LGBTQ group PFY began as coffeehouse 30 years ago, to launch West Babylon site

The nation’s first suburban agency dedicated to providing LGBTQ resources will open a third location in Suffolk County as it celebrates its 30th year of meeting Long Islanders' needs. 

PFY, a Bellmore offshoot of the Long Island Crisis Center that began in 1993 as Pride For Youth, has grown significantly. What began as a coffeehouse to connect LGBTQ youth has ballooned into a multifaceted resource and advocacy center offering counseling, housing help, a food pantry, health services and adult programs. The organization will open a location this summer in West Babylon and is launching a mobile health clinic. The agency also has a Deer Park location. 

“The agency has just grown and grown and grown,” said director Devon Zappasodi. 

The 5,000-square-foot West Babylon location will offer social spaces for LGBTQ adults 31 and older and for adults with HIV who are 51 and older to help them navigate aging with the virus. The mobile health clinic, dubbed Out and About, will operate in partnership with the Suffolk County Health Department and offer HIV and STI testing, Zappasodi said. 

“There are so many unmet needs of LGBTQ adults,” the director said. “When you're an agency that is driven to really, at your core, maintain the essence and spirit of meeting the community where they're at . . . the needs are constantly evolving and changing.” 

Evolution has been a cornerstone of PFY, said Tawni Engel, the associate executive director of Long Island Crisis Center and PFY. The crisis center, which launched in 1971, was inundated with calls in the early 1990s from people seeking LGBTQ services. Thus, PFY was born with a $10,000 grant and the coffeehouse grew with a $140,000 state grant. 

“In the early '90s on Long Island, nothing like that existed,” Engel said. “We saw very quickly on the hotlines, we didn’t know where to send people.” 

Although PFY brought Long Island a safe haven for LGBTQ youth, not everyone was pleased. The crisis center lost private donors and Nassau legislators cut funding, Engel said. The public outcry against LGBTQ services didn’t deter the mission of the organization, which grew each year to meet the community’s needs. Now, PFY’s budget is larger than the crisis center’s, she said. 

Engel credits Long Island’s first Pride parade in 1991 and increased visibility of LGBTQ celebrities in the early 1990s with the increased calls the center received back then. 

“Having people sort of in the public eye who are coming out or talking about LGBTQ identities, it brings more of a sense of, ‘Oh wow, that’s me. That’s who I am and now I can talk about it, too,’ ” she said.  

Although PFY began as a youth group, it now helps LGBTQ adults. Hazell Rodriguez, who moved to Long Island from Honduras in 2016, joined PFY’s MpowerVida group for young Latino and Hispanic gay, bisexual and queer men and trans people. 

Initially, Rodriguez, 30, said she thought she was nonbinary, but after learning about the gender spectrum through the group, realized she is a woman. She now works as an HIV services coordinator for the agency, where she conducts outreach to young trans people of color. 

Rodriguez credits PFY with helping her “find myself.” PFY taught her “You be you.”

“I am,” she said.

By Brinley Hineman

brinley.hineman@newsday.com

Brinley Hineman covers the Town of Hempstead and the City of Long Beach for Newsday. She previously was a reporter in Nashville, Tennessee, and is a West Virginia native.