The following English translation was generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence and has been reviewed and edited by our team for accuracy and clarity.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Hello, a warning before we begin: this series contains sensitive content including violence, drugs, and sexual language. We recommend discretion.
Lorena St. Cartier picks up her Parliament cigarettes pack, takes out the umpteenth one of the day, brings it to her lips, lights it, and takes a drag.
She’s Dominican and 59 years old. She’s a little tired from all the walking between visits to the bank, the market, and especially the doctor. She has a lot of back issues.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: I’ve been in this career for 30 years, dancing. And I dance on five inches, so…
[Diego Senior]: Meaning, wearing five-inch heels…
[Lorena St. Cartier]: Five inches. I don’t dance on one inch. Sneakers, never…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Three decades of dancing take a heavy toll on anyone, even more so if you do it in heels. But Lorena won’t let them go. In fact, she was wearing them the day Diego, our reporter, visited her. She also wore deep eyeliner, a blonde wig, red lips, and blue contour. She lives on the 14th floor of an affordable housing building in Corona, Queens.
[Diego Senior]: What’s that, can I see it? Oh, wow.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: That’s a calendar…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: On one wall hangs a calendar nearly half a meter wide and tall. It has photographs of several trans women posing seductively, including Lorena.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: And I got August, which is a hot month. And the clothing is provocative, it’s hot, I’m in rollers, like I’m at home…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: She appears wearing red heels and a tiny sleeveless white top, torn, with her breasts almost exposed.
[Diego Senior]: Amazing, super sexy, super sexy.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: On the other side of the room, there’s a counter where trophies, crowns, old photos, and the occasional upright sex toy are piled up. Souvenirs of epic victories. Lorena has that gift all queens share: an almost infinite confidence in herself.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: You come like on a mission, you come like with a seal of what you’re going to do in life. I gave everything to this career. It cost me a lot of work, a lot of money, to achieve the position I achieved. Because I know how hard it is to carve your way through here with your bare hands.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Wrapped in the smoke of her cigarettes, Lorena doesn’t hide the pride of having earned the admiration of the greatest trans divas in New York. And of an knowing and demanding audience. She was made in another era.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: The era where there was no internet and there were no likes. So, people love me and respect me and adore me, not because they saw a little video. They lived it live. They know what it’s about.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Because Lorena hasn’t only reaped applause.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: I am the transgender woman with the most crowns in New York City regardless of any ethnicity: white, Black, Latina, Asian, none of them has surpassed me.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Something difficult to verify, but for Lorena it is indisputable.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: I have won 39 crowns. I was the queen of every bar there was here in New York, Latin ones…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And among all those bars and nightclubs, there is one that stands out in Lorena’s memories.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: There was a very famous nightclub called La Escuelita.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: On 39th Street, near Eighth Avenue in Manhattan.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: But what was the power of La Escuelita? If you wanted to be a star — not in New York, but anywhere in the United States — you had to face the audience at La Escuelita. If La Escuelita said yes, you were it. But if La Escuelita said no, you would not make a career out of this.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Our story takes us today to the New York of the 80s and 90s, very painful times for the LGBTQ+ community. But also a golden era for the art of shows and drag performance.
And the mecca of that art, where queens crowned other queens, and dethroned them, was probably La Escuelita. A place where for nearly half a century, Latino trans culture shone like never before. A place that has since disappeared and of which only memories remain.
From Central Series and Radio Ambulante Studios, this is Las Reinas de Queens. I’m Rula Ávila Muñoz.
Episode 8. La Escuelita.
Before we continue listening to Lorena, we need to meet an old colleague of hers: a legendary drag queen.
[Ángel Sheridan]: My character’s name is Ángel Sheridan.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And the creative director of La Escuelita for almost 15 years.
[Ángel Sheridan]: I’m living here in Orlando now. But my family is from Cuba. Ever since I was very young, my dream was always to sing, dance, put on a show…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Ángel Sheridan was and is hugely talented. She studied musical theater in London and began her career in Florida in the late 80s. And word about a nightclub in New York reached her all the way there.
