[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Hello, a warning before we begin: this series contains sensitive content including violence, drugs, and sexual language. We recommend discretion.
The story begins in a large van, on a street in Brooklyn, New York. It’s February 2024.
Inside the vehicle, a dozen young trans people. They’re from different countries: Mexico, Colombia, Peru.
[Viento]: The dress code is red, right? Red. And showing some body.
[Edua]: I did my hair and put a ton of red flowers in it.
[Viento]: I was wearing a dress with these great sleeves and a giant red hat and heels that I would never wear now, but they were like those stiletto ones.
[Rio]: I showed up in a long dress with feathers, a red one.
[Edua]: Wow. A super glamorous red dress with red feathers.
[Rio]: And I also had a boa made out of hundred-dollar bills.
[Viento]: It looked like it was made of dollars, it was incredible. For me it’s a really beautiful memory. And also a very sad one.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Sad, because despite appearances, they are all in mourning. The van is taking them to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, for the funeral of their mother, a queen among queens: Cecilia Gentili.
[Rio]: We were all in there watching and watching the clock.
[Viento]: And around halfway there, we’re like, «why are we still in Brooklyn?»
[Rio]: And that was when we said, «hey, where are you going?»
[Viento]: And we tell him like, «hey, why are you taking this route?» And he says, «oh, because I’m going to 51st and whatever,» like, I don’t know what address he said. And we’re like, «what?! But we are going to Manhattan!»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: They exchange looks and think the same thing: if they want to make it to the funeral on time…
[Rio]: I think we’re going to have to take the subway.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: The subway, at rush hour, in winter.
[Rio]: Very, very stressful because it wasn’t just a matter of taking the train. It was running to the train, switching trains, and then running the three or four blocks we had to run, and I was in stripper heels.
[Viento]: So, picture like 10, 12 trans people, very queened up, in heels, running from the van…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Flying to the station.
[Rio]: We were completely insane.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Laughing, screaming.
[Viento]: Like, if anyone had seen us on the street, they would have thought we were filming a movie.
[Edua]: It was… Yeah, it was like total drama, comedy, beauty. Very Cecilia the whole time. Like, wow, this is so fucking Cecilia, because we all got off very glamourous. We got on the train…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And there’s a preacher reading out loud from the Bible.
[Viento]: And you ignore him because, well, if he wants to read the Bible, let him read the Bible. But out of nowhere he started kind of going at us, right?
[Rio]: Saying we were going to hell and that we needed to repent and all that stuff.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Transphobic things I won’t repeat here.
[Rio]: You don’t know what he’s going to do, but you also know there are 12 of us, and I’m wearing heels, sharp ones…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: So they started defending themselves.
[Rio]: Because we had no time or energy for that nonsense.
[Viento]: Like, we’re going to our mother’s funeral, just shut up, right? Like, shut up. And the man just kept going on and on. So, I don’t know if it was in a moment of… It’s like when grief becomes so strong it turns into strength or something, and Rio just started singing…
[Rio]: «First I was afraid, I was petrified»…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: «I Will Survive» by Gloria Gaynor.
[Rio]: Starting from the very beginning of the song, because we didn’t know how long that person was going to keep bothering us.
[Viento]: We started singing along with her, and then the whole train started singing with us.
[Rio]: They were laughing, singing with us. It was one of those New York moments where you can feel there’s really like a connection with all these people you don’t know.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: The entire train car drove the preacher out at the next stop. And so, running again toward the cathedral — a little late perhaps, but in style — they couldn’t stop thinking that they were living out one of the stories their mother Cecilia would have told them.
[Rio]: It was a very Cecilia experience, because it was a moment where we were really feeling mortality, the trauma of losing Cecilia — which for me was the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to me in my life. And just like the way she wrote and told her stories, we found the humor in it.
[Viento]: Like, we all felt so strongly that sense of: «Ceci did this,» like, «Ceci orchestrated the universe to make this happen.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Among all the queens of Queens, Cecilia Gentili left a unique legacy. Not only of activism and protecting the community, but also an entire catalog of stories that are still being told today.
And her funeral was perhaps her masterpiece.
From Central Series and Radio Ambulante Studios, this is Las Reinas de Queens. I’m Rula Ávila Muñoz.
