The Ali Forney Center is working with a group of Bea’s close friends and colleagues to plan the memorial service.

“Bea Arthur was tremendously kind and generous to the Ali Forney Center” says Carl Siciliano, AFC Founder and Executive Director. “The caring and concern that Bea expressed for our kids meant the world to us, and we are thrilled to be able to give honor to her memory in this way.”

In November 2005, Bea flew to New York City from her home in Los Angeles in order to give a special benefit performance of her one-woman show. The performance raised over $40,000 for the Ali Forney Center.

In an interview for Next Magazine Bea explained her decision to offer her support, “I’m very, very involved in charities involving youth and the plight of foster children. But these kids at the Ali Forney Center are literally dumped by their families because of the fact that they are lesbian, gay, or transgender – this organization really is saving lives.”

Bea continued to offer her support, both as a donor and as an advocate. In one of her very last interviews, published in the New York Blade in May 2008, Bea spoke with pride of having done the benefit for AFC, and indicated that she would do anything to help gay kids disowned by their parents.

The Ali Forney Center currently offers eight residential sites in New York City to provide shelter and housing to homeless LGBT youth, all of which it rents. AFC has recently received generous financial support from the Oak Foundation to support a plan to purchase housing sites. The Ali Forney Center is committed to naming its first purchased site the Bea Arthur Residence for LGBT Youth.

“Before Bea became involved with us, we only had two sites, and could only shelter 12 kids.” says Siciliano. “We were struggling to respond to an epidemic of homelessness that was not very well understood, even in the LGBT community. Bea’s support and advocacy really helped raise awareness in our community. Bea Arthur played a crucial part in our efforts to expand our capacity to respond to the hundreds of LGBT youths who come to us for help. She feels very much like a patron saint!”

The Ali Forney Center is the nation’s largest organization dedicated to homeless LGBT youth. AFC currently provides eight residential sites offering emergency shelter and longer-term housing, and additionally provides two drop-in centers which offer medical care, mental health treatment, HIV prevention, testing and treatment, housing and benefit assistance, and job training and placement services. The mission of the Ali Forney Center is to help homeless LGBT youth be safe and become independent as they move from adolescence to adulthood. Ali Forney was a queer youth who was murdered on the streets in 1997, when there was no safe shelter for LGBT youth in NYC.

The bill would create a special division in DOHMH that would be involved in research and LGBT youth outreach programs.

Read Scott Stiffler’s full story at edgeboston.com.

Schmidt didn’t want to refuse someone in need. Having seen few such cases, however, and with limited space that winter night, she wasn’t sure where to place the transgender woman. The shelter has space for homeless men and women but not anyone in between.

“Rather than turn them away, we give them a cot,” said Schmidt, whose staff allowed the woman to stay a week in the shelter’s lounge – the only space they could find.

“I don’t even know of another shelter that takes the transgendered” in Atlanta, Schmidt said.

Nationwide there are plenty of holes in the safety net of shelters that catches men and women who have fallen on hard times. Activists say help is even harder to find for the transgender homeless, whose nontraditional gender status raises questions about sleeping arrangements and shower facilities.

The people who run the shelters are taking note.

From Phoenix to New York, shelters have fine-tuned policies to recognize preferred gender over birth gender, as they balance the needs of their mainstream clients with those of an unconventional segment of the homeless.

Activists point to the deaths of homeless transgender women in Atlanta and Austin, Texas, to underscore the need for shelter for all. Shelters in both cities are revamping acceptance policies and weighing the creation of trans-friendly space.

The Atlanta Union Mission is considering expanding one or more of its six area shelters, in part to accommodate transgender people.

“We don’t know if we need an entirely different facility,” spokeswoman Voloria Pettiford said. “We don’t know how to meet that need, but there’s a need.”

Organizers say finding spots for transgender homeless is equally important for others in the shelter.

“Put yourself in the position of someone who’s fleeing a domestic violence situation – they’ve come to the shelter as a haven to get away from a male presence in their lives, and they think they’re in an environment that’s all women,” said Nancy Yarnell, head of the Atlanta Day Shelter for Women and Children.

It’s tough to tally the number of homeless who are transgender, a term that includes people who switch gender through surgery and hormone treatments as well as those who just dress the part. The homeless community itself is notoriously difficult to count.

A study last year of 646 transgender Californians conducted by San Francisco’s Transgender Law Center found that 20 percent reported having been homeless, and a third of those said they had been denied access to a shelter.

Vanishing jobs are expected to increase homelessness, and activists say the problem is magnified for the transgendered, whose appearance can make it hard to maintain employment.

Reva Iman is tall and busty with arms full of jingling bracelets and broad shoulders that betray her birth gender. She said she began living and working on the street after being shut out of jobs when she first came to Atlanta.

“The street life of escorting and prostitution, that became my main line of survival,” said Iman, who avoided shelters that demanded she dress “like a man” to spend the night.

“You can’t be yourself,” she said.

Transgender women typically consider ditching their makeup and women’s clothes an affront to the identity they’ve spent a lifetime accepting.

Yet for shelter managers, allowing anything else creates other problems. Some argue biological women feel uncomfortable sleeping next to a biological man, whether or not he has breast implants. Others worry that residents with mental problems – common among the homeless – could lash out at transgender guests.

At Atlanta’s Peachtree and Pine shelter, director Anita Beaty is concerned with the safety of placing female-looking males among the 700 men sleeping there nightly. She has a small area for women, and a stream of transgender women who know she won’t turn them away.

“We want to know how to respond better,” said Beaty, who plans to discuss revamping shelter housing policies with transgender activists further.

In 2003, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Coalition for the Homeless released a guidebook for making dual-sex homeless shelters more welcoming to the transgendered. Tips included adding shower privacy curtains and changing intake forms to include a blank space for gender – instead of male or female.

