CECILIA GENTILI: I am so excited about this.
HARRON WALKER: I am so excited, too—and excited I’m eating this instead of burrito leftovers at my house.
CG: [laughs] Do you cook?
HW: Not like—well, yes. I don’t know why I’m trying to say I don’t.
CG: Do you live with your boyfriend?
HW: No, I don’t, so I usually end up making a meal that I eat for dinner for, like, three days. Not, like, expert level or anything. I got more into cooking during the pandemic. I was just like, time to learn some basic meals, a couple different pastas—
CG: Yeah, yeah.
HW: Bean salads—
CG: Simple shit.
HW: Yeah, that I can just make whenever I feel like it.
CG: Let’s sit on the sofa?
HW: Yeah, sure.
[I left my audio recorder on Cecilia’s counter, so our voices abruptly trail off. Based on the next thing that’s audible, I’m guessing that one of us had brought up the new Ryan Murphy mini-series about Jeffrey Dahmer, which premiered the same day as our interview, and that Cecilia had said something about finding Jeffrey Dahmer attractive.]
CG: I mean, does that make me horrible?
HW: You’re not the only person I’ve heard say something like that.
CG: I think if I was around at the time I would have been one of his victims.
HW: [laughs]
CG: If Jeffrey Dahmer had walked into a bar, I would have been like, “Me! Pick me! Eat me! Hide my body, PLEASE!!” That’s terrible…
HW: So, is there anything you wanted to ask me about the piece before we get started?
CG: Tell me about it.
HW: So, it’s a profile of you pegged to your book’s release. It’s all still very hypothetical right now since I haven’t talked to, you know, the person who I’m profiling yet. But it’s about you, your book, and also it’s being published by LittlePuss Press because that really interests me—the trans cultural production at every level. Beyond the book, I’m also hoping to get into the impact you’ve had on the infrastructure of the city, like building out Apicha’s trans healthcare program. I just think it’s fascinating, all the—this is gonna sound stupid, but all the things you do.
CG: [laughs]
HW: You just, like, have done so many things and are doing so many things. There’s the court case against the Trump administration—
CG: I have done so much shit.
HW: And you wrote a book, and you’ve been on TV [on Pose, another Ryan Murphy production]. You probably could’ve been on this new Ryan Murphy series [about Dahmer] if you’d had time in your schedule.
CG: I do a lot, huh? I can’t eat too much salt because of my blood pressure and having, like—
HW: Do you mind if I go add some?
CG: Yeah, please. I also have heart problems, which, you know, another problem for the pile. My liver is shit because I have Hep C. My lungs are shit because I have COPD. Now my heart is shit because, you know, I’m 50 years old. It’s hard not to feel guilt because I shared the syringe with that person I didn’t know. I smoked the cigarette. So a lot of the problems with my health I feel somehow responsible for. It’s hard to look at it from the other side and say, “Of course, you shot dope. Of course, you smoked crack. You’re a trans woman immigrant. Life is hard.” It’s hard to find compassion for myself about all these things, but anyway. That’s why I didn’t put too much salt in the food. I actually usually use this salt that is not really salt, but I thought, “Harron’s coming. I’m going to use real salt.” [laughs]
HW: Aw.
CG: But if you want more salt, I can give you more.
HW: I’m beyond happy with what I’m eating right now. Thank you, though. That’s really kind.
CG: You know, I feel like a lot of the things that you mentioned that I did came out of going through recovery.
HW: That was around two-thousand…
CG: 2010. 2009, 2010. For many years, I thought those cliché phrases like “rock bottom” were stupid, but where I was at was pretty much that. I was homeless. Toothless. Extremely addicted to heroin. I was in Rikers Island when Immigration came to pick me up. You know when the city says, “Oh, we don’t talk to Immigration!” Bullshit. Immigration came to pick me up from Rikers Island to put me in deportation procedures, right? First, they put me in detention with a woman, a cis woman, and the woman assaulted me physically. So they put me with a man, and the man sexually assaulted me. So they put me in a cell by myself until it got too expensive for them to have me in one cell by myself—one of the guards told me that—so they let me out with an ankle bracelet just to save money. Having one cell for one person is such a luxury, you know? After they let me out, I went into recovery. Actually, it was a client who took me to Coney Island Hospital.
HW: Oh, really?
CG: To detox. Another sex worker there helped me and I escaped because I was in a trafficking situation at the time. So, yeah—it was pretty much rock bottom. I went into treatment, and I feel like the whole treatment mentality kind of grew on me.
HW: How would you describe the treatment mentality?
CG: I am very structured. I get up every day at the same time, I do the same things every day, and that’s because I learned structure through recovery. A lot of my using was because I had a very unpredictable life. So now, I make my bed every day. If I don’t make my bed, I can’t do anything because I feel like something is gonna go wrong if I don’t. I need that structure. And another thing that one of the counselors told me was, “You have to find something that you enjoy as much as that feeling of shooting heroin,” and that thing came to be community. I enjoy sitting here with you—
HW: It’s mutual.
CG: And it would not be the same if it was a cis person.
HW: Also mutual. [laughs]
CG: [laughs]
HW: Same on both counts.
CG: Thank you. It’s really important for me. Advocacy and doing work for my community became my new heroin, right? I also do so much because I didn’t do anything productive for 20 years—well, you know, I got surgeries. That’s productive. I survived. That’s productive. I feel like I’m trying to catch up with some of my friends who are lawyers and have their own legal practices or they have families and children or they have wealth or a house, and I just survived. That’s productive, but how we measure things like productivity or even risk as trans people is different. What risk means for you is different than what it means for a cis person, and it’s different than what it means for me because I grew up, you know, around guns and around people wanting to kill me, drugs. I don’t know what your life looked like.
HW: It wasn’t that.
CG: Because of that, my idea of risk and my idea of productivity might be different than yours. So when I went to treatment and found something that made me as happy as heroin—working for my community—I started making up for those 20 years. That’s why I have this extremely chaotic life where I can’t say no to anything; it’s like, this is an opportunity that I’m grateful to have, an opportunity that I didn’t have for a long time. So I end up doing $200 panels that [laughs] they’re great, but I don’t need to be doing them. I should be laying down on my bed or having coffee with a friend. I do all this work and all these projects and I’m always busy—busy, busy, busy—because I’m trying to make up for those 20 years where I didn’t produce anything that I can show to other people. That is why I’m doing all of this. That is why I went to Río [Sofia] and Cyd [Nova]’s wedding on Saturday, took a flight to San Francisco on Sunday, was in meetings on Monday, took a red eye back to New York to do an interview for the David Prize on Tuesday, be in more meetings on Wednesday and Thursday, then go to Gogo [Graham]’s runway show, and come home to work on Friday.
HW: And then also you were the grand marshall of la Marcha de las Putas on Saturday.
CG: And then I was the grand marshall! It’s like, I can’t do this for much longer because of my health, and because it’s not sustainable. But at least I’m conscious of that now, and I’m trying to make better decisions. This morning, I talked to one of the people on my team, and I was like, “They’re asking me to go and do a speech in Massachusetts about sex work.” I thought that would be so exciting and so important for me to do, but then I was like, do I need to go to Massachusetts? [Author’s note: No. As a woman from Massachusetts, no one ever under any circumstances needs to go to Massachusetts.] So I asked Victoria if she’d want to keep the money and go in my place. So I’m trying to make better decisions to have fewer obligations because I’ve been saying yes to everything for years, and I’ve been saying yes to everything because when you don’t have any opportunities for as long as I didn’t have opportunities—because I was queer as a child, because I was trans in my twenties, because I was an addict in my thirties. I didn’t have opportunities. When you come out of scarcity, every opportunity feels super important. But I’m learning how to walk away from that feeling and be a little more selective about the things that I do. Does that make sense?