Episode 4. The Holy Whore.
Surrounded by skyscrapers, St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan stands out for its white walls, its stained glass windows, and its two neo-Gothic towers. It’s one of the world’s most important Catholic churches. It has been the setting for funerals of athletes, politicians, and artists. And also for LGBTQ community protests against Catholic Church discrimination during the HIV epidemic in the 1980s. A historic landmark.
Cecilia Gentili’s funeral was held there on February 15, 2024. The church was packed, with more than a thousand people — something unusual.
[Priest]: Well, welcome to St. Patrick’s Cathedral…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: So much so that the priest himself points it out as he extends his greeting.
[Priest]: Except on Easter Sunday we don’t really have a crowd that is, that is this well turned out, you know?
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: He says the cathedral only fills up like this on Easter Sunday. And that applause, that howl, is the first sign that this funeral will be like no other.
[Priest]: Let us pray…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Let’s move from the cathedral to the theater:
[Cecilia Gentili]: I am an atheist…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: This is Cecilia Gentili in her theater piece «Red Ink,» which she staged in New York in 2023. It was a monologue in which she told stories about her childhood and youth in Argentina and about her deeply conflicted and contradictory relationship with religion.
[Cecilia Gentili]: I am an atheist, but I have had many, many calls from God…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: «I am an atheist,» she says. «But I have had many, many calls from God.»
[Cecilia Gentili]: In Rosario, the most important thing that happened to me is that I met the first trans person that I ever met in my life.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And in that piece, Cecilia said that the most important call from God in her life came at age 17, when, in the city of Rosario, she met trans people for the first time in her life. Among them was a woman known as La Correntina.
[Norma]: La Correntina was a drag performer with a long history. She was a prominent figure here in Rosario — she took her under her wing and taught her everything she knew about putting together costumes, making feather pieces, doing makeup. And they began putting on shows at a bar that no longer exists, called Inizio, which was right across from a plaza where the girls worked in sex work.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: This is Norma, Cecilia’s lifelong friend. They were born and grew up in a small town called Gálvez. And what bound them from the start was their desire to live against the customs and prejudices of their neighbors.
[Norma]: The only thing that unproductive, forked-tongue society did…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: That is, snake-tongued…
[Norma]: Was to trap people within their own demons and refuse to let them simply be or move forward.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Cecilia came from a poor family of Indigenous descent. That, according to Norma, left her with a feeling of inferiority for a long time. But the town’s rejection manifested in a far more violent way, one impossible to forget. For years, Cecilia was the victim of sexual abuse by a neighbor. And for years, no one knew.
[Norma]: This story of the abuse she suffered as a girl is the dark cloud she fought with every day in search of answers.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Cecilia escaped at 17 to the city of Rosario. And there, guided by La Correntina, she began performing in “transformismo” shows — as that type of entertainment is typically called in Argentina. But Cecilia’s numbers had a twist. While others dressed up and put on makeup chasing an unattainable ideal of feminine beauty…
[Norma]: When Cecilia came on, she was the girl next door, you know? It became a more theatrical event. She always went toward the everyday and toward the reality of bodies worn by time, you know?
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: She dressed like an ordinary woman — sagging breasts, flat behind, invisible hips…
[Norma]: She made herself look plain, she was scrawny, her hair was a mess, you know? And with that she hooked and charmed snakes out of her audience, you know?
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And while others lip-synced to Madonna or Whitney Houston, Cecilia lip-synced to Argentine artists from the seventies, like Violeta Rivas.
[Norma]: Which was very cliché, very, very bizarre music.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Or well, she tried to lip-sync. Because she could never manage to memorize the songs. But instead of trying to hide the problem, she made it part of the act.
[Norma]: The music would go one way and her mouth would go another — then every so often she’d remember, you know, that she was supposed to be lip-syncing. So she satirized her own weaknesses.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And over time she also started adding little monologues and telling stories about the people she knew.
[Norma]: She broke the fourth wall constantly to talk to the audience, you know? Skills the other girls simply didn’t have.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: From that point on, Cecilia began to challenge what was expected of her as a trans woman. And that was how she started teaching herself — and her community — that there were other ways to represent their experience.
[Priest]: Could the person who is going to read the second reading, please come forward?
