This is Latino USA, the Radio Journal of News and Kurturre Latino USC Latin Latino USA. I'm Maria Inojosa. We bring you stories that are underreported but that mattered to you, overlooked by the rest of the media, and while the country is struggling to deal with these, we listen to the stories of black and Latino Studio United Latino Front, a cultural renaissance organizing at the forefront of the movement.
I'm Maria Inojosa, Ola, Latino USA. Listener. Here's a really important show from our archives and one quick heads up. This episode contains a mention of sexual violence, so please take care.
I believe that storytelling is advocacy, and the advocacy is storytelling. The best way to create the change that we want in society, in our lives is by sharing our stories and asking for what we need.
So this book is not.
Just about stories. This book is screaming revolutionary ask to support trans young folks.
From Fudromedia and PRX. It's Latino USA. I'm Mariao Oosa. Today transactivist actor and author Cecilia Gentili on the intersections of advocacy and storytelling. Cecilia Gentili is a very busy person.
I work a lot, have a company, and I do a lot of extra activities or related with community.
When she's not advising organizations or government agencies on how to better serve the trans community, Cecilia might be writing an op ed for The New York Times or speaking in that a rally sharing her thoughts on the need to decriminalize sex work.
Sex workers are again being forced to the impossible situation of choosing between prioritizing their heads or having enough money to survive.
Some of you might be familiar with Cecilia for her role as MS Orlando on the FX hit series Pose, a show portraying underground black and LATINX queer culture in the late nineteen eighties and nineties.
Now are we going to do this or not?
Because it's going to take time and I'm I have a hair forming at them.
Pose, of Course, was the first TV series with a mostly transcast, but when the pandemic struck, Cecilia decided to try her hand at something new, writing a memoir. Because of the pandemic, she no longer had to commute to work, so instead she used that time at home to start writing.
I Open My Eyes and walk to my computer and start writing with a coffee.
And so last year, at fifty years old, Cecilia published five tests, her first memoir, in the form of seven letters written to people in her hometown in Argentina. Writing to people like her grandmother or her father's mistress, Cecilia uses humor and vivid storytelling to talk not only about abuse and trauma, but also about joy and survival. Here's Cecilia Gentili in her own words.
My name is a Legende Lely. I live in Brooklyn, New York City, and I am originally from Argentina. I didn't know what storytelling was. One time, after I changed my name legally, Transgender Legal Defense helped me navigate my name change. And during those meetings of changing my name, I met this amazing trans individual. His name is Noah Lewis, and he invited me to be a part of a storytelling event. And I was like, what is in a storytelling event? And he explained to me that he thought
that I could be good at telling stories. So I was like, what, sorry, I'm gonna say. So he asked me to practice with him. That we were driving to my grandmother's house and my brother while.
We were crossing a railroad. Elbowed me and said, do you see the railroad? And I said, why are we whispering?
And I found the process of talking about an event and talking about my feelings and talking about my story and talking about people around me throughout those times was really healing and very entertaining. We found you in the railroad and I said, what's that in the basket and he said, no, no basket, which is kind of depressing, right. The basket would make it look cute. I love attention. I'm an aquarius. I enjoy being the center of attention. And that was all put together was perfect. But I
loved telling stories life right. So you know, when you tell a story, it's easy because you manipulate the story as you want, rights on the goal, You change things around.
Because it's your story. Who's going to tell you anything about it? You can do whatever you want.
But when I started writing, it's different because you write something and it's structure and its rigid. It's there, it's in a piece of paper, and every time somebody reads it, it's going to be the same. There's no way to tweak it or to play around. When I started writing these stories, I thought it would be important to have a public that for these stories to be told to somebody.
So that's how I came with letters.
I thought, I'm gonna say these things that I have to say to the people that I want to say them right.
Many of them are alive and many of them are not.
