Allen Andrade, 32, of Thornton, was sentenced to life in prison without parole after being convicted of killing Angie Zapata, 18. The jury deliberated for just two hours before finding Andrade guilty.

In handing down the sentence, District Judge Marcelo Kopcow said he hoped Andrade thinks “about the violence and the brutality … and the pain you caused not only your family, but the family of Angie Zapata.”

The case was believed to be the first prosecution under Colorado’s bias-crime statute for a crime involving a transgender person. Gay rights activists hope publicity from the case would pressure Congress to add sexual orientation and gender identity to a federal hate crime law.

Prosecutors had argued Andrade knew for hours that Zapata was biologically male and beat her to death because he disliked gays. They said Andrade had attended a court hearing with Zapata where court officials used her legal name, Justin.

A witness at that hearing also testified that when Zapata spoke, she sounded like a man trying to disguise his voice.

Andrade’s attorney didn’t deny that he killed Zapata, but said he had just learned Zapata’s identity after spending hours with her and he lashed out without thinking. Defense attorney Annette Kundelius said Andrade and Zapata agreed to meet for sex after Zapata deceptively described herself as a straight female.

“This is not something that people plan for,” she told jurors. “This isn’t a situation where people know how they would act.”

During the trial, prosecutors played recorded jail conversations where Andrade referred to Zapata as “it” and said it wasn’t as if he “killed a straight, law-abiding citizen.”

“His own statements in the jail call betray the way he values Angie’s life, the way he thought of her as less than, less than us because of who she was,” Chief Deputy District Attorney Robb Miller told jurors.

“Everyone deserves equal protection under the law and no one deserves to die like this,” Miller said.

Kundelius said Andrade’s statements were jokes made by a man who knew he was innocent.

“Was it in poor taste, was it a smart thing to say?” Kundelius asked jurors. “No. But it doesn’t mean he committed murder.”

Maria Zapata, the victim’s mother, called the murder “a selfish act” by Andrade.

“But there is something that he can never take away is the love and the memories my family and I have of my baby, my beautiful, beautiful baby,” she told the court before the sentencing.

Andrade’s sister, Christina Cruz, said her family was “not supporting the outcome, but we do support him as my brother.”

This is one of the gifts of “Catherine Opie: American Photographer,” a show currently on exhibit at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum.

In the mid-1990s, when mainstream society started focusing on gay and lesbian culture (as opposed to gay men with AIDS or lesbian feminists as a political group), Opie was taking pictures of her community. Of our community.

The iconic portraits displayed at the Guggenheim are moving because they portray us as people worthy of having our pictures in a museum.

Catherine Opie

They are large-format and color-rich; the subjects are treated not as curiosities, but as vulnerable, fierce human beings who are saturated with dignity and self-respect.

To Opie, we are kings and queens, posed against jewel-colored backgrounds.

Here is Crystal Mason, her bald head gleaming, her eyes tired yet resolute. Here is Angela Scheirl in jacket and tie, a jaunty half-smile playing on her face. Here is Daddy Irwin and Mark, clinging to each other protectively, affection clear in their bodies.

Catherine Opie, 47, is a political artist, but not because her images are overtly political. She is a political artist because she treats her queer subjects as human beings instead of freaks – without downplaying how not-mainstream they are.

“It’s important for our own culture – the culture we created – to be represented as it is,” Opie said in a recent interview at the Guggenhiem.

That is the key, she said, to her notorious 1994 self-portrait, “Pervert,” which shows her in S&M gear: black leather hood hiding her face, needles sticking through her arms like decorative sleeves, “pervert” carved in blood on her naked chest.

As gay and lesbian culture started being perceived as mainstream, she started worrying about being seen as mainstream herself.

NEXT PAGE: Who are you calling normal?

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.’