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: LaLa Zannell, Cecilia’s sister, comes up to the altar to read the Psalm prayer. And as she reaches the last step, she raises her right foot ever so slightly — very flirtatiously. The priest laughs, and she approaches the microphone.
[LaLa]: We still gonna show up as us.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: «We’re going to show up exactly as we are,» she says. And she begins:
[LaLa]: A reading from the first letter of St. John.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: A reading from the first letter of St. John: «See what love the Father has for us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him…»
[LaLa]: The word of the Lord.
[Priest]: Thanks be to God.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Cecilia used to say that when she was little she didn’t feel like she was a part of this world. As if she were an extraterrestrial. As if people didn’t truly know her.
That feeling of discomfort made her flee — first from Gálvez, and then, around the year 2000, from Rosario. There, the drag scene had declined. The police harassed trans people. And the gravitational pull of her hometown was still too strong. On top of that, Cecilia needed to earn more money to continue her transition. So she went further. To Miami.
There she began working as an unlicensed hairdresser. She had no papers, there were no opportunities and that pushed her into sex work. And into drug use. She entered a great labyrinth. And there, a prophecy began to come true — one that, according to her stories, a trans woman from Rosario had once made to her: «if you want to be trans,» she told her…
[Cecilia Gentili]: You’re gonna be a whore…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: You will be a whore.
[Cecilia Gentili]: You are gonna get high…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: You will get high.
[Cecilia Gentili]: And you’re gonna die young.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And you will die young.
[Cecilia Gentili]: And I said, «fine, fine. How young?»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: «Ok, ok, but how young?» Cecilia asked. But then she realized she didn’t care about her age. She preferred to live a short, authentic life over a long, false one.
[Cecilia Gentili]: And I said, «this is for me. I want to do this. Let’s start.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And so she began her transition.
[Cecilia Gentili]: And that’s how I started my transition.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Cecilia died at 52, after taking a dose of heroin not knowing it had been laced with fentanyl.
[Priest]: Death is not the end, nor does it break the bonds forged in life.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: At the funeral, the priest gives his homily. He says that the Church intercedes for the dead, out of its conviction that death is not the end, nor does it break the bonds formed in life.
[Priest]: Death is an enemy, but death is now an enemy defeated.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Death is an enemy, but now it is a defeated enemy.
[Priest]: Amen.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: We’ll be right back.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: We’re back on Las Reinas de Queens.
Cecilia navigated the labyrinth of drugs and sex work during the first ten years of her life in the United States.
Along that road — which took her from Miami to San Francisco and then to New York — sex work gave her enough money to have surgeries, get a nice apartment, expensive clothes… And also heroin. Her struggle with addiction led her to lose everything. She fell into homelessness. She became a victim of human trafficking. She ended up in prison.
But then, with the help of several strangers who were part of the trans community, she found her way out of the labyrinth. When she was on the verge of being deported, a social worker managed to transfer her to a rehabilitation center. And during the 17 months she spent there, a lawyer helped her obtain asylum in the United States. And later, another lawyer handled her name change.
It was at that point, around 2010, that Cecilia began to reinvent herself as a storyteller.
Behind that reinvention were two key steps. The first was beginning to work for the city’s trans community. With her papers in order, she found work at a community health center in lower Manhattan called APICHA. There she accompanied some six hundred and fifty people through their transition processes — six hundred and fifty people she listened to and offered her own story to as a guide. Here’s Norma again.
[Norma]: Her story serves a purpose. It serves precisely as a testimony for the people she had — what were called «her cases» at the time. They were her cases, like little folders they would hand her. And I think that’s where her storytelling begins, in this therapeutic narrative she creates with each of her cases — building a bond, the bond of a mother.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: But that role was heavy. After four years, Cecilia quit APICHA.
[Norma]: She told me: I can’t keep working here at APICHA because it means listening to my own story every day.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: She had been listening to and telling trauma for years — first to her lawyers and immigration officials, and then to her patients. The world seemed to ask of her only pain and sadness. But Cecilia knew that her story — and trans stories — were so much more than tragedy. And this is where the second key step comes in.
[Cecilia Gentili]: This dude is perfect. God… God has sent him to me. About time.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: At night, Cecilia began telling her stories at some of the city’s trans bars. And there she gave a new purpose to what was perhaps her greatest gift.
