Carl Siciliano's Intense Faith Led Him to Start the World's First Major Shelter for Homeless Queer Youth
The hunky altruist had a shocking spiritual episode at age 15—which led, eventually, to his founding of NYC's Ali Forney Center, which has become an LGBTQ youth shelter model worldwide.
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Happy Pride Month, Caftaners! I love the Pride vibe in June in NYC—the gorgeous weather has everyone dressing sluttishly and a million parties and events are taking place, or about to. What is sexier than boarding the subway during Pride weekend when a lot of thotty queens from all over the city (and country and world, actually) are running from shindig to shindig being especially queeny, horny and thotty? I’m here for it!
I’m also here for Challengers—did you see it?
I can’t remember the last time I saw such a sexy movie with so little actual sex in it. I didn’t even know that the guy who plays the hot jerk-loser was the same guy who played Prince Charles recently on The Crown! (Unlike my friends I saw the movie with, I thought he, not the ginger-blonde guy, was the hot one. But I’ve always gone for dark-featured guys.)
I love this month’s interview. It’s with Carl Siciliano, the founder of NYC’s Ali Forney Center, which, starting in 2002, has basically pioneered the model of supportive housing for queer and trans youth who’ve been kicked out of their homes by rejecting families or are otherwise unhoused. Carl has an incredible new memoir out about the experience called Making Room: Three Decades of Fighting for Beds, Belonging and a Safe Place for LGBTQ Youth.
We’ve known each other a while and he asked me to read and blurb it, and this is what I wrote:
"A gut-wrenchingly poignant real-life saga of how one gay man's radical commitment to the teachings of Christ sparked a sea change in how young, abandoned LGBTQ youth, most of them poor and of color, are treated and supported, in New York City and beyond. Making Room is almost novel-like in its rich swirl of events and vibrant cast of characters who appear, disappear and often, triumphantly, reemerge. Carl Siciliano has written an unputdownable account of what it looks like when compassion is harnessed to funding and policy."
That’s pretty much how I feel about the book! I’ve always been fascinated by Carl because his work has always been driven by deeply left-wing Catholic beliefs, and it wasn’t even until this interview that I learned that Carl wasn’t even raised Catholic, despite being Italian. Rather, he had a spiritual episode at 15 that ended up charting the course of his whole life, as you’ll see.
But I really hope you’ll buy and read Carl’s book (and tell others about it!), because it’s not only really propulsively and vividly written (Carl told me he wrote it all himself) and very worthy of a summer vacation read, it’s also a sobering reminder that until AFC started, even amid an overall advancement in gay rights and acceptance in the nineties and early 00s, homeless queer youth had next to nowhere safe they could go, and—more so—nobody much cared, until they were made to by Carl and a key few other folks in NYC.
But I think the book is most interesting to me, as someone who was raised a very bored and indifferent Catholic, in terms of how much Carl’s really deep, raw faith and belief that God is love drove the founding and expansion of the Ali Forney Center, which Carl named after a nonbinary homeless queer youth he was particularly close to who ultimately was killed on the streets before AFC opened. I imagine that’s where Carl found the strength (for lack of a better word) to endure the intermittent indignities and abuse he took from his often traumatized young clients and his rich gay donors alike—I’m really not sure I could. Carl, however, seemed to be able to draw from a profound depth of God-given patience in the nearly 20 years he was the head of AFC.
I also like this interview because Carl talks so frankly about the role that his own rather legendary hunkiness played in his building of AFC, both with the kids and with donors. I find that someone who can be reflective and analytical about their good looks is more interesting than someone who, perhaps out of an understandable modesty, rebuffs the claim. And Carl also talks a lot about the connection between religious fervor and sex that has animated much of his life. In all, Carl is an interesting hybrid of knowing-how-to-get-things done shrewdness and a wide-eyed sense of wonder and worshipfulness. (He also has an endearingly goofy laugh.) I hope that comes through!
Please buy Carl’s book, $15,000 of his advance on he’s donating to AFC. (I also forgot to mention that the book contains vivid accounts of AFC’s dalliances with Lady Gaga, Madonna and Bea Arthur.) And if you don’t already support Caftan at $5/month—for which I am, as ever, grateful—please consider doing so. I desperately want to push out Caftan interviews and other stuff at the rate of one a week rather than roughly one a month. My vision is to scale this up into a minimagazine for older gay men, and the more paid support for Caftan I get, the more I can pursue that. That’s my dream! Help me, please! Until then, have a good Pride and I’ll see you in July (if not sooner), for which I’ve already set up an interview with someone whose comic and satirical brilliance caught my reader’s eye 32 long years ago and whom I’d forgotten completely about until, via a bookstore shelf, they popped up in my life again recently. It’s the kind of one-chance-in-a-million comeback stories that I love, and I guess once I actually chat up this guy come July, I’ll learn what more he’s got to say. (Was that all sufficiently coy and cryptic?)