HW: You talked about finding pleasure in working for your community. What does your community look like?
CG: I have close friends that I consider more like family, and then I have this big group of acquaintances and other people that I know, and then there’s this huge amount of people who—you know, from Apicha, I had 650 clients, right? Even when I had people working under me doing care navigation, I always made it my business to be in touch with people all the time, so there’s, like, 650 people for whom I am really important because I either started them on hormones or helped them with their healthcare or with their mental health. And these 650 people have changed dramatically through their transition, so sometimes I don’t recognize them anymore. [laughs] Sometimes, a stranger comes to me and is like, “Hiiiiiii, it’s so good to see you!” and I’m like, “...Hiiiiiiii!” [laughs] and I don’t know who they are because, you know, people change through transition and because I also don’t remember everybody. That’s 650 patients, right? So I’m always meeting people all the time, and I love it, but it’s also very exhausting. There are also all the people who saw me on Pose, and, like—it sounds stupid, but we’ll go to the airport and people will stop me. “Are you Miss Orlando?”
HW: Oh, and it’s on streaming, so new people keep learning who you are.
CG: Yeah, like the other day, we were in the airport, and I was ordering coffee. Someone in line behind me who didn’t see my face, just by listening to my voice, was like, “Excuse me, are you Miss Orlando?” And I was like, “Yeah.” And she was really nice, but it’s also kind of like… I’m always in a space of familiarity around others. I’m not complaining about it, but it is definitely not normal.
HW: Like, you can’t ever just relax in public space.
CG: No, no. I feel terrible, like I’m talking all this shit about myself like I’m the shit. But we went to see Lady Gaga. It’s a fucking stadium. I don’t know how many people were there, maybe 50,000.
HW: Was it for Chromatica?
CG: The Chromatica Ball.
HW: Finally, it happened. [laughs]
CG: Yeah. [laughs] Finally, it happened.
[Cecilia asked that her opinions on Gaga’s sixth studio album be kept off the record.]
CG: But while we were there, people were coming up like “Oh, Miss Orlando! Can I take a picture with you?” And I’m just like, am I famous? I don’t know, it feels like that’s not my neighbors’ experience of life.
HW: I feel like a Lady Gaga concert in the tri-state area would be exactly the place you’d be recognized that much. With your neighbors, though, do they know you’re on TV? That you’ve written a book?
CG: I don’t know. We just did this special for HBO that is coming out soon about sex work [2023’s The Stroll, directed by Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker]. I wonder if they’re gonna see it and realize that I’m trans. I’m not used to passing, Harron. I’m used to people spooking me fiercely, so I always assume that people know that I’m trans.
HW: You kind of carry that with you, like surely they know I’m trans.
CG: Yeah, but then I don’t know if they know that I’m trans. I remember when I moved here last year, it was on a Saturday, and the Tuesday after I was doing a rally at city council against… I think it was the Mayor?
HW: Sounds about right.
CG: [laughs] That makes sense, right? It was on, like, Channel 7 or something. I was talking about trans issues, this and that, so maybe they know. I don’t know, maybe they’re just nice and pretend that they don’t know. I have a normal relationship with my neighbors.
HW: Like you’re friendly with your neighbors and vice-versa?
CG: I try to play this housewife fantasy. I think it’s hot. [laughs]
HW: How long have you been with Peter?
CG: I’ve been with Peter for about nine years.
HW: Is he your husband? Boyfriend? Partner?
CG: He’s my partner. I’ve been trying to get married with him, but he’s against marriage. I don’t know, I think he has trauma about marriage. I’m also a little bit of a psycho, so maybe he thinks if I marry him I’ll kill him for the money.
HW: [laughs] And you’re playing the long game.
CG: Which, I could totally see myself committing murder and getting away with it. For someone who dislikes the police as much as I do, I watch so many detective shows. All of them! I don’t know how that’s possible, because I really dislike the police. [laughs]
HW: There is something, like, bizarrely comforting about a finely tuned procedural kind of show like that, you know?
CG: I just started paying $7 a month for the BritBox because they have the best detective shows.
HW: Is that like British TV?
CG: Yeah.
HW: Oh, cool.
CG: It’s much better over there. I just watched a whole season of Luther—oh god, he’s so hot.
HW: Sorry to shift gears so hard, but when did you first conceive of your book, Faltas? When did this idea first come to you?
CG: It was not an idea. It was pretty much Cat [Fitzpatrick, her editor at LittlePuss] forcing me to do it.
HW: She said that she’d been trying to get you to write a book since back when Topside Press still existed, before that all imploded. Do I have that right?
CG: Cat was at my first storytelling show. I’d worked with Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF) to change my name, and Noah Lewis, who was my lawyer there, he must have, through talking to me, gotten the sense that I could tell a story. So he called me and told me that he was organizing this storytelling show and that he wanted me to perform.
HW: Had you ever done any shows like that?
CG: Nothing. When I was young, I used to work in the clubs, you know, as a… It was not as a drag queen because the idea of a drag queen in Argentina at the time meant that after my show you’d have to see me as a man—you’d have to see me as both things—and I never came out of drag.
HW: Like, it was a part-time vs. full-time thing.
CG: Like, being a drag queen meant I was doing this show for you.
HW: Like, don’t worry.
CG: Yeah, but I never came out of costume. I was also really talentless. I didn’t know how to lip-sync. I didn’t know how to sing. I didn’t know how to dance. But I was really funny, and I was gorgeous. I also had this extreme sense of fashion, I guess? So most of the time, people would just pay me to go to bars and just be at the door or be sitting at the bar, talking to people. I was very good at talking, very good at entertaining.
HW: But you weren’t necessarily onstage, you were more working the room, setting the vibe.
CG: That’s what I’d do… So, OK, I don’t know what we were talking about.
HW: Noah at TLDEF.
CG: So, Noah asked me to tell a story. I’d never told a story like that before. He was like, “Why don’t you write something, and I’ll help you with it?” So, I wrote these two stories that I realized were related and combined into one story: the one where I discovered that I couldn’t use the girls’ bathroom at school, and then the story about my brother telling me that I was not his brother and was actually an alien and I told my grandmother about it. He told me it was perfect, so that’s what I performed. I went after Janet Mock, who was already established at the time. She told this amazing story about how people think she doesn’t have any tattoos, but she has tattoos on her eyebrows because somebody ripped her eyebrows off once while waxing them, something like that. Then it was my turn, and people loved it! And Cat was one of them.
HW: Was Cat also performing?
CG: No, she was in the audience. She approached me afterward, and I was like, who is this frantic Brit walking around? And then she was at another storytelling event and came up to talk to me. She always, from the beginning, told me I was very good—I think I needed that validation. She told me about Topside Press… I’m kind of unsure how everything went down there, but I also thought it was marvelous to have this trans press, so I was really sad when it dissolved. Cat started inviting me to her events. When she published a book, I was in her event telling a story that she loved.
HW: Do you remember what story?
CG: It was the story about the Jesus Christ dick.