[Ángel Sheridan]: Everyone would say, «oh, when you go to New York, you have to go to La Escuelita to do a show, kid. They’re going to love you there.» This and that. I always heard: La Escuelita, La Escuelita, La Escuelita, La Escuelita, La Escuelita.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: She arrived in New York in the early 90s and very soon carved out a space for herself in a company called «An Evening at La Cage,» inspired by the legendary play and film «La Cage aux Folles.» They did impersonations of stars like Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Cher. That was her Broadway debut and that was how her career as a drag performer began.
One night, after the show, a man approached her. His name was Raúl de la Paz and he was Cuban. They already knew each other from Miami. But now Raúl wanted Ángel to perform at his club: La Escuelita.
La Escuelita was in the basement of a building on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 39th Street, in Manhattan. When Ángel visited it for the first time, it was a large, poorly lit and even more poorly ventilated ballroom, accessed by going down a flight of stairs.
[Ángel Sheridan]: It was nothing special. All the tables were different. The chairs were broken. The benches… Well, a disaster, right? The bathrooms… The water was overflowing from the bathrooms. It was, well, it was a disaster.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: There were leaks. There were rats. And there were cats wandering between the legs of the drag queens and performers who were putting on their shows, impersonating the big singers of the time. And there, Ángel did an impersonation of Cher.
[Ángel Sheridan]: I stepped out onto the stage and the audience came and the audience… It filled up. The entire stage where they were giving me money, putting money in my boots, and putting money in my wig, and all that. I said, «but my God, what is happening here.» I couldn’t move.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Ángel had never experienced such an intimate communion with an audience. And among all the people who approached her that night, she remembers a very old and very sick man. His name was Iván El Terrible. It was said he was Puerto Rican and had been a drag performer. He had AIDS. And he was one of the guardians of the community’s memory.
[Ángel Sheridan]: He opened my eyes to the New York scene and to the life that existed before I got there, you know what I mean?
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Iván told Ángel many stories about how hard it was to be a trans Latina person in New York. And he also told her about a historic place for the LGBTQ+ community in the United States.
[Ángel Sheridan]: He lived it, he lived through all those problems, the fights at Stonewall.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Stonewall. It was a bar in the West Village of Manhattan, in the sixties. It was frequented by gay men and women, drag queens and trans people, many of Latino and African American origin.
Every so often the police would raid it. But in the early hours of June 28, 1969, when officers arrived at the venue, the people who were there resisted and threw them out with punches, bricks, and bottles. Iván el Terrible was there. Within hours, a protest erupted that lasted six days and energized the LGBTQ+ rights movement in the United States.
But very soon, the role that trans people of color had played at Stonewall was conveniently forgotten by the white gay mainstream. And it was a trans Latina person who took it upon herself to remind the community of this injustice: Sylvia Rivera, a New Yorker with a Puerto Rican father and a Venezuelan mother. She was at Stonewall. And in 1973, during the Pride march in New York, she climbed onto a platform, grabbed a microphone, and delivered a speech that has since become historic.
[Audio de archivo, Sylvia Rivera]: I have been beaten. I have had my nose broken. I have been down in jail. I have lost my job. I have lost my apartment for gay liberation, and you all treat me this way? What the fuck’s wrong with y’all? Think about that…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: «I have been beaten, I have had my nose broken, I have been thrown in jail, I lost my job and my apartment for gay liberation. And you treat me this way?» And she added: «Without the drag queens there would be no gay liberation. We were on the front lines.»
As you can see, Sylvia deserves her own series. But what we need to know is that she, and another trans Stonewall veteran — Marsha P. Johnson, an African American woman — founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, an organization dedicated to supporting homeless trans people and sex workers.
They became mothers to many of those people. And since then, both of them are like saints to the community, just like Lorena Borjas and Cecilia Gentili.
The point is that, after Stonewall, more and more bars and clubs for the LGBTQ+ community began to open in New York. And that brings us to the second story Ángel heard from Iván el Terrible.
[Ángel Sheridan]: Why do they call this place La Escuelita? It’s the basement of a building, right? And he tells me, «oh, because this wasn’t the original location»…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Iván told her that, before La Escuelita settled definitively at Eighth and 39th, it had lived a wandering life through several Manhattan venues, fleeing gentrification and pressure from the authorities.