Now here’s Ali Forney Center founder Carl Siciliano, whom I interviewed on May 29, the afternoon before his book launch party at AFC’s new Trans Mansion in Harlem.
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Tim: Carl, thanks so much for talking today. So, um, you have a place in the city and in the Catskills, right?
Carl: Only in the Catskills, alongside the Neversink River. We don't have a place in the city. We moved up here in 2007. For years of my Ali Forney life, I drove four hours a day, in and then out of the city. But I live with my husband, Raymond, who's a retired facilities manager for law firms, and my parrots Milo and Sweetie in the bedroom and Raymond's parrots JJ and Juan Pablo in the living room. If you're too loud, JJ will say "Shut up!" and if you say something funny, he'll go "Haha." We also have our dog, Maxwell, and our beloved pig, Taylor, who lives in the house.
So when I wake up between 7am and 8am, the first thing I do is run down to the finished basement to bring up Taylor and feed her and let her outside to go to the bathroom. I try to spend a good amount of quality time with her. She'll come in the bedroom and lie in my lap because she wants me to scratch her ears and rub her belly until she falls asleep. She has this sweet snore, like [high-pitched] Oooooooooh.
Out our windows we have a beautiful view of this gorgeous river with Canadian geese and ducks. We've seen deer giving birth. Raymond always had this dream of moving to the country when he was 50 and raising chickens, so I drew a circle around NYC on a map to figure out how far I could imagine driving every day. You couldn't get a studio apartment in the Bronx for what we paid for this place in 2007.
Tim: So what is a typical day like?
Carl: Usually several mornings a week, I'll have meetings with other providers [of LGBTQ youth shelters] around the country and the world to give them technical assistance. Since I was succeeded by Alex Roque as executive director in 2020, my title at Ali Forney is founder and senior director of technical assistance.
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Another part of my role at this point is trying to educate religious communities about the harm happening to queer youth because of religious rejection, which is overwhelmingly the root cause of why kids get thrown out. I don't think there's nearly enough focus within the LGBTQ movement of naming that and trying to think of ways to combat that. As a religious person, I'm perhaps uniquely positioned to speak in a very direct way about the wreckage that's happened because of this religious condemnation of queer people.
Tim: Do you work entirely from home now?
Carl: Mostly. AFC puts on two conferences a year for the providers we work with, one of them being international. Sometimes people will come visit NYC and I'll drive into the office and be part of their tour of AFC and give a presentation. Our drop-in center moved recently from Harlem to 37th St., the building where GMHC is now. Currently, we have three transitional housing apartments and we're opening a new Trans Mansion in Harlem. We have about 15 different AFC sites in the city. For the most part, our housing model is that we rent three-bedroom apartments, each with six young people living there. But we own the Bea Arthur Residence [funded with a gift from the Golden Girls legend a few years before she died in 2009] in the East Village and will now own the Trans Mansion as well. I'm doing the launch party for my book there tonight, in fact.
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I also spend at least an hour a day writing. I'm working on a second book, but also I do a lot of emailing, reaching out to churches and proposing that I speak. In the late afternoon, I'll go to the gym and grocery shopping, then come home and cook our dinner. I'm vegetarian and Raymond is not, so we've settled on a pescaterian life. Last night I made fish tacos. I'm Italian, so if I had my way, we'd be eating pasta every night. But one must stay pretty so I have to watch my carbs. I have a sex symbol reputation, which is harder to maintain as one gets closer to 60.
Tim: Yes indeed you do! What's your workout routine?
Carl: I actually feel like working on the book plus Covid did a number on my body and I'm a shadow of my former self, but also once you've built yourself up to a certain level, your body can stay looking decent without a super amount of work. I probably go to the gym four or five times a week and try to spend 15 to 20 minutes doing cardio, like the cross-country machine, then weights-wise, one day will be chest, another arms, another legs and butt.
Tim: Do you take any supplements?
Carl: At this point I only take creatine. I eat a lot of Greek yogurt, eggs and beans to get a decent amount of protein.
Tim: What is your gym like? Is there a little gay community there?