HW: The tattoo?
CG: Yeah.
HW: I think I saw you read that at a Bluestockings reading.
CG: Yeah, it was with McKenzie Wark.
HW: That was, like, a week or two before lockdown started, I think. It was a different time. I had bangs.
CG: You had bangs? Oh, no.
HW: [laughs] The first thing I did in lockdown was grow those out.
CG: Torrey [Peters] was there, too, and she had a bob. Anyway, Cat encouraged me to write down that Jesus Christ dick story, so I wrote it and she edited it and I hated it, hated reading my stories back to myself. I think the beauty of my stories are that they fluctuate and that they are never the same. Like, the meat of the story is the same, but depending on how I’m feeling or depending on who’s in the audience or what they’re reacting to. I love that connection, right? The stories can change depending on so many factors, but when you write something down, it’s there—forever. And if it’s bad, it’s terrible forever. And if it’s good, it’s good forever. Storytelling allows you to play, and if you’re good at telling stories and if you know how to read a room… I’ve never told a bad story because I’ve always been able to feed off of what people like and give them what they want. When I’m telling a story, I have a lot of control.
HW: Sounds a lot like what you were saying about being in the clubs when you were younger and just feeding off the energy and sensing what people wanted.
CG: Absolutely. That’s what I’ve been doing all my life. So, I hated when she edited that story—I think we sent it somewhere, it’s published somewhere, I think. She was very happy and very proud, but when I read the story I just thought it was horrible.
HW: Do you remember what it was that turned you off about it?
CG: It wasn’t my writing or her editing. I hated it because I wasn’t telling it. I had no control over how people would feel reading it.
HW: Like, if they miss an inflection—
CG: A joke or inflection, right. Like, when I say, “I held that dick in my hand,” and I look at people and say, “Have you ever held a small cat in your hand?” [She pantomimes doing just that while she speaks.] There’s a whole magic to it that only happens if you’re saying it in person, but when you read it, you don’t see me saying it. You don’t hear me saying it. So, I hated it, but this bitch was relentless. She was like, “You should write your stories! They should be a book!” She invited me to tell a story to her class in Newark and invited me to perform for her class at NYU, so I’m going to all these classes, telling stories at her housewarming parties and whatever Topside Press was doing. I don’t know what happened with that, why it dissolved. All I know is gossip, and I don’t want to gossip.
HW: Oh, yeah?
CG: [laughs] Just stay away!
HW: Yeah, like I told Cat and Casey [Plett, the other cofounder of LittlePuss Press] last night, I definitely don’t want this profile to be about Topside. I don’t want it to steal attention from either you or their press or anything. I’m not, like, secretly digging for dirt.
CG: That’s OK, but the gossip is delicious.
HW: Yeah, like, off the record …… ………… …… … … …… …… … …… ………… … …… … … …… ………… …… … … …… …… … …… ………… … …… … …
CG: …… ………… …… … … …… …… … …… ………… … …… … … …… ………… …… …
HW: …… ………… …… … … …… …… … …… ………… … …… … …
CG: …… …………
HW: …… ………… …… … … …… …… … …… ………… …
CG: …… ………… …… … … …… …… … …… ……
HW: …… ………… …… … … ……
CG: …… ………… ……
HW: …… ………… …… … … …… …… … …… ………… … …… … … …… ………… …… … … …… …… … …… ………… … …… … … …… ………… …… … … …… …… … …… ………… … …… … … …… ………… …… … … …… …… … …… ………… … …… … … …… ………… …… … … ……
CG: …… ………… …… … … …… …… …
HW: …… ……
CG: So, afterwards, a few years later, Cat was like, “I’m opening my own press, and I want you to write a book!”
HW: Were you more receptive by this point to writing your stories down?
CG: At this point, yes. I’m wanting to make up for those 20 years of nothingness. I’m ambitious. I’m successful. I’m already doing Pose. I have my own company. I had written for The New York Times a couple of times. I had this amazing editor who speaks Spanish, and—
HW: What’s her name?
CG: Her name is Isvett Verde—verde, like the color green. I don’t really know how she ended up being my editor, or why I ended up writing an article for her in the first place, but she’s my editor. The first time she sent me edits, I had trouble concentrating on them because I have a lot of attention issues, and I didn’t really understand the way that edits appear in a Google Doc or a Word document; I wasn’t really sure anymore what I’d written and what the edit was, it was confusing. She called me, and we reviewed the edits together, which gave me the opportunity to talk with her and discuss each of the edits, including the ones I didn’t understand, and we would either come to an agreement or I’d fight against the edit. Sometimes, we’d talk to each other in Spanish, and she’d ask me, “What do you mean in Spanish? Tell me in Spanish what you’re trying to say here,” and she’d help me with the translation. Working with her, I stopped being afraid of being edited. I had a lot of insecurities with editing. It always felt like somebody was putting me down, even if they weren’t trying to. I like stories that are raw. I like stories that are about, like, sex in the bathroom and getting dicked down hard and doing coke. I love stories that make people feel more alive, but a lot of my stories happen for “Gay, Inc.”
HW: So, like, nonprofits?
CG: Yes. And they want inspiration. They want something that makes them go, “Oh, the poor trans woman living a terrible life made it through all that terribleness and succeeded!” They love that inspirational story, but I want to talk about sex and being manipulated and manipulating. Gay, Inc. doesn’t want that, so I was being edited as a storyteller a lot.
HW: To get a happier ending out of you?
CG: To get the inspirational part out. Gay, Inc. wants the terribleness of the narrative and then the good ending. Having those better experiences with Isvett as my editor, I started thinking about how different this process could be. I decided that if Cat agreed to do live edits, talking them through, I would write a book for her. She agreed. What I then had to figure out was who I was telling my stories to since I didn’t have an audience. I couldn’t picture who my reader was because all different people read books; as an author, you don’t know who your audience is. That inspired me to make my stories directed at somebody.
HW: Is that how you came up with the epistolary format?
CG: Yeah, that was how I made them make sense. If I wrote the stories as letters, then they made sense to me. That’s how I wrote Inés the first letter. I remember, I was working on it in a writing group with Cyd [Nova] and Torrey.
HW: When was this?
CG: Torrey was starting to write Detransition, Baby.
HW: So, this was, like, years ago.
CG: She was working on the story about the elephants. [laughs] I know that story from way before Detransition, Baby, and she knew Inés before Inés was even a letter.
HW: Was this, like, 2017? 2018?
CG: Yeah. 2017, sometime. I sent the letters to Cat, and then Cat sent me her edits. We met in person, I think, or maybe the pandemic had already started so we were meeting on the phone to talk about “OK, what are you trying to say with this?”, “OK, let’s change it to this.” I remember that process so well. It was not—I feel like editing can sometimes be such a cold process, but with Cat it was great because we would talk about all the edits. In one letter, for example, I fought her really hard about something she wanted to change. It was the letter to Juan Pablo, my friend. She was like, “This letter is about you. This is not about him.” And I was like, “Yeah, that’s what I want.” And she said—
HW: Like, she was saying it should be more about him?