[Norma]: She understood that humor is a weapon, and she understood that it can also transform difficult stories into stories that can make you laugh.
[Katia]: It was what she could do: «hey, I’m going to talk about this thing that is a huge and horrible tragedy. And I’m going to make you laugh.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: This is Katia Perea, a friend of Cecilia’s.
[Katia]: When she spoke and told these stories, she was in that moment teaching you that it was possible to survive the things that many of us have suffered, you know, being queer and trans from a young age. And so, how we can have joy today, right now.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And so, to help you better understand all of this, Katia is going to tell us one of Cecilia’s most iconic stories. The story of Jesus’s penis.
Ok, the 1980s in Rosario, Argentina. Cecilia is a young trans woman, naive, romantic, full of hormones, who spends her time at the city’s trans bar.
[Katia]: So, she’s there on a Monday, a Tuesday afternoon, into the evening, and a man shows up.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: A strikingly handsome man with a Polaroid camera hanging over his pecs.
[Katia]: And he says to her: «you are so beautiful.» And she’s like, «oh, thank you.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: But Cecilia, so innocent at the time, feels the need to give him fair warning…
[Katia]: «Just so you know, I’m trans»… And he goes, «No, I can’t believe it!»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: «How is that possible!? God… Well, I don’t care, you are too beautiful. You’re going to be my first trans woman!»
[Katia]: Right away she’s in the fantasy that he is in love with her. He’s going to marry her. They’re going to have a family.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: But the man offers her something less romantic.
[Katia]: He tells her, “let’s have sex in the bathroom.”
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Cecilia calculates: he could be the man of her life.
[Katia]: So she says, «okay.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And in the bar’s dirty little bathroom, the man gets straight to the point. He pulls down his pants, and Cecilia sees that he has a dark mark on his penis.
[Katia]: And she said, «I got a little worried because it’s the AIDS season, so I didn’t know what it was.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: It was the time of the AIDS epidemic, after all.
[Katia]: «But when I start the blowjob, I realize as it starts to grow, that it was a tattoo… of Jesus Christ.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Jesus!
[Katia]: Oh Jesus! Yes! Here comes Jesus!
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: They get going. But then Cecilia hears a click.
[Katia]: He takes a photo of her with the Polaroid…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: The man has just taken a photo of her with the Polaroid!
[Katia]: The photo comes out and he says, «okay, I’m going to step out. You clean yourself up.» And so she’s so young, you know, and naive. She’s thinking, «oh, now I have a boyfriend and we’re going to get married and…» Okay, so she comes out and goes to find him at the bar — which is empty because it’s Tuesday — and she looks around and doesn’t see him.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: The guy isn’t in the bar, or outside on the street either. Cecilia goes back to the counter and confesses to the bartender: something very strange just happened to her.
[Katia]: He goes, «strange, that a man took you back there and had sex with you?» “Yes…” «And that he had a tattoo of Jesus Christ on his penis?» “Yes…” At that moment she sees that behind the bartender, there in the bar, are all the photos of the girls that man had taken in the bathroom. And she realized that she was now part of that group. And then she says: «and that’s the last time I ever had sex for free.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And that was the last time Cecilia gave sex away for free. She had found her profession: sex work. But of course, Cecilia knew how to modulate her stories depending on the audience in front of her.
[Oscar]: Yes, I think she had already noticed how people responded over years of telling those stories.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: This is Oscar, one of Cecilia’s daughters, who worked with her for many years.
[Oscar]: She knew how to inject charisma from different angles into the story to highlight different things. So every time you got to hear a story, whether you’d already heard it or it was your first time, something different always stood out.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Cecilia read her audiences. And I say that in the plural, because throughout the 2010s she was building a dual career — as an activist and as a storyteller. And she reached more and more audiences. On one hand, she moved from bars to off-Broadway theaters. And on the other, she went from working for other LGBTQ organizations to founding her own company in 2018: Trans Equity Consulting.
[Viento]: It was an organization that did consulting on trans issues, by trans people, from a trans perspective.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: This is Viento, one of Cecilia’s children — one we heard singing «I Will Survive» on the subway.