Shelters have made similar adjustments in Boston, New York, San Francisco, Phoenix, and Austin, Texas, where a transgender homeless woman’s recent death sparked an outcry.

Police found former political candidate Jennifer Gale, who was born male and fell into homelessness, dead outside a church in December. Gay and lesbian activists blamed a lack of space for the transgendered in Austin’s shelters.

“When Jennifer Gale passed away, that definitely reignited the flame that we needed to start working on this more,” said Dawn Perkins, community relations manager for Front Steps, which coordinates shelters citywide.

Six years earlier, police found 52-year-old Alice Johnston dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in suburban Atlanta. In a suicide e-mail, the unemployed transgender woman told friends she’d lost her home and had been turned down by city shelters, according to close friend Monica Helms, who testified about it to the city’s homelessness commission in 2003.

There has been some progress.

In 2007, Atlanta United Way officials funded the creation of H.O.P.E Through Divine Intervention, a nine-bed program for transgender homeless women. About 21 have moved on to permanent housing through the program, said associate director Kia Croom.

Openings are rare and Croom said it should double in size to be effective, but there’s no money for expansion.

It’s a gorgeous mid-September Tuesday evening in New York City and the setting sun warmly glows over the streets of Midtown. Chelsea, New York’s gayest enclave, shifts into party mode just a few blocks south. To the northeast, the world is starting to queue up for Broadway hits. Meanwhile, commuters rush to the comforts of home.

But for thousands of gay youth in Gotham, there will be no partying, no theater, no playing tonight.

And once again, no home.

Estimates say that a staggering 20,000 young people are homeless every night in the city, – anywhere from a quarter to a third of those are LGBTQ kids. A lucky fraction of that number has found its way to Sylvia’s Place, tucked here on the city’s far west side, so near and so far from so much wealth.

Sylvia’s Place is the subject of a new documentary shot in 2006 which followed seven LGBT teens who frequented the shelter. To see what Sylvia’s place is like now, I step into this surreal and humbling world to meet with Kate Barnhart, director of Sylvia’s Place since 2004.

Tonight, like every Tuesday evening, dinner is being served by a small team of volunteers from the adjacent Metropolitan Community Church of New York. I take a seat on a metal folding chair next to Kate’s desk, not quite sure where to put my manpurse amidst the overflowing boxes, plastic bags, and just plain stuff that’s everywhere. She motions for me to throw it into the area behind her, with a dozen other backpacks and handbags.

“Behind my body is the safest place, so everyone stashes their stuff back here,” she says.

Sylvia’s takes its name from Sylvia Mae Rivera, a veteran of the 1969 Stonewall uprising who just a year later co-founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), an assistance group for the city’s young homeless trans community.

In the late 1990s Rev. Pat Bumgardner, senior pastor of the MCC, hired Rivera to run the church’s food pantry, only to be amazed by the crowds of young queer folk in need drawn by the charismatic activist. On Rivera’s deathbed (from liver cancer in 2002), Bumgardner promised that the church would create a safe space and night shelter for desperate LGBTQ youth who had nowhere else to go.

And so Sylvia’s Place was born in early 2003, and has ever since provided disenfranchised young gay people aged 16 to 23 with such simple necessities as dinner, bathroom facilities, somewhere to sleep for the night, breakfast in the morning, and – perhaps most important – a listening ear and an encouraging voice.

They do all this on a ridiculously small budget, with a shoestring staff of mostly volunteers, in one 2,500-square foot room, despite the (quite understandable) unpredictability of the clientele.

NEXT PAGE: ‘We take people until we can’t fit anymore.’

Kevin Pravia, 19, was found Sunday night by his roommate in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. The Pace University sophomore was last seen being helped into a taxi early Saturday after a party in Manhattan.

Jeromie Cancel, 22, was arrested Tuesday on murder charges. Investigators said that while Cancel was being questioned in an unrelated case, he admitted suffocating Pravia and stealing his cell phone, laptop computer and iPod.

Police said Cancel, who smiled for television cameras as he was being led in handcuffs out of a police station, was homeless. Police didn’t know whether he had an attorney.

Cancel’s father, Jesus Soto, told WNYW-TV that his son had stolen possessions from him in June, and that he called police when Cancel showed up at his apartment Monday night.

“You don’t take someone’s life like that,” the father said. “He deserves what he gets.”

Cancel claimed that Pravia approached him in Manhattan’s Union Square park around 6 a.m. Saturday looking for drugs and that the two went to his apartment, a few blocks to the northwest, police said. After the slaying, Cancel stayed behind to watch the violent film “Saw,” then left before 11 a.m., police said.

No drugs were found at the scene, police said.

The medical examiner’s office said tests were being performed to determine the cause of Pravia’s death.

Cancel told investigators that Pravia fell asleep and that he decided to rob him, so he punched the student in the face, stuffed a bag in his mouth, wrapped the television cord around his neck and suffocated him, police said. He said he sold the laptop on the street after leaving the apartment, sold the cell phone in a store and couldn’t remember what he did with the iPod, they said.

Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Browne said authorities recovered the phone where it had been sold.

Pravia, who friends said was openly gay, was from Peru, Mass., about 10 miles from the New York border.

Pace officials offered sympathy to Pravia’s family. Grieving friends quickly cobbled a Facebook page dedicated to the student, expressing shock over his death.

Pravia was a 2007 graduate of Wahconah Regional High School in Dalton, Mass., where counselors were available Tuesday for staff and students. Principal James Conro remembered Pravia as a “quiet, polite and respectful young man.”

“My heart goes out to the family,” Conro told The Berkshire Eagle of Pittsfield, Mass.