Making Room: Three Decades of Fighting for Beds, Belonging, and a Safe Place for LGBTQ Youth

From a pioneering advocate for LGBTQ youth, a gripping, impassioned account of how an unhoused queer youth’s murder compelled him to create the nation’s largest housing program for homeless LGBTQ teens.

“A brave, honest, and deeply spiritual reckoning with the trauma and joys of caring for the youth that families and communities have cast away.”—GO Magazine

ONE OF CNN’S ESSENTIAL READS FOR PRIDE MONTH AND BEYOND • ONE OF SPIRITUALITY & PRACTICE’S BEST SPIRITUAL BOOKS OF THE YEAR

What power does a long-disenfranchised community hold to transform the treatment of its most abused members? How can we locate that power?

Carl Siciliano met Ali Forney—a Black nonbinary teenager known for fierce loyalty to friends and an unshakeable faith that “my God will love me for who I am”—in 1994 while working at a daytime center for homeless youth in New York City. Nineteen years old, Forney was one of thousands Siciliano encountered who had been driven from their homes by rejecting families, forced to struggle in the streets due to homophobic and transphobic violence in the shelters.

Then Forney was murdered, a moment of horror and devastation that exposed the brutality that teenagers like Forney faced in a city marked by gentrification, racist policing, and the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic. Anguished by Forney’s loss, Siciliano fought to create homes where unhoused queer teens could live safely, with their human dignity at last affirmed, while he helped lead a movement that compelled New York City to invest millions of dollars in kids who’d been ignored for decades.

Siciliano writes with loving affection for Forney and many other queer teens, showing deep respect for their wisdom, courage, and spiritual integrity. Their stories illuminate the harsh realities faced by hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ youths suffering from homelessness across our nation. And, exposing the political and religious forces that continue to endanger LGBTQ youths, he makes a clarion call for their protection.

Written with heart and profound insight, Making Room is a landmark personal narrative, bringing to life an untold chapter of LGBTQ history and testifying to the power of community, solidarity, and the human spirit.