Cecilia Gentili is the posthumous recipient of the Vanguard Award as part of Them’s 2024 Now Awards. The Now Awards honor 10 LGBTQ+ vanguards at the forefront of culture and change today. Below, please read our March 2024 story on Gentili’s extraordinary life and legacy.
Organizer, icon, puta, and mother, Cecilia Gentili always dreamed big. But even she might not have envisioned what her funeral became: a St. Patrick’s Cathedral ceremony attended by nearly 1,400 mourners dressed to the nines in red, black, and tulle that sparked a firestorm of Catholic controversy. What she certainly may have predicted, however, is the determination and ferocity her family displayed in fighting back against the transphobia and whorephobia of the fallout.
For Cecilia, who died nearly a week after celebrating her 52nd birthday on February 6, transgender liberation wasn’t a far-off theory. It was tangible and attainable; we just had to be willing to fight for it, and she certainly made that her life’s mission. In many ways, her decades of community work speak for themselves.
A legendary activist, performer, and staple of New York City’s LGBTQ+ scene, Cecilia’s résumé doesn’t even begin to capture how legendary she was. From expanding Apicha’s transgender health services program, to creating a free sex worker-focused health initiative at Callen Lorde, to fighting to decriminalization sex work with DecrimNY, to working with Jewish Voice for Peace to fight for a liberated Palestine, Cecilia’s influence was widespread. She served as the director of policy at GMHC, the world’s first HIV/AIDS service organization, collaborated with organizations like the AIDS Institute, and founded Trans Equity Consulting, an organization paying trans people to be experts on their own experiences. It often seemed as if Cecilia had a hand in every battle for folks living on the margins — and that’s because she did.
“Cecilia was truly [the] Marsha P. and Sylvia Rivera of our generation, a radical sex worker who gave everyone a chance and who gave everyone hope and an opportunity to get free,” organizer and community builder Qween Jean, who first met Cecilia in 2019 at a rally for asylum seekers, tells me. “Cecilia believed in collective elevation — and she believed it was not just a theory, but something we need to put into practice — and she elevated and lifted her community every chance she could and in everything that she did.”
Cecilia was born on January 31, 1972 in Gálvez, Argentina. As her Aquarius birthday foretold, she had a creative streak from birth. From a young age, she was moved by music, art, and literature. But Cecilia was destined to be a big fish in the small pond of Gálvez, where she was exposed to a range of religious faiths, many of which persecuted her as a queer child. Even when she didn’t have the language to capture her experience, she knew she was different.
“When she was a kid… she felt like she had a family of extraterrestrials that were going to come pick her up and her grandma and her would sit under her tangerine tree in Argentina and wait for the spaceship to come,” artist, organizer, and poet Viento Izquierdo Ugaz, who met Cecilia in 2017 through a project honoring trans artists, recalls. “It’s very Aquarius, too — but also very trans to understand yourself as not of this planet and to feel like you don't belong and that there’s somewhere else for you.”
No aliens came to whisk her away in the night, but Cecilia knew that she needed to leave her hometown in order to survive and bloom. As she detailed in her remarkably vulnerable memoir Faltas: Letters to Everyone in my Hometown Who Isn’t My Rapist, she moved to the larger neighboring city of Rosario for college. It was in Rosario in the 1980s, as Argentina fell into a brutal dictatorship, that she met a trans person for the first time, came out as trans herself at age 18, and faced all of the discrimination that came with it. It was illegal to wear clothes of the “opposite sex” in Argentina in the 1980s and ’90s. She was repeatedly targeted and brutalized by the police. Finally, after a year of saving her earnings from working as a hairdresser, she bought a plane ticket to the U.S. to pursue a safer life as her full self.
“You said you knew there was a better life out there, and you were determined to find a way to it,” she writes to her childhood frenemy Helena in Faltas. “I too was certain there was a better life for me out there.”
Cecilia arrived in Miami in 1998 with $35 in her pocket — mind you, the taxi from the airport to her friend’s was $25 — and no legal status, which made finding lawful work close to impossible. Early on, she did sex work to stay afloat, and was arrested because of it. She moved to New York City soon after, where she dealt with addiction and more jail time. But even then, while struggling to survive, she couldn’t help but build community.
