fluidly through many spaces of New York City’s gay world, but had only met transgender people in passing. That this was my first deep encounter speaks to the segregation the LGB community imposed upon its “T” members, how back then they were still held at arm’s length, like unwanted stepchildren. As I got to know our young transgender women, I also began to recognize how gay organizations back then often refused to include them in their advocacy.

There were persons in that room who would come to shatter my heart’s constraints. They would greatly expand my understanding of what it means to be queer and of how to be an authentic human being. At that point, I had no idea how these kids would change my life.

One afternoon during my first weeks at SafeSpace, I was summoned to the case management office. Tyrone, a thin young man, was shaking uncontrollably and unable to respond to his case manager’s questions. Afraid he might be having a seizure, we called for an ambulance. When the paramedics arrived, they recognized Tyrone was hyperventilating from a panic attack, gave him a paper bag, and instructed him to breathe into it slowly. Once he stopped shaking, he explained his situation.

Tyrone had been couch-­surfing for six weeks at various friends’ places, a common practice of teens when they first become homeless. Now he’d come to the dreaded day when no more couches would welcome him, and he was panicked at facing the night with nowhere to go. As Tyrone described his predicament, I was struck by the difference between his clothing and his demeanor. He was dressed in a baggy black sweatshirt and a tilted black baseball cap, projecting toughness like a member of the Wu-­Tang Clan—­yet he wore unmaskable terror on his face. As hard as he needed to appear to the outside world, his clothes couldn’t disguise his painful vulnerability.

Tyrone’s case manager made some calls and was able to locate a grandmother in Washington, D.C., who offered to take the young man in. I agreed to foot the bus fare, and one crisis that day was resolved.