It all began in the 1970s. Shortly after Stonewall, a group of Latino people, including the Cuban Raúl de la Paz, wanted to open a club for the Latino gay community, a place, and here I quote, «where men could dance with men, and women with women.»
And on a corner of Broadway, in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, they found an old school for dentists that had a sign in English: «The School,» La Escuela.
[Ángel Sheridan]: So, when they opened the bar there they didn’t have the budget to put up a new sign and this and that, and they left it as it was, they kept the name just like that: La Escuelita. It was la escuelita. That’s why it’s called la escuelita.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Imagine: the venue still had the chalkboards on the walls where students had received dental hygiene classes. But now, the new Latino attendees left all kinds of love messages there. And the Puerto Rican customers, who were the majority at the time, wrote the lyrics of an old Puerto Rican children’s song: «Mi escuelita, mi escuelita, yo la quiero con amor, porque en ella, porque en ella, es que aprendo la lección.» (My school, my school I really love it, because it is there, it is there that I learn.”)
And what did La Escuelita teach? Well, when Ángel arrived in the early nineties, La Escuelita offered, above all, a life lesson. Those were the worst years of AIDS, very painful times for the community. In fact, shortly after Ángel met Iván el Terrible, he died.
[Ángel Sheridan]: So, that trauma was killing us. You’d arrive at La Escuelita and La Escuelita was… It let you — how can I put it — breathe, right? You could be who you were, the goddess you believed yourself to be, the… You know, the most beautiful boy. All of that was for the Latino audience, right? For Latino gays in New York that was — I don’t know how to tell you — a sanctuary.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: A sanctuary.
[Ángel Sheridan]: So, when we arrived at La Escuelita, it was something where you’d say, «oh, here we are. Our community. We’re listening to our music. We’re speaking our language,» you know, «we’re all together.» And it wasn’t like, «oh, I don’t like this person. I don’t like Mexicans, I don’t like those people, I don’t like Salvadorans, that they’d fight with this one.» No, no, no. There, everyone was Latino. That was our place. You know what I mean? Of course, some white folks would come, this and that, they loved the vibe and all. But that was ours, and the best of ours.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: The vibe, the love, the warmth. But La Escuelita had many other things that set it apart from other gay clubs in the city. Ángel told us that on Sundays, Raúl, the owner, would offer a meal for the trans community in the area.
[Ángel Sheridan]: Everyone who had been thrown out on the street, you know, whose parents had thrown them out, who had no money, who were surviving God knows how, you know, all of them would come to La Escuelita and everyone ate at La Escuelita that day.
[Larry La Fountain-Stokes]: My experience of going to La Escuelita was one of breaking structures. having my world turned upside down.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: He is Larry La Fountain-Stokes, a Puerto Rican researcher. He arrived from San Juan to New York in 1991 to pursue his doctorate. And he set out to explore the gay bars of Manhattan. But very soon he realized that La Escuelita was different.
[Larry La Fountain-Stokes]: In American gay bars it would be unthinkable to have a table with a cake, with pastry, to bring your family, your family, your mom… Your mom, your grandmother, your aunt, your godmother. I mean, not the queer family, not the trans family. I mean your family, family.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: He was fascinated by the diversity: gay Latinos, lesbian Latinas, trans Latinos; Latinos from different social classes; Latinos of various generations and skin tones, arriving from all over the city, even New Jersey.
[Larry La Fountain-Stokes]: I think what was beautiful was the way music, art, dance, drink, — love, sex — brought us all together, right?
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Of course, sometimes there were irreconcilable tensions. Sometimes the groups wouldn’t even look at each other, even while dancing to the same catchy merengue. But, according to Larry, there was a moment, at one AM, when everyone looked in the same direction for sure. Because at that hour, what made La Escuelita so famous would happen: the drag performers’ shows.