Victoria Von Blaque first met Cecilia in the early 2000s through a friend group of trans porn stars including Angelica Lovelace, Dominique Silva, Raquel Chambers, and Sex Change Nina. Von Blaque recalls that in those early days, the girls would get together, swap trade tips, and gossip while grabbing lunch at the since-closed restaurant Go Sushi in NYC’s West Village. Von Blaque, who identified as a drag “weekend warrior” at the time and had yet to come out as trans, was struck by Cecilia’s boldness and generosity. During their very first interaction, Cecilia clocked that Von Blaque was trans and offered her the lipstick out of her own purse.
“Of course, she was on it,” she remembers. “Shortly after, I started my transition and a transition journey. Ever since the first time I met her, she’s always been so generous. I complimented her on her lipstick. She was like, ‘Do you like it? You can have it.’ Though I did not take it, it was a situation that always lived with me.”
The two formed a sisterly relationship over the years, as Cecilia and Von Blaque did photoshoots in Cecilia’s apartment, discussed clients, and cooked together. (Cecilia was an amazing cook, known for her soups and beef Wellingtons.) Cecilia also gave Von Blaque advice on how to navigate the ins and outs of the sex work industry and life as a trans woman, offering counsel on dealing with clients, doctors who could provide hormones, and the names of good surgeons — as well as surgeons who should be avoided at all costs.
“She always had a word of advice for us, and for me,” Von Blaque says. “That helped me be successful… I’ve always been very grateful to that because that could have saved my life.”
Cecilia became a bridge builder, using her lived experiences as a sex worker, asylum seeker, and trans woman as guiding lights on how to approach her work in community services. Her first position was an internship for the LGBTQ Center of New York that later became a consultancy.
It was just a few years before this work that Cecilia met Ceyenne Doroshow, now the founder of G.L.I.T.S and a godmother of the Black trans liberation movement. At a point when some queer clubs were still not admitting trans women, particularly Black trans women, Cecilia paid a security guard to get both of them into a nightlife spot. Later, when Doroshow and Cecilia found themselves working for different community service organizations, they formed a deeper bond.
“Neither one of these organizations were trained to prioritize trans women and we had a lot of the same complaints and a lot of the same problems that a lot of your policies that were written are not really for us,” Doroshow tells me. “That formed years of being able to vent and cry and be transparent and be mad.”
Later, from 2012 to 2016, Cecilia worked with Apicha Community Health Center to develop a transgender services program. Von Blaque says Cecilia made a distinct impression from her first day on the job. While she was qualified in many ways for the position, she had done what many of us do on applications: exaggerated parts of her résumé, namely her knowledge of Excel.
“They were like, ‘We need this Excel sheet by the end of the day,’ and she lied on her résumé,” Von Blaque tells me. “She found the first Butch queen, the first gay man she could find and said, ‘I need help. I don't know this,’ and so they taught her how to do an Excel sheet as quickly as possible.”
It’s safe to say they never regretted appointing her to the position, because what Cecilia didn’t know in Excel on her first day, she made up for a million times over in her lived experience and ability to connect with people.
“Mama took up space, and she also got her start because someone was willing to give her a start and show her what to do,” Von Blaque says.
For countless trans folks — trans femmes in particular — Cecilia was the first friendly, warm face they encountered on their uphill journey to secure gender-affirming care, as well as other life-saving services. That’s how Gia Love, organizer, artist, and one of Cecilia’s many chosen daughters, first met her in 2012.
“Oftentimes, when you go into these places that are community spaces, you are not greeted and welcomed with open arms,” Love says. “I walked in and I just remember this trans elder with so much energy — and I think she was more happy for me in that moment than I was for myself … I was truly lucky to start this journey and have someone like Cecilia navigate me through everything.”
Love says she knows her relationship with Cecilia was so special; she also knows that Cecilia came into so many other trans people’s lives this way, holding their hands as they navigated an institutional bureaucracy often designed to work against them. Cecilia was a mother to so many: Love, Oscar Díaz, Chiquitita, Gogo Graham, Joshua Allen, Maya Margarita, Río Sofia, Cyd Nova, and Cielo Félix-Hernández, just to name a few. But what made Cecilia so special as a mother wasn’t the number of children she raised, it was her selflessness, generosity, and unconditional love.
“I’ve never had a relationship with someone that was so intricately caring and reciprocal,” Díaz, Cecilia’s daughter and trusted professional collaborator, tells me. “As a Virgo, and as someone who also is very self-sacrificing, my relationship with Cecilia was a little bit of a tug and pull, because my autopilot is caretaker, bodyguard, and self-sacrificing in everything I do for what I’m passionate about. It was difficult to fulfill the role of caretaker with Cecilia as her right hand because she was, more often than not, there for me.”