CG: Yeah, the other letters are more about who I’m writing the letter about. She said, “This letter is different. It doesn’t really go with the others because it’s not about him. It’s more about you.” And I told her that that’s what I wanted. I even rewrote the end of this letter to be even more about me, where I tell him that it’s time in our relationship that things are about me. That was a beautiful moment, and she loved it, right? I think the fact that she is a trans woman was such a relief for me—like, this person is gonna get it. This person is gonna get my narrative because they are trans. There’s still a big barrier because I am a woman of color and a Latina and an immigrant—well, she’s an immigrant, but she’s from England. It’s different. She doesn’t have that same language barrier I have. But we actually found out that how I think in English is very British-English, because in Argentina that’s the English they teach you. And there’s some crossover with Castellano, the kind of Spanish we speak in Argentina, so some of the words sound the same. She loves that. For a moment, I was like, Is she gonna get what my letters are all about? Being a person of color, and being—you know, there are a lot of mentions of colorism in the book and the desire of being, like, white as a goal. That is very Argentinian; Argentinian people have whiteness as this final goal. That’s how I grew up. Was she gonna get it? And she did. We had a lot of trust between us. I gained back a lot of trust I’d lost in editing. Trans people editing trans people writing for trans people—I guess it’s kind of like an editorial t4t. [laughs]
HW: With the way that you write about your experiences with colorism and being a rape survivor and, you know, the drama of everything that comes with being a gender-nonconforming kid who has to play dumb about it in order to get through your childhood, I thought it was really interesting that your book didn’t so much focus on exposing yourself to the reader. Moreso, it was actually exposing everyone else around you. The adults, your family members—you exposed things about them by writing about how they interacted with you.
CG: I love that you said that. That was so important. It makes me feel accomplished in a way.
HW: Like, that was a really interesting twist on the whole memoir format, where it’s usually like, “Here are my confessions.” You, on the other hand, used your experiences of childhood to expose everything that happened around you just by virtue of you being darker skinned than some of your family members, by being someone who was raped and sexualized by adults because you were gender-nonconforming.
CG: One of the most difficult parts was writing that letter to my childhood friend, Rosanna, where I tell her that her father raped me and that I have had nightmares about it for many years. I kept thinking, what would that conversation be like in person, what would that even look like for me to say “Your dad raped me”? How would that feel for her, you know? Why tell her now? What gives me the right?
HW: What does give you the right?
CG: Why not? If that’s what I need. Why do I have to care about her feelings? Why can’t my feelings be more important for once? And if she doesn’t like that, if it doesn’t sit well with her, it’s OK for once not to give a fucking shit about it, right? Not to give a shit about how she feels as long as it makes me feel better. When I started writing the book, I really hoped she would never read it. I would tell myself, “OK, it’s in English. No one in Gálvez is going to read the book. Part of me now, though, wants the book to be translated into Spanish and hopes they all read it. Part of me looks forward to seeing their reactions. I know some people are not going to believe me, they’re gonna say, “Why are you doing this to the memory of this guy and his family?” But I had to say it. It was really important for me to do that, even more important because she’s still alive, right?
HW: You found her on social media, as you wrote in Faltas.
CG: Yeah, and I wrote this letter thinking that I was talking to her. The most important part of the book for me is when I talk about my mom and tell her that I know that she knew and I know that she didn’t do anything about it. That’s hard because nobody is listening, because my mom is dead. But it was important for me to put it out there, even though… Who wants to talk shit about their mother, right? Unless you are that girl from Nickelodeon.
HW: Oh, I’m Glad My Mom Died! [Author’s note: Former iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy’s 2022 memoir about growing up on TV, her abusive momager, addiction, and how the child star sausage is made. I recommend!]
CG: Yeah. [laughs] But that’s not a narrative that happens a lot, and I don’t want people to think that my mom was this terrible person.
HW: I don’t think you do that in the book. There’s a lot of empathy on the page.
CG: It was just like, you know you did this thing where you ignored what was happening. Unless you are extremely dumb, you know why a child is coming out of this man’s house when nobody else is there. My mom, she was not dumb. She chose not to look at it. There were many other signs, right? So it was important for me to say what I said to my rapist’s daughter, but it was even more important for me to say what I said to my mother, that I knew that she knew and she didn’t know how to deal with it. That is not OK, but it’s OK because, well, what can I do? She made a decision to consciously ignore it. I think part of her blocking it out was because she didn’t know how to deal with that information, so she pretended it didn’t happen.
HW: It’s very different from when you were working the room in the clubs or telling stories for Gay, Inc., where you were giving people the kind of stuff you knew they wanted. With Faltas, you were giving yourself what you wanted. Is that comparison accurate?
CG: It’s certainly accurate. I’m not trying to please anybody. That’s why I wanted to be so intentional with my edits with Cat. I remember our last editing session, I went over to her house and she made potato and leek soup. It was delicious. And we had tea—she is very British about that. When she came here for the first time, she asked, [affects a Mary Poppins-style, very posh accent] “Do you have any tea?” And I told her—oh, you can have it, yeah.
[Peter, Cecilia’s partner, has walked up to the coffee table and reached for her plate to bring it to the sink. Cecilia thought he was coming over to eat some of the pasta on it.]
PETER: Oh, no, I’m gonna get my own, but are you done?
CG: Oh, yes, yes. You can take this. And you can take that, too. [She gestures to my plate.]
HW: Oh! No, no, that’s OK. [Peters gladly clears it anyway.] Oh, thank you!
PETER: You’re welcome.
CG: So, I tell Cat I’ve got [the Mary Poppins voice again] bags of tea. [laughs] She didn’t seem to like it. The next time she came here, she brought her own tea. What a psycho. [laughs]
HW: She has a problem.
CG: [laughs] So we were in her house, and we were editing the last letter, and as we finished the last edit she said, “You know what you have? Well, you have a book.”
HW: How’d that feel?
CG: You know, I don’t know… “The book” sounds like something so academic, right? People who know shit write books, that’s how I see it. People who have been writing for a long time, who have a career for a long time, write books. Like, “This is what I do: I write shit.” Because I’m not that person, for me it felt like such a remote accomplishment, like something you could dream of doing but if somebody were to tell you “You’re going to write a book someday” you’d say, “Oh, that’s bullshit. I don’t have what it takes. I’m a dumb bitch,” you know? I’m a ho. I walk the streets and make money, that’s what I do. I don’t write books. I don’t even speak good English, I’m not writing a book in English, but I guess that’s the magic that happens when you’re ambitious.
HW: I mean, there they are right there. [I point to the stack of about half-a-dozen copies of Faltas on the media console across the room.]
CG: There they are! I love that it has my last name on it. It doesn’t say “Cecilia Gentili.” It just says “Gentili.” [laughs] On the spine? Faltas. Gentili.
HW: I think I need glasses.
CG: Oh, my god. I think you maybe do need glasses.
HW: One of my eyes just decided a few months ago, “I’m nearsighted now.”
CG: Well, bitch, time doesn’t just go by for me only! For you, too, ho! [laughs] So, yeah. That’s how it happened. Casey was not as involved in the whole editing process. I don’t know if she was reading the stories at the same time. I didn’t hear from her during that stage.
HW: Yeah, when I spoke with them it sounded like their plan was to each have their own writers they were working with, maybe looking at each other’s manuscripts for a second set of eyes.
CG: With Emily [Zhou] maybe, I think she’s working with Emily more closely.
HW: Yeah. I won’t be able to mention her book though since they told me it hasn’t officially been announced yet, or like officially confirmed. [A year and a half later, it’s been more than confirmed; LittlePuss published Emily Zhou’s short story collection, Girlfriends, in October of last year.] When they told me, I was just like OK… I’ll just pretend I didn’t send Emily an email seeking comment for this story. [laughs] I mean, LittlePuss has definitely tweeted about her book!