[Viento]: And Ceci really advocated for trans people to speak only from their own experience, and that that experience itself was like our school, you could say.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Viento worked with Cecilia at Trans Equity. And they were something like a commando unit. A trans commando unit, ready to move into cis-heteronormative territory. Cecilia knew that there were countless companies and organizations that had no idea how to treat trans employees or clients. And that’s where Trans Equity came in with training sessions.
[Viento]: What gender is, what it means to be trans, what pronouns are, and so on — like, starting from zero: what the trans experience is and how to treat and provide services to trans people in your organization.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And the secret weapon of those training sessions was, of course, Cecilia’s stories.
[Viento]: You’d just put up a slide about… it could be anything… Pronouns. And she’d spend like half an hour on that slide, just talking about something that had happened to her. She always connected it back to her own life.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And that connection — so strategic — always had a different purpose depending on the audience. Because, as we’ve already heard, with her stories Cecilia could heal and comfort and entertain, but also educate, persuade, and move people.
[Norma]: Never with bitterness, always with humor.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Back to Norma.
[Norma]: She had told me: «I discovered…» Oh, I don’t know if it’s okay for me to say this, but anyway… «I actually discovered how to get money out of rich people for my community, because I found a gap. I found a gray area in the system. Not stealing from them, right? No. But how to ask them and how to make them feel guilty.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Cecilia frequented many fundraising galas for New York’s trans community. There she rubbed shoulders with wealthy people, always willing to donate to a good cause. And to benefit from tax deductions. Cecilia knew this. So she told stories that placed the audience before a dilemma.
[Norma]: She put you in a bind with your sense of emotional responsibility toward others, to give those people the chance to be the saviors, right? She cast them in that role.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: She was like Robin Hood. And her stories were like arrows aimed straight at the hearts of the wealthy. And their wallets. And politicians — well, she charmed them too.
Cecilia led an entire movement that managed to give sex workers greater legal protections in New York. She helped the state legislature pass a law so that police could no longer detain sex workers simply for being on the street. And at the time of her death she was supporting a bill aimed at decriminalizing sex work in the state — which, let’s not forget, is still a crime in New York.
In short: Cecilia seemed to be everywhere at once. And in each of those spaces, the applause was vital.
[Norma]: The applause was vital — but not for the sake of the applause itself, but for the communion that existed between the audience and what she was telling. I think without that, yes, she could not have lived.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Because that communion was her ultimate purpose. And precisely for that reason, Cecilia sometimes didn’t hold back when it came to embellishing her stories or changing their content to sharpen the meaning she was after.
The man with the Polaroid camera, for example, didn’t actually have a tattoo of Jesus — it was of the Virgin Mary. But what we might consider a deception could also be seen as a way of taking ownership of her past and the story she told about her life. Shaping herself beyond the trauma, the abuse, and the pain.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: In her journey as a storyteller, fiction and reality always went hand in hand. In 2018 she had a role in one of the first television series to address the trans experience with trans characters and trans actors: POSE.
[Cecilia en POSE]: But Miss Orlando is here to make things right.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: There she played Miss Orlando, a Latin trans woman from New York who in the 1980s sold hormones to low-income trans people.
And so, over the course of a decade, Cecilia’s stories touched more and more people. And the wider her reach grew, the more she became her own myth. But that myth was still missing its final chapter. We’ll be right back.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: We’re back on Las Reinas de Queens.
After the priest’s homily — in which he spoke of conquering death — the funeral continues. And every evocation of Cecilia’s life fills the cathedral audience with life. Katia Perea, Cecilia’s friend who told us the Polaroid man story, comes up to the altar…
[Katia]: And may Cecilia’s community be loved and received and seen by each other…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And she prays for the community’s access to gender-affirming healthcare. Or, as Katia puts it, «life-affirming.»
[Katia]: We pray to our Lord Jesus Christ, who is full of love. Lord, hear our prayer.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And then three people share memories of Cecilia.
[Peter]: How many times our phone would ring in the middle of the night…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Peter, her partner of more than 10 years, speaks about how Cecilia would get up in the middle of the night to help her APICHA children…
[Peter]: And she’d always be there and always answer that call.
[Ceyenne Doroshow]: But this lady worked so hard, to make sure…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And Ceyenne Doroshow, one of the leaders of the Black trans community, recalls that Cecilia did everything in her power to protect sex workers.