Carl: Not at all. I just go in and do my workout. I'm a pretty introverted person.
Tim: How can you have put in the decades of intense social contact with all sorts of people that it took to build AFC and still call yourself introverted?
Carl: I don't even know if shy is the right word, but when I was a teenager I would spend intense times alone reading, meditating, praying. But when I started feeling a need to figure out how to put love into action [working in social services years before starting AFC], I had to—I was working with these handicapped kids and dealing with a lot of people all the time. And slowly I got an ability to do it. At one point when I joined The Catholic Worker, I was living in a house with 20 homeless people.
But anyway, at night, usually we'll have dinner and watch TV together for an hour, and I'll walk the dog again and carry the pig downstairs to go to sleep. I'm praying she doesn't get much bigger. She recently got up to 50 pounds and I have a feeling she'll be pushing 70 pounds soon. Mercifully, she's learned to run up the stairs herself.
I also meditate and pray every day, usually around noon for a half-hour. One day a week, I try to go to a little cabin I have on top of this mountain in Delaware County where you can see for 50 miles. I pray and meditate there until nighttime.
Tim: Can you describe meditation? I've been doing it on and off the past year or so. For me, it's an exercise in doing nothing and being forgiving of oneself and letting something be what it is, because inevitably my mind starts wondering or I might even start falling asleep.
Carl: That's like you asking me to describe sex or something really intimate. When I was 15 years old, I had this profound—
Tim: I know from the book—you had this profound spiritual experience out of the blue that changed your entire life. But first, in general, what were you like as a kid? You grew up in the wealthy Connecticut towns of New Canaan, Darien and Wilton.
Carl: I don't go into this in the book much, but when I was four, my mother and father divorced and my mother left us and my father raised me and my brother. When I was eight, he remarried and they had two more kids. Then for the next eight years, we moved almost every year, including to France.
Tim: What did your dad do?
Carl: He was a marketing researcher. He was not the most emotionally stable guy and his jobs didn't always work out well, which is why we kept moving all over the place. I'd make two or three close friends, and then it would be wrenching to lose them. I was very close to my grandmother, but she had mental health issues where I couldn't see her for big chunks of time.
Tim: Your mother actually left you and your brother with your father. It's usually the father who leaves.
Carl: I just saw that movie The Lost Daughter, about a woman on vacation on a Greek island grappling with memories of having abandoned her children. My mother ended up on the Greek island of Spetses. I was like, "Oh, I can't take this [movie]."
Tim: Do you, or did you, not have rage toward her?
Carl: Yeah, I did. We got closer in subsequent years. She got breast cancer in her early fifties and had a double mastectomy but then the cancer came back five years later and then she couldn't work. She was just in her apartment in NYC, completely reliant on me and demanding of me, until she died in 2008. I had to do everything for her while I was running AFC. I had such a hard time with that, that she wasn't there to take care of me as a child but still had these expectations that I take care of her. And I did take care of her and we got much closer in that period, so I don't regret any of it.
Tim: How did you deal with the feelings though? Did you pray for patience?
Carl: Yeah, big time. I'd engage in this dialogue with myself, like, "Okay, you've cared for people who've punched you, kicked you and spit in your face, so if can look past that because you have this belief in a God of love, why can't you put it aside when it's your own mother?"
Tim: Did you ever confront her about it?
Carl: No. I didn't think she'd have the emotional capacity to deal with it. There was something in her that was very shut down and closed off around personal stuff.
Tim: We continue to have relationships with people even after they die. What has your relationship with her been since her death?
Carl: I'm still aware of how formative her abandonment was. I still often feel unworthy and unlovable. But I also have a bizarre feeling of gratitude about it. Maybe my superpower is my ability to have compassion for people who've been in similar situations [of family abandonment or rejection]. I look at my life— probably tens of thousands of kids have had a safe space to sleep because my own mother abandoned me.
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Tim: Your own abandonment drove the work you did.
Carl: Yeah. I've been working with homeless people since I was 17. I think something about what it means to not really feel at home, to not feel loved or to have a place on this earth, feels very visceral to me, being uprooted again and again on top of abandonment.
Tim: So when you're 15, you have this surprise spiritual awakening that drives you into radical left-wing Catholicism in the years ahead. As an Italian, did you grow up in the Catholic church? I did. I think I've mentioned this here before but my main feeling about going to church every week, this very suburban Massachusetts Catholic church, was utter boredom. I can't remember one meaningful sermon. And then I went with my best friend to the Unitarian Church in town where her own family went, and I had this revelation that religion or church or whatever could be about social justice and doing good works in the world, not just listening to the same boilerplate Bible passages week after week.