CG: They had a party at Cat’s house and Emily read a little piece, so I don’t know.
HW: Like, if it’s not public yet, how did I know about it?
CG: So, yeah, Casey became more involved after the book became a book, managing publicity and social media and events. She’s been wonderful, but Cat is the one that’s been there through my whole process.
HW: What changed that made you comfortable with having your stories printed?
CG: I think trust. Because if I open the book now and read some piece of the book, I’ll still think it’s stupid and it’s not good, but I trust Cat when she says that it’s good. I’ve gotten to the point that I trust her. So if she says that it’s good, it must be good. But I still read pieces of the books and think, “These parts are really stupid, like, how do I write this dumb shit—”
PETER: I don’t think so.
HW: Yeah.
PETER: It’s a beautiful book. [Kisses Cecilia.] Your book’s very nice. [Turning to me.] It’s nice seeing you again—I guess I saw you last week at [Río and Cyd’s] wedding.
HW: Yeah, thanks for picking me up at the subway tonight.
PETER: My pleasure, it’s my pleasure. [To Cecilia] You take care of her, OK?
CG: Yeah, I’m gonna put her in an Uber. We’ve been drinking…
PETER: [with a tone of mock naiveté] Hmmmm, yeah… I noticed that the bottle was a little empty…
CG: [laughs] Have a good night. You gonna sleep on the third floor?
PETER: No, I’m going to sleep on the second. I’m going to watch Survivor. You know the phone keeps going off—
CG: We’re doing the whole Survivor pool with Río.
HW: Oh, yeah, she was telling me—
CG: I know, I know. We’re pretending to be young and relevant
PETER: Oooooooo!
HW: I went over to their place sometime last year, and they were all watching Survivor. And then I went over there again a few months later, and they were all watching Survivor. Something’s going on in that house. They are always watching Survivor.
CG: They are Survivor addicts!
HW: All they talk about is Survivor. It’s taken over their lives now.
CG: In an effort to be young and relevant, we are pretending that we care about it.
PETER: I had never seen the show.
HW: Me either.
CG: I’ll stay down here with her if you watch it.
PETER: I’ll give you footnotes.
CG: Maybe I’m not pretending. Maybe I actually know who’s probably going to win and they’ll have to give me all the money.
PETER: Maybe next year because I’m winning this year.
HW: Good luck to you both.
PETER: Thank you. [Walks upstairs.]
HW: Literally every time I see them, every time I run into them, Survivor comes up. Flower [Estefana Rios], Cielo [Félix-Hernández]—
CG: It is unhealthy.
HW: They love Survivor.
CG: But I’m here for it. It’s fun. Río asked me, so excited, “Do you wanna be in our betting pool?” How am I gonna say no?
HW: Her energy is so infectious.
CG: I just sent them the money and looked at the contestants like hmmmm, well, this person is hot… This person looks smart… This person looks strong… I’m gonna pick them like that. [laughs] That’s what I did, and now I’m in a game to win 300 bucks.
HW: Totally unrelated, but I wanted to go back to talking about Apicha. I really wanted to ask you about it and how you got it up and running. I remember back in 2017 when I was first transitioning, my friend who started before me just went and got an appointment at Apicha. It was all pretty easy. Can you tell me how that kind of infrastructure came about and the role you played in building it?
CG: Yeah, so, I was in treatment. They didn’t know anything about trans people, so they decided to send me to the LGBT Center for peer counseling. Cristina Herrera [CEO and founder of the TransLatinx Network], who’s now one of my best friends, was my counselor. I think it was the first time that I’d met a trans woman who was not a sex worker. I was like, wait… You have a job? She was like, “Yeah, I’m a counselor here.” I started going to group there, and the next thing you know they had me facilitating the groups. They gave me an internship. I started working as an intern at the Center. When my internship was coming to an end, they asked me if I wanted to apply for any jobs. Apicha had an opening, and I applied. This amazing person helped me create my resume. They said, “What is your experience?” I said, “Well, basically, I’ve been a sex worker, a prostitute, for all my life.” They were like, “So, what did you do as a sex worker?” I was like, “Well, basically, I wait for phone calls. I wait for people to call me.” So they wrote, “Great at answering phones,” right? And then I said, “I schedule appointments.” They wrote, “Very good scheduling capabilities.” And then I said, “Clients come and I entertain them.” So they wrote, “Very good at customer services.” They wrote the whole resume based on what I used to do as a sex worker without saying I was a sex worker. I didn’t get the job, but they called me, saying they had another position they thought I could be great at. So I went to Apicha and started working. I remember when I went in the first time, I was wearing, like, high heels and a blue dress with short sleeves and pearls—a very cheap, tacky version of Jackie O. I don’t know, it was such a foreign thing: to have a job. I had to pretend to be this professional, right? I thought a lot about, like, Working Girl. Remember Melanie Griffith?
HW: With the super big hair.
CG: I was not working with trans people. I was an HIV peer navigator. My first day, my boss gave me a list of clients and asked me to put all the names, phone numbers, and addresses into a sheet. I looked at him, terrified, and he’s like, “It says that you are proficient in Excel and Word…” I was like, “Yeah.” I did not know what an Excel sheet was. So this other person found me crying in a corner, and he’s like, “What are you doing?” I was like, I have to do an Excel sheet, and I don’t know what that is.” He came with me to my desk and helped me make an Excel sheet and fill it out and then email it. I was like, “How do I put an Excel sheet into an email?” He taught me to do that, too. I sent my first email to my boss. I said, “This is the sheet that you asked for,” but if you think the word “sheet” in Spanish, it should be spelled “S-H-I-T” because that’s how it would be spelled phonetically. So I said, “This is the shit that you asked for.” [laughs] We had to have a big meeting about “the way that we communicate here.” I was like, “Oh, my god! I’m sorry! That’s how it sounds in Spanish!” They were like, “Oh, we’re all Asian here! Don’t worry.” The English barrier stuff was all OK, but I really thought I would just be fired on my first day. A couple of months go by. I’m working as a peer navigator, right? I don’t have any money. I was hungry—I was fucking hungry. The person they had working the trans clinic that they opened a couple months after I started working there leaves, and they were like, “Do you want to be the trans care coordinator?”
HW: Is this 2010? 2011?
CG: 2010, I think. I said yes and started working with their electronic medical records—I learned how to do that. I started doing outreach. I was seeing, like, 20 people a week. I couldn’t do orientations one-on-one anymore—had to create these orientation groups because so many people wanted to come.
HW: Specifically for HRT?
CG: Anything that a trans person would need, right? And, like, at the beginning, I didn’t know that a trans person could need anything but hormones. I didn’t know that some trans people don’t want hormones, and that some trans people don’t want to be women. A person would come in, and I’d say, “This is what we’re going to do: We’re going to get you on hormones, and I’m gonna get you a letter to get you a breast augmentation,” and they’re like, “Oh, no!” [laughs] I was like, “I’m going to make you a woman!” [laughs] People were very nice to me and put up with a lot of shit. I really didn’t know what I was doing. I learned with them. I learned a lot from my community, and I’d leave work with this sense that I did something good today. All these things, I had to do by myself—like, I didn’t have mother figures in the trans world. I never felt really attached to a sense of motherhood. But many people at Apicha started calling me mom or mother—I talk about it in my book. I would cringe because when I think about motherhood, I think about my mom who was a terrible mother [laughs], right?