[Ceyenne Doroshow]: That sex workers are free. I don’t know, y’all may have heard the story that Jesus ministered to all. Cecilia ministered to all.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Cecilia, like Jesus, took care of everyone.
There’s an archival recording of Cecilia’s voice I want you to hear.
[Cecilia Gentili]: Hi, hi, hi. Hola, hola, hola. Hello to everyone. Thank you all for being here…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: It’s from March 31, 2021, a year after the death of Lorena Borjas, the queen of queens, whom we met in our first episode. A group of her friends and members of the Latin trans sex worker community had gathered to celebrate a small street near Roosevelt Avenue receiving a new name: Lorena Borjas Way.
[Cecilia Gentili]: I have sort of mixed feelings. Because there’s no point in having a street named after Lorena if there’s no commitment, no desire to do what the community needs. There’s no point in having a street named after Lorena if there are girls who have nothing to eat. There’s no point in having a street named after Lorena if there are girls who can’t pay rent, who have no doctor, who have nowhere to go when they’re at their lowest. All these tears we can shed mean nothing if we don’t all come together to do what the community needs — because that’s what Lorena wanted. And that’s what would make Lorena happy. I’m going to cry, because why not, right? But at the same time I commit to keep working. And I want everyone here to do the same — for all of us here to have a desire to work for the community.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: The greatest reason Cecilia’s stories reached so many people is that Cecilia worked without rest, day and night. That is the same reason thousands attended her funeral.
[Liaam]: May new generations learn about her, about the constant struggle of this woman, this warrior…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And that is the same reason that on that day, Liaam Winslet — director of the Colectivo Transgrediendo, right-hand woman to Lorena Borjas, and the third person tasked with honoring Cecilia — calls her this:
[Liaam]: This whore, this great whore, Saint Cecilia, the mother of all whores, today we say see you soon…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Oscar, Cecilia’s daughter, stands beside Liaam, translating into English.
[Oscar]: This whore, this great whore, Saint Cecilia, mother of all whores…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And in that moment something clicks in the community. In Katia…
[Katia]: That moment alone left us in shock.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And in Norma, watching the funeral online from Argentina.
[Norma]: It was overwhelming — I burst into tears, and even now as I remember it I get emotional…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And in Cecilia’s children who sang «I Will Survive» on the subway.
[Rio]: Yeah, I said «oh, shit» — in that moment I said ok, now we are being real. Now we’re really being honest.
[Monte]: The atmosphere just shifted. For us in that moment, oh, it was like the most beautiful, most incredible, most powerful thing to say about Cecilia…
[Viento]: Like she named something that was maybe on many people’s minds, but they hadn’t known how to put into words like that.
[Rio]: Because that was Cecilia’s reality — she was the holy mother of whores. That was her work, the work of her life.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Liaam’s words charge the audience with energy. And so, when the hymn preceding communion begins…
[Katia]: The cantor sings «Ave María» and someone we didn’t know stood up. They started singing «Ave Cecilia» over the «Ave María.»
[Oscar]: And at a certain moment that person was inspired, filled with feeling, and started dancing, and moved all the way down the aisle. It’s a large cathedral. That is not a small aisle.
[Katia]: And then they were about to reach the altar and it was like, wow, what’s going on — a shock.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: But just as they reach the steps, they stop and dance back.
[Katia]: But I think in that moment it really bothered the person assisting the monsignor, and he said something to them.
[Monte]: I noticed how they were talking to each other. And I was like, what? What was going to happen now? The plan was for me to sing my song.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Monte, Cecilia’s son and an artist, was going to perform one of his songs after the «Ave María,» during communion — you know, when people can come forward to receive the host that symbolizes the body of Christ. But when the «Ave María» ends, amid the audience’s applause, another priest approaches the officiating priest and asks him to say the Lord’s prayer and dismiss the congregation. That is, without taking communion.
[Monte]: I noticed they were already cutting the Mass short. They were like taking away time. We were like, okay, let’s do this faster.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And so, Cecilia’s casket begins to leave the Cathedral in silence.
[Monte]: So I thought: «oh, maybe I’m not going to sing after all.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: But at that moment, Cayenne, Cecilia’s sister, says to Monte:
[Monte]: «Go up right now and sing.» And I was like, okay.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Monte runs up to the altar, where the microphone is, and sings.