Carl: No, we didn't go to church when I was growing up. If we had, I think I'd have felt the same way as you. My father had been sent to Catholic school in the Bronx and he'd call Mother Seaton Mother Satan and he'd call the Irish brothers [priests] vicious bastards. He hated the church, so we didn't grow up religious at all.
Tim: So you had no religious reference for your spiritual awakening?
Carl: As a kid, the biggest book I had was an illustrated children's Bible, which was so homoerotic—battle scenes with those big muscular legs under the tunics. I'm sure whoever illustrated it was a gay guy. But I still had no conscious interest whatsoever in religion before this overpowering experience uprooted my life on April 15, 1980.
Tim: Which you describe in the book. You were looking at what you describe as a kind of tacky mural of a nun somewhere in your town. Where did the moment come from?
Carl: [long pause] God. I feel like God put His or Her hand on me— I feel like words don't really capture this stuff. I think human beings have a capacity for mystical experience that is not dogmatic but a direct knowledge, somehow, of God. We tend to be walled off from that consciousness by our egos, self-centeredness and fears. But this was like a lightning bolt broke through my veil and I could see something for 30 seconds or so—I was outside of time. I was just standing there looking at the mural and it was like boom. I'd looked at that tacky mural a hundred times before.
Tim: Were you frightened?
Carl: I was in ecstasy or rapture. With a normal experience, you stand outside it and evaluate it. I wasn't able to do that. I was utterly in it. The "me" sort of dissolved. But in the immediate aftermath, I was terrified. I'd been walking to the candy store and I remember there was something about the fluorescent light in there casting these harsh shadows in the aisles. It felt sinister. I'd never looked at light and darkness and thought, "Oh, there's something scary here." This Middle Eastern guy was working behind the counter and I wanted to say to him, "I'm scared, I just had this crazy experience." But I was aware I'd sound crazy so I kept it to myself.
The next day, I was sitting with some friends in their front yard, along with their mother, trying to explain it, but I didn't have the words. They were just like, "Oh, that's weird." Then over the next six months, I went into this deep depression where I didn't know how to describe to myself what had happened—but I sensed that there was this profound meaning in the world that I was cut off from. I started reading The Plague by Camus and Nausea by Sartre and Fear and Trembling by Kierkegaard and didn't understand half of what I was reading. We moved that summer and I got more isolated and it was kind of scary.
Tim: Did you worry that you were crazy?
Carl: Well, my grandmother had mental illness, so I knew that what she was going through was different from what I was going through, which was more like an existential angst. But I remember staying with my mother over Thanksgiving, in my sleeping bag on the floor of her apartment, and trying to think of a reason not to kill myself. I was a big Beatles fan and John Lennon was killed the next week, which put me in an even darker place. But then over Christmas break, I read Walden by Thoreau and somehow was able to reconnect to the experience. I understood that Thoreau was talking about a spiritual quest, about how to engage in transcendence by stepping away from the materialistic realm and connecting to nature. I was like, "Yes, yes, yes" and started going out into the woods and looking at the snow and the sky and the stone walls. It was like I had this capacity for silence that came upon me where all the voices in my head would be gone and I'd be present before the trees and the sky and the setting sun and this sense of amazement and wonder. I was voraciously reading to understand how other people had done this, like Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain. Maybe my Italian DNA clicked in, but I started learning about the Catholic mystics and saints who'd devoted themselves to the poor and lived lives radically outside materialism. That thrilled me and I wanted to do it. But if, like you, I'd grown up in a suburban parish, I can't imagine I'd never have had any interest in Catholicism. I was exposed to the best stuff, like Saint Teresa of Avila, instead of the boring, insipid stuff.
Tim: Do you go to church now?
Carl: I'm not a church queen. When I first converted to Catholicism, I'd go to Mass every day. I'd take the bus to South Norwalk and go to earning morning Mass with janitors and nurses. I was moved by their devotion in a way I'd never seen at Sunday Mass.
Tim: So how does your sexuality start coming into this?
Carl: I started realizing I was gay when I was 12 or 13 and realized the thoughts that were provoking my orgasms. And that scared me. This was 1977. There were no queer visibility in suburbia. Using "faggot" as an insult was very common. Billy Crystal's gay character was on Soap, but my father refused to let us watch it. So I had this vague sense that there was something very shameful about being gay, that would make your father be not able to deal with you.