HW: Which I feel you hinted at when we were being interviewed by that reporter for Torrey’s profile in New York magazine two years ago. We both talked for, like, two hours and only got, like, one line in the actual story. [laughs] [Author’s note: Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man, “we’re all looking for the guy who did this,” etc.]
CG: [laughs] I know! I read the whole thing, thinking, “Where are we coming in…?”
HW: Like, the only thing I end up saying is, like, “Torrey’s so hot, when I met her I wanted to kill myself.” Like, there was no context. Just, “Harron Walker says Torrey was so hot, I wanted to die.”
CG: “I wanted to kill myself,” that was the wording.
HW: Oh, yeah. “I wanted to throw myself off a cliff,” I think. But I was trying to say something about how meeting someone who passes when you’ve just started hormones—I did not know how to deal with that. But yeah, anyway, I do love that that’s in there, but I remember you said something when we were being interviewed and the conversation veered towards motherhood. Torrey nodded at your reputation as a maternal figure for so many trans girls who you got on hormones, who you’ve been a mentor for, and you said you had conflicted feelings over that. I didn’t fully get why until I read your book.
CG: When you don’t have a good relationship with your mom, it’s hard to be called a mother—and again, my relationship with my mom was not bad, per se. We were great friends because a mom who asks you to steal from your dad is not your mom. That’s your friend. That’s your buddy. [laughs] A mom who ignores that you’ve been raped is not very motherly. I have high regards for the idea of motherhood, so when somebody calls me mom or says “MOTHERRRRR,” I’m like, “Fuck!” That’s so much responsibility! Like, “No, girl, I don’t wanna be your mother. I’m your case manager, OK? Case. Manager. Miss Cecilia is fine.” And they’d be like, “MOTHERRRRR,” And I’d be like, “Fuck!” It was hard to find out that I could be seen as somebody’s mother because I don’t think of myself as someone who could handle the responsibility of motherhood.
HW: The anxiety of not being what you think a mother should be? Or failing to be that?
CG: Yes, like I could never be a mother. Why are you calling me mother? This sucks. I don’t want you showing up at my house and having to house you because that’s what a mother should do. I don’t want this!
HW: You were drawing a boundary.
CG: Yes, but then I realized they were talking about a kind of motherhood that was different—not different, but had other structures. Now, Gia [Love] is my daughter. Río is my daughter. Gogo is my daughter. Serena [Jara] is my daughter... I love being their mom, but it was a whole discovery.
HW: Has that changed how you think about your own mother? Going from “I could never be a mother” to “I could be a mother”? “I am a mother”?
CG: Yes. I made peace with that. It’s kind of inevitable with these kids. I mean, who am I to tell them I’m not their mom? They’re so set on it. What am I gonna do, be a bitch and say “Don’t call me mother”? Hopefully, you can see in the book that I have a lot of understanding and compassion for my mother, for how she acted. I hope it comes across as compassionate. She did her best. She didn’t deal with the things that she didn’t know how to deal with, and she had, you know, mental health issues. My mom would take pills to be happy—amphetamines—and then she couldn’t sleep at night. So she’d be up all night and then have to go to work, and she’d do that on no sleep and be crazy. She was like, “Oh, the money! We don’t have any money! What are we gonna do?” I was the only person next to her, so it was me she was telling, “OK, we need to steal from your father because I need to see a witch. Your father’s going to leave us,” so I said, “Oh… OK.” She was like, “No, it’s not OK.” I didn’t have a problem with stealing his money—I’ve stolen from many, many, many men in my life—and it wasn’t because he was my father. It was that I always thought he would kill me if he found me stealing money from him. It was such a terrible feeling to live with as a child—that this may be my last minute on Earth because he’s going to wake up and find me stealing from his pocket and get so mad he’ll kill me. My mother, I don’t think she ever felt any kind of responsibility for creating those situations for me. But I understand her better now. I have a lot of compassion for her. I love her. I love her very much. I had a lot of conversations with Cat about the end of the letter to my grandmother, because at first I said something like, “You were more of a mother than my mom, but if I had to choose who I miss more, I’d still say my mom.” We had to talk about why that would not be best for the narrative, because I wanted to show that dynamic of how my grandmother was a much better mother to me than my mom in terms of being understanding and caring and offering me love as a chill, but I still missed my mother more, even if she was terrible at times. I miss her incredibly. You may come to understand it better in my second book, where I talk about—
HW: You have plans for a second book?
CG: Yeah! [laughs] I am already writing it. It’s about my next 10 years, from 17 to 27 years old when I lived in Rosario. I left Gálvez and lived in Rosario and met trans people and started doing sex work and doing drugs. It’s all about sex, drugs, sex work—craziness.
HW: I read in past interviews that you started transitioning when you were in college. Is that right?
CG: Yes. I tried to go to college, but I dropped out. It was not something you could do at the same time.
HW: So it was like, either go to college or be trans. Try to get a job—
CG: And be miserable as a person, or be trans and lose all of that. As you can see, the choice was clear. I’m going to write about all of that.
HW: Will it still be in the letter format you used in Faltas?
CG: No. The next book is about the essence of places, streets you live on. “Do I have to hide as a trans person here?” or “Can I come out?” It’s about geography, locations, and how those locations shaped my transness and my life. You don’t work here, you work somewhere else. Locations have been very important in my life.
HW: So, 17 to 27?
CG: It finishes with a story about leaving Argentina. I feel like most of my life has been about leaving spaces. I left Gálvez. I left Rosario. I left Miami. I can’t believe that I’ve been in New York for almost 20 years. I feel like this is the last one. I’m not leaving anywhere.
HW: You feel pretty rooted in this house? In this community right now?
CG: Yes, well, Peter just retired at 50.
HW: Oh, that’s cool.
CG: No, it’s not cool! He’s at home [dramatically tilts her head up and raises her voice as if shouting so loud he’ll hear her upstairs] ALL DAY, BEING A FUCKING PAIN IN THE ASS. It’s cool for him, not for me. [laughs] So, he just retired. I’m 50—gonna be 51 in a couple of months. As I told you, I’m really trying to look for ways to do less. After almost 20 years of living in New York, I hate the winter—not the winter, the snow. In Argentina, we had cold winters growing up, but you could put on a coat, go out, and live your life. Here, walking through the accumulation of snow… I also have COPD, so my lungs get compromised easily. We are dreaming about doing like a… How do they call it… A snowbird, where you spend winter somewhere else. So, I think this is going to be our residence, but we’re going to spend winters somewhere else. The crazy part is, that somewhere else may be Argentina.
HW: Really? When was the last time you were back?
CG: Ummmm, well, I’m going to be a citizen next week. I’m becoming a citizen next week.
HW: Ahhhhh!!!!
CG: Finally.
HW: Congrats.
CG: But the last time I went was six years ago, and I was detained when I came back.
HW: Once you got back into the U.S.?
CG: Yes.
HW: Shit.
CG: They detained me in JFK. I was like, “Is this because I have two names?” And they were like, “No, girl. Look at your history of arrests!” And they pulled up this list with so many things on it. “You are a delinquent!” And I said, [adopting a more innocent, virginal tone] “No… I’m reformed…”
HW: It was a long time ago…
CG: They sent me to this room. It was horrible. I thought I was going to be deported. Peter was outside crying—
HW: Even though it’s been years at this point since you got asylum and everything?