Everyone begins shouting Cecilia’s name, over and over. And thousands of kilometers away, Norma speaks to her, as if she were right there.
[Norma]: «Girl, look at what you did.» That was my expression. My words were like a way of conveying to Cecilia what was happening. «Girl, look at how many people are here. Girl, look at what the cathedral looks like outside. Look at the flowers.» In that moment, for me, she transcended. I couldn’t say, «girl, look, they’re calling you a saint.» No. She was no longer herself. She had become a saint.
[Monte]: She is now a saint — not metaphorically, not as a joke, not as an exaggeration, but truly.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And Cecilia’s story reaches its final chapter.
[Norma]: It had the touch of St. Patrick’s magnificency, right? And it had the wildness of people going absolutely crazy, screaming, uninhibited. It was a synthesis of the dramaturgy she had built.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: But the interpretations continue. Because what happens to a person’s story when their community elevates them to sainthood?
[Rio]: I find it very complicated, because when you canonize someone, you’re also separating them from the community. You’re making them into a kind of person that Ceci wasn’t.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Some of Cecilia’s children fear that over time the less heroic sides of their mother will be forgotten: the lazy Cecilia, the critical and gossipy and resentful Cecilia, the romantic and hot-blooded Cecilia, the Cecilia from that speech on Roosevelt Avenue — the one asking her community for help, the one who was tired.
[Norma]: Maybe by making her a saint, that earthly vision of her gets lost — the daily struggle, all of that. But then again, that is also the work of those who remained on earth.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: A few days after the funeral, the Archdiocese of New York issued a statement.
In it, the Cathedral’s pastor said he had agreed to hold the funeral at St. Patrick’s without knowing Cecilia’s story. The Archdiocese added that the event was an insult to the Catholic faith and that the behavior of the audience was, and I quote, «scandalous.»
In the media and on social networks, the controversy erupted. And at the center of that controversy were the words Liaam spoke in the cathedral: «This whore, this great whore, Saint Cecilia, mother of all whores.» It seemed to imply that those two words — «saint» and «whore» — cannot go together.
And so, under pressure from various conservative Catholic groups, the cathedral’s pastor held a «Mass of Reparations» to atone for the supposed harm caused to the Church by the funeral.
The message was clear: the community was not welcome. It was a reminder that all of Cecilia’s work for the trans community and for sex workers could not be taken for granted.
And that is why in the next episode we will return to Queens for a night of trans remembrance. Because sometimes remembering is the best way to keep a story going.
Las Reinas de Queens is a podcast from Central, the series channel of Radio Ambulante Studios, and is part of the My Cultura podcast network on iHeart Radio.
This series was produced by Diego Senior and Pablo Argüelles, with additional production and reporting by Nikol Pizarro, Joana Toro, Andrés Sanín, Sindy Nanclares, and Sofía Campero.
The editors were Daniel Alarcón, Silvia Viñas, and myself.
Fact-checking by Bruno Scelza and Nikol Pizarro.
María Linares handled sound design and mixing, as well as the original music.
The song «Una Casita, Pt. 2» was courtesy of the artist Monte Marin, also known as STEFA*.
Archival material from the show Red Ink was courtesy of Nic Cory. Trans Equity Consulting provided the recording of Cecilia’s funeral.
The graphic design and art direction for the series are by Diego Corzo.
Product development for Las Reinas de Queens was handled by Natalia Ramírez. Digital production by Ana María Betancourt and Óscar Luna.
Business development and strategic partnerships were led by Camilo Jiménez Santofimio. And Julián Santos and Eric Spiegelman provided legal support.
Las Reinas de Queens is an original idea by Diego Senior, Joana Toro, and Andrés Sanín.
Executive producers are Diego Senior, and from Radio Ambulante Studios, Carolina Guerrero, our CEO.
At iHeart, the executive producers are Arlene Santana and Leo Gomez.
Part of the funding for this project was provided by the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, as part of its «Expanding Gratitude» initiative, with support from the John Templeton Foundation.
You can follow us on social media at centralseriesRA and subscribe to our newsletter at centralpodcast.audio.
I’m Rula Ávila Muñoz. Thank you for listening.