'Homeless For The Holidays,' Ali Forney Center's New Web Campaign, Highlights LGBT Youth Without Shelter In New York

The devastating rate of homelessness among New York's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth continues to rise each year -- a fact brought home even more poignantly during the brisk holiday season.

To draw attention to the city's roughly 1,600 homeless LGBT youth, the Ali Forney Center is launching an Internet-based campaign, "Homeless For The Holidays," which features photos and stories of diverse NYC inhabitants who are currently without shelter. Starting this week, a new photo of one of these youth, along with his or her own first-person story, will be released on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays through the month of December. Each photograph was taken at some point over the the past two months, when the subject did not have access to a shelter bed at the Ali Forney Center (the nation's largest organization dedicated to LGBT homeless youth) or elsewhere in the city.

Many of the campaign's subjects have been thrown out of their homes in what Ali Forney Center founder Carl Siciliano has deemed "the most terrible expression of homophobia imaginable."

View Envy, the first subject for the Dec. 6 edition of "Homeless For The Holidays," here.