CG: Yes. Peter’s outside crying and calling lawyers—calling everybody. I’m in there, not crying. I’m just thinking, like, OK… I have to find a way out of this. The guards change shifts, and the new guard looks at me and asks, “Why are you here?” I said, [all pure and virginal once more] “It’s because I have…two names…” And he was like, “Ugh! We’ve been trained about this! Just go, please. Just go… Miss? Miss! Yes. Miss.” And I was like, [you can hear the intact hymen] “Thank you…” [laughs] And ran out of there, up to Peter who’s crying outside, and I just say, “Run, Peter!! Run!!” [laughs] We’re running, and Peter’s crying, “I thought I was going to lose you!” and I’m like, “Let’s get the fuck out of here!”
HW: I’m so glad that worked. [laughs] Is that the kind of thing I can put in the story?
CG: Oh, yeah. You can put it in, everything I’m going to tell you. I’m going to be a citizen next Thursday. If the story comes out any time after next week, I’m fine. You know, being trans has been, most of the time, a terrible thing to navigate in life, but a couple of times like here or when I was in Immigration and they sent me out with an ankle bracelet because I was trans, it actually was quite helpful.
HW: In a past interview, you’d said it was because they let you out with an ankle bracelet that you had time to apply for asylum. Is that right?
CG: Yeah, yeah. That’s totally what happened. If I was inside, I could not have gotten a lawyer to take on my asylum case. But because I was outside, I was able to get treatment and detox. I started a 12 Step program and got connected with a free lawyer from a nonprofit—they sent me to a Catholic charity! In my first meeting with the lawyer, I said, “I just want to be clear. I am a transsexual, and I am an atheist, and I don’t believe in God.” I didn’t know how they were going to offer me services. And my lawyer, she was like, “Girl, I’m a lesbian, and I’m an atheist, too. Don’t worry.” [laughs] The Catholic charity did my immigration case for free. I didn’t pay for anything. The whole thing happened because I was let out with an ankle bracelet.
HW: Shifting gears, let’s talk about your company, Trans Equity Consulting. When did you found that?
CG: 2018? I would say I was working at GMHC. I was a manager by the time I left Apicha, with people under me doing direct services for clients.
HW: You started with a handful of clients in the trans health program, and by the end?
CG: 650. So, I had three patient navigators under me—I hate to say people were “under me.” I had a team. We worked together. I’d actually hired three trans women, which was really cool. So they were the ones providing the services, but although I was a manager, I was still very involved with our clients. I was always going to the clinic to meet the people we worked with. A lot of people were coming to Apicha because of me. Like, people would tell their friends, “Oh, there’s this crazy lady Cecilia! She’s going to get you on hormones right away!” And other people wanted to meet me, right? By that point, I’d started making money and moved into a better place. I was dating this older trans woman. We’d dated each other a long time ago, but drugs came in the way. She’d left the country, but came back. I was terrible to her, and she was terrible to me—that’s book number three. [laughs] And now she’s back here, and I’m living with her. I’m talking to her about adopting a child, like, “Please! I’ll just be a mother and take care of you.” So, I’m in this different situation, making good money, but it was hard to go home to my nice dinner and my comfortable bed knowing I was leaving people who were hungry and homeless… I can’t do this shit. It’s hard. I really have such an admiration for people who do case management for so many years. It’s hard because sometimes you can’t offer, you know, anything that even comes close to what you have. So, I moved to GMHC, who’d made me their Director of Policy there. I had no idea what policy was.
HW: Oh, wait—do you mind if I go to the bathroom?
CG: Oh, go, go, go…
[The recording picks up a few minutes later.]
HW: Sorry, I really thought I could hold that. Classic my bladder, just like, “No, you can’t!” So you were saying that you just got to GMHC from Apicha and were doing policy work.
CG: I had this incredible mentor named Julian Klein. He taught me a lot of shit about policy, and—do you want some tea?
HW: I’m alright, thanks.
CG: So, he taught me a lot about policy. I told him that I wanted to get money from the city—money to do trans work—and he said, “OK, you have to build a coalition and ask for money from a politician.”
HW: Who were the other people in the coalition?
CG: Sean Coleman, Kiara St. James… A whole bunch of trans people. LaLa Zannell…
HW: Was she still at AVP at the time?
CG: She was at AVP at the time. So, I formed this coalition, we went to a politician, we asked for money, and kept it going every year. Last year, it was $4.5 million.
HW: When was the first year?
CG: 2016? Yeah, 2016. The coalition didn’t have a name, but we called it the Trans Equity Fund to get funding. After a couple of years, the fund kept growing. We kept adding money to it. By then, I decided to leave GMHC. I thought, this is my legacy. I created the Trans Equity Fund. So I didn’t feel terribly bad about taking the name and creating my own company and calling it Trans Equity Consulting. In the beginning, it was just me doing speeches and panels and little trainings here and there. Then after we had a couple more clients, I hired Cyd.
HW: Was he your first employee?
CG: Yes, he was my first employee.
HW: Aw.
CG: I went to Riis beach, and Cyd was there—
HW: Was that the first time you two had met?
CG: I think we’d met before, a couple of times. I knew Cyd because when I was at GMHC, I formed another coalition—after the Trans Equity Fund, I was like, “Oh! Coalition work works!” So I created the Decrim NY coalition, and we started writing the bill to decriminalize sex work in the state of New York. We went to City Council and asked for money for sex workers, and that’s how we created the coin clinic. Cyd started coming to the Decrim NY meetings, and we became close. I offered him a job at GMHC, but he was like, “No, honey, I’m going to school.”
HW: Him saying “honey,” like the word “honey” is something I associated with him.
CG: Honey!
HW: [my best Cyd voice] Honeyyyyyyy!
CG: [her best Cyd voice] Honeyyyyyyyy!
HW: When I was driving with a bunch of people to see Río and Cyd one time, we all started taking bets on what the first thing Cyd would say would be. Someone, I think it was Harry [Cullen], bet “honeyyyy,” and when we got there Cyd walked out, like, “Honeyyyy.” He was right.
CG: [laughs] So one time, I went to Riis Beach with Ambrose—Ambrose is Cyd’s best friend. I go to Riis with Ambrose and Cyd is there, and after talking I hired him right there. I didn’t know what I was doing at first. He didn’t know what he was doing at first. I don’t think anyone knew what they were doing when they were first hired by Trans Equity. We were all very 12 Step at this point—fake it till you make it, another concept I borrowed from recovery, right? Fake it till you make it. I go into a room, and I fucking make you believe that I know what I’m doing when in reality I’m learning how to do it while I do it. Again, that comes from recovery. Fake it till you make it. That’s how we all are as professionals. I make money to pay everybody and myself. I don’t know, it’s hard to define success for people because success is different—eat some, baby.
[Peter has come back downstairs]
PETER: Oh!
CG: It’s baklava. [Author’s note: I brought some from Sahadi’s, which is around the corner from where I work.]
PETER: I had success in Survivor. Three of them from each team had to walk across these rocks, and they had a choice to either lose their vote at the next meeting or get an awesome kind of pass or something.
CG: OK, what happened? I lost interest already…
PETER: My guy! Gabler—Mike Gabler. He won.
CG: Is Ryan still there?
PETER: Is that one of your people?
CG: Yes.