Dozens, if not hundreds of people, have their own tender stories of Cecilia’s generosity; she bought people their first couch, secured them hormones and housing, and always made sure everyone had enough to eat. Her phone was never on silent because she wanted to be there to pick up in case anyone in her community needed anything. “Our phone would ring all the time in the middle of the night and she’d jump into action to help people in crisis,” Peter Scotto, Cecilia’s partner of many years, recalled in a statement shared with media after her death. “She’d always be there and answer that call.”
Cecilia’s care came from a dream: for trans people to have a full seat at the table. That’s why she founded Trans Equity Consulting in 2019. From workshops aimed at making organizations more trans-inclusive, to community survey projects, to active lobbying for the protection of LGBTQ+ rights, Trans Equity’s mission was to put money in trans people’s pockets for advising on matters pertaining to our communities. It was absolutely a family business in more ways than one, employing many of Cecilia’s own children to do the work she had been teaching them about for years, including Love, Izquierdo Ugaz, and Díaz.
“I just saw how much she cared about trans people getting paid and trans people getting rest and trans artists being uplifted and supported and centering art in her facilitation,” Stefa Marin Alarcon, a musician and member of Trans Equity, says. “I just thought that was so beautiful, to marry the activism or the organizing with also uplift artists and trans people's artistic work.”
One of Cecilia’s most ambitious undertakings through Trans Equity was Transmission Fest 2023, New York City’s first ever all-trans music festival. Put together less than two months before Pride, Cecilia knew her trusted team could handle it speedily, and with grace. Over 1,000 people flooded into Marsha P. Johnson State Park along the East River to listen to a line-up of 20 trans artists, including Stefa, Las Mariquitas, and Dev Doee, with waterside views of the Manhattan skyline on a clear summer day.
“I want all the faggotry. I want all the tranny behavior,” she said to the crowd as she hopped around the stage in her Coachella-appropriate jean cutoffs and black tank top. As effective an organizer as she proved to be, Cecilia is often remembered for exhibiting this kind of playfulness — an unfettered exuberance that felt completely boundless.
“Those moments in time in which our community was together were so sacred and really released a communal joy,” Díaz says. “And that was what she really thrived off of, is seeing smiles and joy and laughter and talent and beauty and grace all together in one space.”
Cecilia had always been a performer, but she had hit an entirely new artistic bloom in the last season of her life. She starred in FX’s Pose as the beloved character Miss Orlando from 2018 to 2021. In 2019, she came out with her one-woman show The Knife Cuts Both Ways. She published Faltas in 2022 to rave reviews, and her off-Broadway show Red Ink, which premiered in 2023, likewise garnered praise with its run ending shortly before her death.
Diaz recalls a brisk fall day in 2023 when they took portraits to promote Red Ink. Cecilia stood adorned in a white, long-sleeved dress, partially submerged in a creek at her upstate home that funnels into a reserve that supplies much of New York City’s water (one she would joke about peeing in so all of NYC could get a little taste of her). She smoldered at the camera, baptized in the cold creek, as Díaz took photos — a dynamic they had grown accustomed to over years of photoshoots together.
“It was a big nod to her renaissance that she was having creatively, but also just in the levels of recognition and honor that she was receiving on the advocacy end,” Díaz tells me. “She had been doing that type of work for so long, it felt appropriate to be able to do that creative project.”
At the same time, Cecilia was also trying to slow down in the last year and take a step back from some of her many efforts. Izquierdo Ugaz and their partner had recently moved to Urubamba, a small town in the Andes, away from the bustle of Lima, Peru. During one of their conversations, Cecilia, who had recently bought her upstate property, asked the couple if they missed their life in the city.
“We were like, ‘Not really, we really love it here.’ And she was like, ‘Oh my God, me too. I thought I was the only one,’” Izquierdo Ugaz recalls, laughing. “It was really nice to see that she was really connecting. Since she also comes from a smaller town, I think she was really happy to now connect back to this place outside the intensity of the city. I think we were all wanting that for her, too.”
She was, perhaps, beginning to envision what it might look like to return to her rural roots, but this time with frequent visits from the family she had raised. Sadly, she did not live to see that chapter. On February 6, a post appeared on Cecilia's Instagram, but not from her. It showed a portrait of Cecilia dressed in a yellow dress and flower crown, and below it, a caption noting the sudden news that she had passed away.