And that's how I started writing these letters to There are seven letters to seven individuals that had some kind of impact in my life, good or bad. That you love to talk about my hometown I was born, and see that de Galabes. Most of people live from agriculture. The town is very little, and everybody knows you, and everybody knows everything about you, and everybody talks about everybody, and everything that is a little bit outside the normal
becomes some kind of sensation. When I was a leader in Argentina was going through a dictatorship, my mother was very clear about the political climate. She told me that she wanted me to know what the reality was because she clearly saw me as a queer kid. And you know, oppressive regimes go first for people who think, write for poets, for thinkers, and for artists, and many of those folks
are queer. So the queer community is one of the communities that suffered the most when it comes to repression from oppressive regimes or government. So my mom told me that most of the things that she was oppress round was just because she wanted me to leave. I grew up with an extreme sense of a binaryness. So a person who was a sign melobird should be masculine and do all masculine things and be rough and be all macho, and a woman had the expectation of being submissive and
beautiful and wear dresses. And at the time, as it was the seventies, it was no concept of like trans people or non binary people. I didn't meet another transperson until I was seventeen, so for many years I thought like I was an extra terrestrial or I thought that I was crazy. I never never felt like anybody was
like me. So that's how I grew up. I grew up having to perform a sense of masculinity that it was not really innate or really came naturally to me, but I navigated in a way in which I was able to indulge in my femininity and in the beauty of being a queer kid. My mom used to give me flowers to bring to the teachers very often. It's a form of appreciation that we do in Latin America.
My mom sent me to.
School with my carnation in my hand, and when I got to school, I was confronted and told that I shouldn't go to class, that I had to go to see the superintendent la Dilectora de la Cuela. And you know that something is wrong, and they don't send you to see the superintendent if you are doing good. They send you to see them if it did something wrong. And there was my mom and Tho these two women, one was a psychologist and another one psychiatrist, and.
They with very.
Not very pedagogic ways. They explained to me that I shouldn't use the girls bathroom because I was using the girls bathroom.
I thought that that was normal.
I felt and always see myself as a girl, so are would going to the girls bathroom? So they explained to me that because of my gen italia, which is such a difficult conversation to have with the kids six years old, you know, it's just hard. I think that was the first time that I learned to negotiate, you know, with people. And I was like, you know what, I'm not gonna have find this. I'm just gonna do what they tell me and I stop using the girls bathroom.
But I actually thought at the moment that they were all crazy. As a child, I was obsessed with UFOs. I'm from an area of Argentina that was very famous for people seeing UFOs. One day, we were driving with my father and my mother to my grandmother's house. We were driving and we passed through a railroad and my brother was like, that's where we found you.
And I was like what he says, like, yeah, we found you there.
You're not my brother, you know, we found you there, and you in race, you know, with us, but you're not part of this family.
Which is like really really nasty.
But you know, I guess as both brothers and sisters and siblings do, right, And I totally believed him, and it kind of made sense, right. I put to a two together and I was like, this is a known UFO area. I was found in a railroad. I am a girl, but I have a peepee and I can't use the girl's bathroom. Everything led me to believe that I was left in this earth by mistake, by a
group of extraterrestrials. And I went to my grandma and I explained that to her, and my grandma, being the amazing woman that she was entertained, and she said that, yeah, maybe you are. I told her, like, maybe they'll come back for me. And that night we waited for the UFOs to come back to get me. So we waited, and of course nobody came. But she told me that we have to thrive with what we have a hand.
And she told me that what I had was her and my family, and even if it wasn't my family, even if I was from another planet, I had to make the best out of it. It was a very important lesson of a very, very wise woman. I think it's important that we talked about the importance of giving good, healthy attention to our children, because if we don't give them good, healthy attention, somebody may try to give them
a negative attention, like it was my case. I've been in therapy for more than ten years, and I believe that was the time that took me to come to terms with my history of abuse and also with my history of survival. Right because this book is not just about sexual abuse. It's about surviving sexual abuse. It's about
finding ways to thrive as a young person. It is one phrase in the book that for me summarized a lot of the whole book that when we talk about sexual abuse and the person who sexually abused me, I say that he saved my life and.
Ruin it forever.