PETER: Ryan? Oh… I think he died.
CG: [melodramatic] Noooooo!!!! [laughs] That’s so stupid. Have a baklava.
PETER: I think I’m gonna have ice cream. I’m having a real craving for ice cream.
CG: Would you get me a chamomile tea?
PETER: I’ll get you a chamomile tea. Would you like a chamomile tea?
HW: Oh, no. I’m OK. Thanks, though.
PETER: Would you like more tequila?
HW: I should probably at least be able to find my keys at the end of the night. [laughs] Thank you, though. I was just thinking, I should probably keep an eye on the time. I have to wake up at, like, 5:30 for work.
CG: What do you do?
HW: I work in the kitchen of a diner in Greenpoint. It’s actually, like, not that far from where Torrey lives.
CG: Oh, perfect. How many jobs do you have?
HW: At the moment? Ummmmm, three or four, depending on how you define it. [Author’s note: Is "working on a book" a job in its own right, or is it a sub-job under “freelance writer”? Either way, I finished it—and also quit the diner.]
CG: You’re making it work, which comes back to what I was saying before about how to define success because success looks different for everybody, right? In my idea of success, I’m successful, you know? And it took time for me to recognize that I deserve success. I deserve to have a company. I deserve a partner and to have a book and—
PETER: Oh—
CG: Excuse me, it’s my interview! Get the FUCK out of here! You do your own interview! [laughs] And to have a book, you know, why not? I have it, and I want more, but I also want to do less. I want to work less. I need to work less.
HW: Do you think that’s realistically going to happen soon?
CG: I’m trying really hard, but again, most of the folks that work with me—we are learning as we go. It’s hard to ask them to step up to positions they don’t feel comfortable in yet, so most of the projects I manage myself, and that’s not sustainable. But I’m trying to find ways to make it work, even while I’m trying to work less, and find a way to enjoy myself. I think this interview has been the longest time I haven’t looked at my phone and checked up on work or answered an email or something like that. No, really. This is such a refreshing time.
HW: Well, thanks for letting me into your home to distract you from your phone. Can you describe the kind of things that Trans Equity Consulting has been doing recently? I don’t know if you can talk about it, if it’s private or discreet.
CG: No, no, no, we work with governments. We work with the Departments of Health at the state levels and the city level, doing things to support their work with trans people. We’re currently planning a retreat for trans leaders in the state of New York, which is so cool. I get to plan a whole retreat, and they give me the money to do it. We’re also planning to do a lowkey educational program, which is, like, you know—you don’t have a Bachelor’s, but you’ll have this diploma from the state of New York. Something to support themselves so they can make it in the workplace.
HW: Like, you don’t have the experience, but you have the experience.
CG: We do most of our work contracts with the state of New York. We work with nonprofits like SAGE, Ali Forney Center, Callen-Lorde, making sure that their services for trans people are the best and making sure that their interactions with trans coworkers are the best—because when we think about trans people, we always think of them as clients of nonprofits; trans people work at nonprofits too, right? And we want more trans people to work at nonprofits, so we have to create spaces that are trans-sensitive, or at least not transphobic. We also work with corporations because we love corporate money. Gucci, Coach… I get paid in shoes and bags because I love designers. [laughs] I fucking love designers. We work with other corporations, so, yeah—that’s what we do.
HW: Going back to—sorry, I feel like I’m obsessed with your work at the Apicha trans health clinic. I was wondering if you could describe what accessing trans healthcare was like when you first got to New York City 20 years ago. Like, when I started transitioning in the mid-2010s, everyone was either going to Apicha or Callen-Lorde—or maybe they went to Planned Parenthood. [Author’s note: Oooooo, she’s different.] There were these three informed consent clinics to get hormones. What was it like for you when you first got here?
CG: I came to New York City in 2003, and I did hormones from the black market. I was getting the Colombian hormones, the Soluna. They were the best. I would get them from the Bronx from this trans girl who would get them from Colombia. They had to be Soluna. Nothing but Soluna.
HW: Was that, like, a pill or an injectable or…
CG: It was an injectable. Your nipples would blow out so hard that you would do a Soluna and for two days afterward you could not let your nipples touch your t-shirt. It was, like, painful, but I craved that pain. That was my reality. So when I went into treatment, they sent me to Callen-Lorde to get hormones—they were the only place to go that I knew about—but they were at capacity and couldn’t take on new clients, so they put me on their waiting list for, like, six months.
HW: Which still happens even though there are, like, three different locations now, it’s crazy.
CG: But there’s also a lot more people coming out. It was the perfect moment for Apicha’s trans healthcare program to take off like it did. Callen-Lorde was at capacity, so all these people on their waiting list and other people just starting to transition started hearing about this little clinic in Chinatown that also had hormones. Also, I don’t know what Apicha’s IT department did to make this happen, but at the time if you searched “HRT” the first thing that came up was Apicha, so some people heard about it that way. Other people told their friends, “Why are you waiting for Callen-Lorde? Go to Apicha. They give it to you right away. There’s this crazy woman named Cecilia that kind of fast-tracks everything.” They would tell their friends, and soon we had 20, 30, 40 people coming in a week. I didn’t have time to write my monthly reports because there were so many people. It was just an avalanche. We got money from different grants to grow, and I got to hire trans people to offer services to trans people. It was such a stars-align thing for me to shine. I don’t wanna put it like I shined because I was great, but I shined because everything came to be in such a way that was very beneficial for my career. I was in the right time in the right place with a lot of desire to succeed. I had a lot to prove. I didn’t do shit for 20 years; I was just using heavy drugs. I thought, I have to make something of myself, in part so I could go back to Argentina and go back to Gálvez and show them that I made it. That’s how much they all lived in my head. I wanted to show them that I’d made it, that I was not a failure, that I am not the piece of shit that you tried to make me believe that I was. But then six years ago when I went to Gálvez, I realized this is terrible. How sad it is that I’m just trying to show them that I’m successful. Why? I had something to say to these people. That’s why I wrote those letters to them. That’s how this book came about. I think everything kind of aligned in a very specific way. Does that make sense?
HW: Yeah, definitely. When you were in Gálvez, did you run into anyone you wrote letters to?
CG: I ran into a couple people who I definitely made an effort to parade Peter in front of, for example—to say, “I got a man, and how many times did you get divorced?” [laughs] It was fun.
HW: Yeah.
CG: I was like, “Oh, let’s have dinner! I’ll pay. I have money, and I know that you’re broke.” It feels great, because they made me feel like shit so many times. I’d just be like, “Just google my article in The New York Times! Just google ‘cecilia gentili new york times’—oh, wait. You don’t read English.” [laughs] As I was doing that, I was like, “What am I doing? Why am I doing all this shady shit? There were much deeper things that I needed to say, and again there was Cat, asking me to write a book. “I have my own press now! You’ll get to write whatever you want!” So everything came into place.
HW: Is there anything you didn’t get a chance to talk about in the interview, or anything important that hasn’t been said that you want to say now?
CG: I feel so comfortable that I don’t even remember the things that I said, so I don’t remember the things that I didn’t say either.
HW: Good thing I recorded it.
CG: No, I talked about everything I wanted to talk about. And I appreciate you.
HW: I appreciate you so much. [We hug.] Also, thanks for trusting me to interview you. And write about you. And, yeah—I don’t know. I don’t take it for granted, and I really appreciate it.
CG: I can’t wait to read it.