The news of Cecilia's passing quickly rang through the LGBTQ+ community in New York and around the world, leaving many in disbelief and deep grief. Behind the scenes, Cecilia’s children and family leapt to coordinate their mother’s homegoing in the grand style she deserved: one fit for a saint. After all, Cecilia herself had prepared them for moments like these. Jean and Love discussed plans for a memorial held just two days after her passing, which packed Judson Memorial Church to capacity. Izquierdo Ugaz and Marin Alarcon planned a virtual vigil for Cecilia’s loved ones across the globe who couldn’t make it to the in-person events while Doroshow and Scotto made arrangements for a funeral at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.
Cecilia’s children know their mother was a saint — and it’s certainly the right designation, because only a miracle worker’s funeral could summon seemingly all of New York City’s trans community to a Catholic church. On February 15, over 1,400 of the best dressed queers in New York City funneled into the same church where over 100 protestors were arrested in 1989 for pushing against Catholicism’s homophobic stance on the HIV/AIDS crisis, all to honor an icon.
Cecilia’s altar glinted in the stain-glass filtered sunlight, piled high with red carnations and roses, pictures of the departed, and candles. In the middle of the display stood a red-framed portrait of her illustrated by her friend and artist Gabriel García Román, in which her image is circled by phrases she selected, written in her own handwriting: Travesti, Puta, Bendita, Madre, Be My Child. During the ceremony, Cecilia’s loved ones, friends, and admirers sang their praises of “Santa Cecilia,” calling her name in unison again and again.
“Seeing all the people at the funeral services, and all the love I’ve received from people in her community all over the world, is a testament of how awesome Cecilia was,” Scotto says. “She was an angel, an icon, a mother, an educator, a leader, and so much to so many people.”
In properly grand Cecilia fashion, the ceremony wouldn’t be complete without an encore. In the smoky expanse of the Nowadays club in Brooklyn — where Cecilia had danced many nights away and attended even more community mutual aid events like Body Hack — soft blue and purple lights cast a foggy glimmer over the hundreds of attendees at her repass. Sara Ramirez sang a haunting acapella version of Luis Miguel’s “Sabor a Mí”; Love and Jean did a high-energy lip-sync performance; and toward the end of the five-hour celebration of life and memory, a spontaneous ball broke out. Indya Moore, Arewà Basit, Díaz, and others walked and danced, and at the end, performance artist Maya Margarita lifted the red-framed portrait of her mother to the sky, almost as if to invoke Cecilia.
Adorned in a black cowboy hat and wrap-around shades, Díaz left the audience with a few parting words: “Fucking protect trans rights all over; We must embrace and fucking protect our immigrants; and we need a motherfucking free Palestine. Everyone, please take care of each other. We must love and protect one another.”
It’s been a little over a month since her family put Cecilia to rest, as of this writing, and they are doing what they can to grieve, hold her memory close, and figure out what it means to continue her legacy. Grief isn’t a linear process; it’s filled with peaks and valleys and detours, and the same holds true for defining what Cecilia’s absence means to an entire community in mourning. For many of her loved ones, doing the work has been the most immediate and obvious response.
“What it means to honor Cecilia’s legacy is that there is an endowment in her name in the city, that there is an institution for learning and for access, for stability and wellness, for our immigrant Black and brown and intersex and trans sex workers in the city; it means that we honor her legacy by creating housing for trans and queer youth that have had to go through all hell and have to survive the belly of the beast in order to live in their truth,” Jean says.
Cecilia’s loved ones are trying to make this vision a reality. Shortly after saying goodbye, members of her chosen family launched Cecilia’s Legacy Fund, a pool of money that will go toward covering funeral expenses, legal fees, and donating the rest the grassroots organizations supporting efforts to fully decriminalize sex work, fight for the liberation of trans folks, and uplift immigrant communities.
Her “big footprint” of a life, as Díaz says, should serve as a reminder that activism isn’t about thinking, but as the very word implies, doing. Everyone knew her political commitments, from sex work to trans liberation to Palestine; that went without saying.
“We understand where Cecilia stood on all of that,” Díaz says, “That’s not necessarily what makes her a saint. What makes her a saint is the way in which she met that call and the way in which she overextended her heart and her hands and poured into it the way that she did.”
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