[Larry La Fountain-Stokes]: I mean, the night would stop for an hour, an hour and a half, to focus on the art of drag performance. So, at a certain point, you know they’re going to start playing the Star Wars music. And that means the show is on its way. And then, right? These spectacular things would happen that I say were like going to mass, like being in church, because those divinities would come out onto the stage from behind the curtain, and suddenly these lines of people would form who wanted to give them money, give them kisses, be hugged by the artists. So much so that the poor artists, I think sometimes it was very hard for them to lip-sync their songs and dance, because there was so much interaction with the audience. And they developed all kinds of skills in how to control the audience in order to show off, dance, lip-sync their songs, and also interact in such an intimate way with their audience who were their adorers.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And those adorers came from everywhere. For example, it was at La Escuelita where film director Pedro Almodóvar first saw a drag queen performing the song «Puro Teatro» by La Lupe. I don’t know if you’ve heard it, «Teatro, lo tuyo es puro teatro.» It’s very famous. Almodóvar made it even more iconic in his film «Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.» What I want to tell you with all of this is that the quality of the shows was extremely high.
[Larry La Fountain-Stokes]: At least in the 90s, New York was the epicenter of drag. So the drag was very, very, very, very good.
[Ángel Sheridan]: It was the best of the best. The best of the best.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Ángel again.
[Ángel Sheridan]: And if you weren’t at a level, right? at a professional level, you didn’t come to La Escuelita to perform. Not just anyone could come here.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: We’re talking about artists who in many cases had studied theater, dance, singing. Some, like Ángel, were drag queens. And others, the majority, were trans.
[Larry La Fountain-Stokes]: It was hard to understand how she could be so beautiful, so gorgeous. How… The charisma she had, her costumes, her makeup, her hair, her jewelry, her clothes.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Imagine being able to be so close to all that beauty.
[Ángel Sheridan]: The people who came didn’t have money to pay $100 to go see a Broadway show. They didn’t have money to go to a Janet Jackson concert, to go to a Madonna concert, and so on. They’d scrape together their coins, gather their coupons and all that to come and watch at La Escualita. We were their stars.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And in those years, there were several stars who dominated the stage at La Escuelita. Their names were fabulous: Jeannette Valentino, Christina Piaget, Lady Catiria. Each one was in charge of hiring other drag and trans girls for their own shows.
[Ángel Sheridan]: So, they were in competition to see who was… «The dopest show is Jeannette Valentino’s.» «The greatest show is this one’s.» «The most incredible show is that one’s,» right? So when they performed, –maybe didn’t pay rent that month, but when they showed up at La Escuelita, they had the best of the best. The best designer dresses, beaded gowns, feathered gowns. Well, I can’t even tell you how many stars and legends were made in that place.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And among all those legends, Ángel remembers one we met at the beginning of this episode.
[Ángel Sheridan]: The Latina diva of all divas, my God, is Lorena St. Cartier, who is still out there looking absolutely stunning, still turning the world upside down doing shows.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Lorena St. Cartier. After the break, we return with her and her deep voice, seasoned by cigarettes, rum, and endless nights.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: We’re back on Las Reinas de Queens.
Lorena St. Cartier has the ability to light a cigarette, kiss it with her red lips, smoke it, and at the same time tell the stories of three people, four events, and two places — all before the first ash falls into the ashtray.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: I’m an artist, I need to smoke to create.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: When she arrived in New York in 1987 from the Dominican Republic, she identified as a young gay man. She was 20 years old, came from a Christian, conservative family. And she loved theater. In her country she studied choreography, dance, directing. And with that pedigree she sought what so many others seek when they arrive in the city: fame and work. In that order.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: I arrived and worked in every Latino theater there is in New York. All of them.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Teatro IATI, Repertorio Español… Believe me, fine places.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: I was the lead dancer at the Teatro Rodante Puertorriqueño. That’s why many people associate me with Puerto Rico. See how things fall into place?
