Cecilia Gentili, transgender activist, performer and author, dies at the age of 52

Cecilia Gentili, a fierce advocate for transgender people and sex workers and a powerful legislative lobbyist — as well as an author and a bawdy, fiery artist — died Feb. 3 at her home in the Marine Park section of Brooklyn. She was 52.

Her death was announced by Peter Scotto, her longtime partner. He did not specify the cause.

Ms. Gentili often joked that she had a master's degree in immigrants, sex workers, trans women and addicts. She was an expert because she had experienced all these things.

She was born in Argentina and was sexually abused since childhood. As a trans woman in Argentina, she said, the only work she had been able to find was prostitution. She left South America in 2000 for the United States in search of safety and a better life. That didn't happen. At least not at first.

She was undocumented, homeless and trafficked for prostitution in the US. She also had a heroin addiction. After several arrests, she ended up in the men's section at Rikers Island, where she says she was raped and beaten.

Immigration detention was her next assignment, but there, as at Rikers, there were no safe facilities for a trans woman, so authorities sent her home—to her trafficker—with an ankle bracelet to monitor her whereabouts. However, an immigration officer managed to get her a place in a rehab clinic, and after seventeen months she was clean.

Ms. Gentili's first stop after rehab was the centre, a community center for LGBTQ people, on West 13th Street in Manhattan, and she was happy to talk about how her mentors there helped her write a resume. Sex work had given her several marketable skills, she realized. She was great on the phone, adept at scheduling, and she excelled in customer service.

Ms. Gentili's first legitimate job was at the Apicha Community Health Centerin SoHo, where she worked as an HIV peer navigator and then as a trans health program coordinator, leading a clinic that grew from four patients to more than 500.

She was hugely ambitious and passionate about the well-being of her clients and excelled in this work, as well as the policy work that supported it. She soon became director of policy GMHC, the four-decade-old nonprofit organization (originally called the Gay Men's Health Crisis) dedicated to the prevention of AIDS. In 2018 she founded Trans stock advicewhich advises companies on equality issues and acts as an advocate for trans women of color, sex workers, immigrants and prisoners.

Ms Gentili had many legislative successes. She lobbied for the passage of the New York State Gender Expression and Discrimination Act, which became law in 2019, and the repetitionl of the so-called Walking While Trans Ban, which had banned loitering for the purpose of prostitution and disproportionately targeted trans women and women of color.

She was also one of two lead plaintiffs in a successful lawsuit against the Trump administration, which had tried to roll back trans protections enshrined in the Affordable Care Act. At the time of her death, she had lobbied to decriminalize sex work and, through one of her other organizations, had helped draft legislation that would achieve this. DecrimNY. One such bill is in committee in Albany.

“New York's LGBTQ+ community has lost a champion in trans icon Cecilia Gentili,” said Governor Kathy Hochul posted on the social media site after Mrs. Gentili's death. “As an artist and steadfast activist in the trans rights movement, she has helped countless people find love, joy and acceptance.”

But Ms. Gentili was more than just a skilled lobbyist, self-taught policy wonk and mentor for transgender people. She was a gifted storyteller whose stories of her harrowing experiences were useful during her asylum process and which she later turned into tragicomic gold.

Noah Lewis, a transgender rights attorney she met when she filed for her name change, was fascinated by her. He convinced her to perform a monologue at a transpride storytelling event in 2013. Ms. Gentili would later create and perform. two a woman shows and is cast as a sketchy body enhancer, armed with a syringe of filler, in “Pose,” the FX series about 1980s drag ball culture.

In 2022, she published her first book, “Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn't My Rapist” (faltas is Spanish for mistakes). It's a coming-of-age story, structured as letters to her friends, family and tormentors from her complicated, horrific upbringing. The Los Angeles Times mentioned it “At the same time painful and hilarious, angry and forgiving, beautiful and unbearable.” Her editor, Cat Fitzpatrick of Little Cat Busya small feminist publisher, said she had been begging Ms. Gentili for years to write her stories.

“Like Socrates,” Mrs. Fitzpatrick said on the phone, “Cecilia was skeptical of the written word.” Stories changed and grew in response to an audience, she found. A collection of letters was her solution.

In her letter to Juan Pablo, the only child like her in her hometown, she wrote about the time her mother took her to the local witches for a stomach ailment. As they left, she said, a witch whispered, “I can make you a girl.”

“I had learned from Disney movies that nothing was free or lasted long,” Ms. Gentili wrote. “But even if it was for one long night, like Cinderella, even if I didn't casually leave a shoe behind for the prince to find, it was a wonderful opportunity to imagine that it was a wonderful opportunity.”

She was born on January 31, 1972 in Gálvez, a city in northeastern Argentina. Her father, Terdinando Gentili, was a butcher who spent more time with his mistress than at home, Ms. Gentili recalled. Her mother, Esmeralda del Pilar Ceci de Gentili, cleaned houses and suffered from depression.

The family was poor and lived in government housing, and there, when she was six, Cecilia was molested by a neighbor, who continued to abuse her until she left home at eighteen. She was bullied at school and threatened outside, and sex, she said, became a survival mechanism, albeit at a terrible cost to her.

But Cecilia had a champion in her maternal grandmother, her abu, an indigenous woman who lived in rural Argentina. When Cecilia came to stay with her, the grandmother let her wear her jewelry and clothes. One Sunday, when she and Cecilia were visiting the local Baptist church and Cecilia was wearing a pair of her grandmother's earrings, the pastor complained. Abu told the pastor away and never returned.

“That was the end of the church,” Ms. Gentili wrote in her letter to her grandmother, which is a chapter in her book, “but not of your relationship with God. You kept reading the Bible to me every night until I fell asleep wearing most of your jewelry.”