Right, because this person was the only person that was understanding me as a girl, that was entertaining my femininity in the terrible way that it happened. It was also life saving for me because I felt validated and recognized through the terrible actions that he committed. I think is important that we talk about sexual violence, and that we
talk about sexual violence and children and young adults. So this book is a lot about that, but it's a lot about surviving and the beauty of surviving and the strength of surviving and thriving. So, after ten years of therapy, I found the courage to talk openly about my history because that history and the terribleness of some of the things that happened to me were a big part of
my bad mental health, my need to use substances. So as part of my process of therapy, I came to understand that I could talk about these things that it was a hate to talk about these things. Finally, after so many years of therapy, I understood that it was not blame of my part, and all of these terrible things that happened to me that I was not to blame, which I did blame myself for many years. I decided
not to soften any of the narrative. But also I decided that I didn't want to create a piece that was just about trauma, because I.
Believe that.
People in general, specifically cis gender people, have a tendency to fit said with the trauma and with the pain and with the terribornness of the lives of a transperson. Right, So I wanted to intertwine the trauma with the joy that I experienced. So at the same time that these bad things were happening to me, I was also experiencing joy, and those two things can live.
At the same time.
So that's why the book, I hope it translates as those two feelings living together and intertwine. All the letters that I wrote were really important for me. It was very important. Letters that is addressed to my grandmother is meant to describe the joy and the beauty that we can create when we support people, specifically in this case children who are different and is the story of a woman who decided to stand up for her grandchild. My
grandmother loved tangos and Argentina. The tangos is, you know, part of the culture is so important, right. But my grandmother, who watch a show called Grandest Ballories del Tango. In the middle of the show, at a moment where I thought it was the most important for me, with the song that I like the most, I come out of her room with all her clothes and jewelry and I do a performance of a tango for them. So they stopped looking at the TV and they moved their heads
to look at me. And the TV was just the music, but I was the show. I was doing the show. And I remember myself doing this at four or five, six, seven years old. That's one of the most beautiful memories of my grandmother, her just allowing me to be me right. And if more people will have allowed me to be me like she did with good intentions, maybe my life would have been a little bit better. But even though it wasn't better, it was a life and it's to be celebrated, and that's what we do.
That's what we do as trans people.
We have to celebrate ourselves when others don't. Trans kits are extremely underattacked with business of legislation throughout the whole country, where like trans kits are not supported in helper or like demands on sports for trans people right, and all of this is the result of this ideology that trans people are this new phenomenon. Trans people have been here forever. I've been here for fifty years. This is not new. The thing is that now trans kids are able to
better understand themselves because like the Internet, because information. But in my time, I didn't have any of that. So I had to improvise, and I had to be myself and my feminine self and the little girl that I was.
As I could.
And that's what I did, and I think it informed a lot of my life till nowadays I find ways to do what I need to do to survive and thrive. I believe that storytelling is advocacy, and the advocacy is storytelling. The best way to create the change that we want in society and in our lives is by sharing our stories and asking for what we need. So this book is not just about stories. This book is screaming revolutionary ask to support trans young faults. So this book is an act of advocacy.
On its own.
That was Cecilia Gentily gentily passed away on February sixth at our home in Brooklyn. She had just turned fifty two years old. This episode was produced by Julia Rocha and edited by Daisy Contreras. It was mixed by Julia Caruso. The Latino USA team also includes Victoria Strada, Renaldo Lanos Junior, Andrea Lopez Cruzado, Lori mar Marquez, Marta Martinez, Mike Sargent, Nor Saudi, and Nancy Trujillo. Bennileei Ramirez is our co
executive producer. Our director of Engineering is Stephanie Lebau. Our marketing manager is Luis Lunap. Our theme music was composed by Sanie Robinos. I'm your host and executive producer Maria Jojosa joined us again on our next episode and in the meantime look for us all of your social media. I'll see you there and remember off y Yes Joo.
Latino USA is made possible in part by New York Women's Foundation. The New York Women's Foundation funding women leaders that build solutions in their communities and celebrating thirty years of radical generosity, the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide.
From futuro Media and prx it's Latino USA. If I remembered my name, that would be good