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And by now you can imagine: very soon, Lorena discovered the Latino bars and the drag shows.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: And I’d arrive at the nightclub, sit down at a corner of the bar. I went to watch that theatrical transformation, which I found unique.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Because the divas didn’t only imitate Iris Chacón or La Lupe, they were also something more, like from another dimension.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: What I want to say is that it was so impressive to me. I had never seen this in my life. I came from a Christian family, and just the fact that I danced already made me a sinner.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Lorena couldn’t even imagine herself as a drag performer, much less as a trans person. So she stayed in what we might call the traditional world of theater and dance. She began teaching classes. But the world of drag performers wouldn’t let her go. One day a Cuban trans girl approached her asking for help with an event. And then her own cousin, who was beginning her transition, also asked for her help.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: And I told her, «if you’re going to do it, you have to be number one, because you’re my cousin and you can’t be anything less.» So, I started putting together productions for her.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: The first of those productions was at none other than La Escuelita. They asked Raúl, the owner, for an opportunity, and he gave them a slot on Sunday, which is the weakest day of the week.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: I put together a spectacle never before seen in New York City, with 25 dancers in a gay nightclub, working with transsexuals. In the number, dancers came out dancing, jazz, voguing, dancing flamenco. And at one point in the song, we all came out. Some dancing hiphop too.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: The owner of La Escuelita was impressed.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: And it was like a revolution, because all the transsexuals started to come by.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Lorena found, let’s say, a market niche. She realized she earned far more as a show choreographer than as a dance teacher. She admits that was her main motivation for entering the world of drag performers. And very soon she expanded her repertoire. Because at La Escuelita many beauty pageants were also held that needed talented choreographers.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: I started watching the pageants that were held that year, which were entirely for girls with breasts. It was Miss Latina Continental and Miss Manhattan Continental.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Miss Continental is to this day the most important beauty pageant for trans people in the United States. It takes place in Chicago, but in those years the New York preliminary rounds were held at La Escuelita.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: People were pressed against the wall, packed in, it was so full you couldn’t move.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Lorena remembers a choreography she put together for her cousin for a pageant in which they were competing against one of the great divas of La Escuelita: Christina Piaget. And faced with such a rival, Lorena sought inspiration from the hottest thing of the moment, the film «Batman Returns,» which had just been released in 1992, directed by Tim Burton and with Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: Very sensual with the… «I don’t wanna be alone…» pretty, pretty. But then my cousin came out with all the dancers. I lifted her all the way up in a lift, and that place started to crumble. Then, when Batman came out and she grabbed him… When she threw him to the floor and jumped on top of him, and gave Batman pelvic thrusts, you couldn’t hear the music anymore. But when the Penguin came out with all his henchmen at the end of the song, the place just fell apart. So, in the end, the one who had to win won: Christina.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Christina Piaget, one of the divas alongside Jeannette Valentino and Lady Catiria. According to Lorena, no talent was enough to make a place for yourself among them. Without breasts, they would never give you a crown.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: Because the transsexuals dominated the scene and they didn’t allow anyone to enter that circle. It was a closed circle like this. You can be Baryshnikov from Russia and you’re not getting in here.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: But Lorena was still a gay boy, short, skinny. Dressing up had never crossed her mind.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: For me, that meant going out to make a fool of myself, because I was a choreographer and I was known as a choreographer and I was known for dancing, but in this world, where you have to go out fully done up and… I felt like I was the ugly duckling, like I was a little circus clown.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: A little clown surrounded by women with incredible bodies. But of course, as competitive as Lorena was, the barrier the divas put up for her was nothing but a provocation.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: The thing is that, well, I started to gain some confidence. You develop a taste for it, I developed a taste for it.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: The first night she dressed up was for a New Year’s show at La Escuelita. Raúl, the owner, needed a last-minute emcee and asked Lorena to do him the favor. She swallowed all her Christian guilt and showed up on 39th Street in an elegant black silk dress. She performed a song from the musical «A Chorus Line»:
[Lorena St. Cartier]: «Let me dance for you…» The most unbelievable thing is that I gave it my all. And one of the best entertainers there was in New York City at that time came up to me, her name is Ginger Valdés. And she was the only person who gave me a one-dollar tip.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And while giving her that dollar she leaned in to her ear and said:
[Lorena St. Cartier]: «You’re too much for them. They can’t handle you. But in here, what you’re left with is not even a dollar.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Not even a dollar. Meaning, she made it clear she wasn’t enough and didn’t belong.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: What is a little boy dressed as a woman with a laughable wig which looks horrible on him, doing performing a New Year’s show alongside women who come out with breasts and beaded gowns? They didn’t see talent. They didn’t care about talent. They were going to see a drag show and you had to give them drag.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: It was humiliating but Lorena wouldn’t be intimidated. She kept dancing, kept dressing up. And as an ally she had someone powerful: Raúl, the owner of La Escuelita himself. He died many years ago, but according to Lorena, he changed the course of her life. Because at one of the Miss Continental preliminaries at La Escuelita, Raúl managed to break through the barrier the trans divas had built around her, the one that kept you from winning a crown if your body didn’t meet the very strict beauty stereotypes.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: The owner said, «if you don’t give one of the crowns to the little one…»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Meaning, Lorena.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: «I’ll throw you all out.» If you ask me why, I don’t know. I don’t know. But, I won one of the crowns for the first time, and that put me on the map. It put me on the map in Queens, it put me on the map in Manhattan. The queen. Lorena St. Cartier. Lorena St. Cartier, Lorena St. Cartier.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And precisely when Lorena was beginning to make a name for herself as a queen, showcasing her own talent herself instead of choreographing other girls, news spread throughout the city: La Escuelita had suddenly closed.
We’ll be right back.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Well, La Escuelita closed in the summer of 1995. It was sudden. Word is that on the last night it was open, the divas gathered on stage and sang «America the Beautiful» with the American flag displayed upside down, a powerful act of protest.
According to Ángel Sheridan, the drag queen, the reason for the closure was simple: the owner of the building where La Escuelita was located wanted to turn the basement where the club was into a banquet hall. And for that reason he did not renew the rental contract with Raúl.
And just like that, overnight, the Latino LGBTQ+ community of New York was left without one of its main spaces for socializing and making culture. The shows ended, the pageants, the family gatherings, the Sunday dinners.
[Ángel Sheridan]: Imagine that out of nowhere, without you even expecting it, they take that away from you. Where do we go now? Where are we now? Who are we?
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And here,an Israeli man named Savyon Zabar, better known as Big Ben, enters the story: A New York nightlife entrepreneur who built his name managing clubs in search of the next nighttime success.
Ángel had met him while performing in the Broadway show «An Evening at La Cage.» She had also shown him La Escuelita before it closed. And Big Ben had loved it. So much so that when La Escuelita closed, he approached Ángel with a proposal.
[Ángel Sheridan]: «Look, I want to open a place like La Escuelita.» I said, «Yes, OK!»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And they started looking for venues all over the city.
[Ángel Sheridan]: Many places. We went to many, many places.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And Ángel got excited about all of them.
[Ángel Sheridan]: «It’s great,» «look, here’s where we put the stage, here the dressing room.» He says, «yes, but there’s no access here.» I say, «what do you mean there’s no access?»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Access to the subway, the train, the bus. A place like La Escuelita, in the heart of Manhattan, near the Port Authority and Grand Central stations. A place you could get to without spending much money. Months went by…
[Ángel Sheridan]: Well, around 3 in the morning one day, I’m sleeping and the phone rings. And I say, «oh, who is calling me at 3 in the morning?» I don’t pay attention and keep sleeping, and it keeps ringing, keeps ringing. I pick up the phone and, «hello, hello,» and it’s him. «What I just found out: the old Escuelita, what it is… They want to rent it out again.» «What?» «Tomorrow at 9 in the morning we have to be there first thing.» Well, I get up, we head over there, this and that. And sure enough.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: The building owner wanted to rent the basement to them again. But not only that. He had renovated the entire space: the bathrooms, the kitchen. They closed the deal. And Big Ben and Ángel asked themselves, what are we going to call the club?
[Ángel Sheridan]: Then he said, «how do you say ‘new’ in Spanish?» And I said, «‘new’ is ‘nueva.’ La Nueva Escuelita.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And so they began buying pages in the city’s gay newspapers and magazines, the Village Voice, the Hotspots.
[Ángel Sheridan]: And the first thing it said was, «a New York tradition comes back.» A New York tradition returns. So everyone was waiting, everyone was waiting. The next week we put: «La Nueva Escuelita at da da da da da da da, opens on such and such day,» and so on. You should have seen it. The line went around the block and all the way to the next block. And no, no more people could get in.
[Audio de archivo, HomoVisiones, Heriberto González]: Hi, friends, my name is Heriberto and this is another program of HomoVisiones. If you don’t know where we are today, follow me.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: The one speaking is named Heriberto González, a Puerto Rican journalist who was at the opening night of La Nueva Escuelita in 1996. The place had a larger stage, private dressing rooms, air conditioning, professional lighting. That night, Heriberto interviewed the attendees for HomoVisiones, a community television program focused on the Latino gay scene in New York.
[Audio de archivo, HomoVisiones, Juan]: Look, my name is Juan. But I definitely have to tell you that this is something sensational, something we Latinos needed: an elegant gay place, classy, something to admire. This is incredible. I feel lost. I don’t know where I am. I don’t recognize absolutely anything.
[Audio de archivo, HomoVisiones, Heriberto González]: Hey, sir, and how do you compare it to the old place?
[Audio de archivo, HomoVisiones, Juan]: It’s been a change from night to day, from day to night. It is something beautiful for us. We deserve it. We deserve it, that’s why we have it.
[Audio de archivo, HomoVisiones, Heriberto González]: Have you seen old friends from the old Escuelita now at the new one?
[Audio de archivo, HomoVisiones, Amalia]: Yes, many. Many of us are still here, because there are many of us who are stronger than the four letters.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Meaning, AIDS.
[Audio de archivo, HomoVisiones, Heriberto González]: Hey, sounds like you’re a little drunk.
[Audio de archivo, HomoVisiones, Amalia]: No, honey. I’m half Puerto Rican and half Cuban, so I can do anything for you.
[Audio de archivo, HomoVisiones, Heriberto González]: What do you think of the new Escuelita?
[Audio de archivo, HomoVisiones, Betty]: Well, I had the experience of being able to work at the old one, and I am completely surprised because this place is fabulous. It is completely modern. Everything is fantastic, I tell you. I think we should thank the gay community because now we have a new place where we’ll be able to come together and bring La Escuelita back to what it was before: joy and warmth among all of us Latinos.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: It was clear that La Nueva Escuelita looked different. And so did many of its newer customers, attracted by Big Ben and Ángel’s advertising campaign.
[Ángel Sheridan]: Well, what happened was that word spread and suddenly it wasn’t only a Latino place. The Black folks started coming, the hip-hop crowd; white people started coming; serious people started coming. So we couldn’t even say it was a gay bar anymore, because there was a little of everything, everything, everyone.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Ángel told us that over time even ultra-orthodox Jews started showing up, who would take off their clothes at the entrance, put them in a backpack, and come in to dance.
[Ángel Sheridan]: And I would say, «, I never thought this was going to be such an international thing, Sir»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Salsa, cumbia, and merengue began to coexist with hip-hop and music in English. Here again is researcher Larry La Fountain-Stokes:
[Larry La Fountain-Stokes]: It stopped being an exclusively or primarily Latino space and became more of an African American, Afro-Latino, and Latino space. It shifted a little toward English and less toward Spanish.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And then the celebrities started arriving: Marc Anthony, Christina Aguilera, Madonna, Sarah Jessica Parker. And well, for those who had known the old Escuelita, it was clear that on that path toward fame, something was being lost.
[Larry La Fountain-Stokes]: I don’t know if nostalgia is dangerous. I mean, I’m glad it was nicer, but I would have liked La Nueva Escuelita to have stayed more faithful in terms of it being Hispanic, Latin, its Spanish-speaking…
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: So yes, La Nueva Escuelita was changing, in appearance and in clientele. But as creative director, Ángel made sure that something of its essence remained. Starting with the community of drag queens, performers, and trans girls, both those who performed and those who were regular customers looking for a familiar place where they could feel safe. And Ángel took on the role of aunt.
[Ángel Sheridan]: The big aunt of all of them. So they would come, they’d tell me «look, I want to do this,» and so on. Then I’d tell them, «look, go to this place, go to this doctor, let’s do things right.» In my dressing room — I had a private dressing room — I had a refrigerator. At one point, I had like 15 little bottles of hormones with syringes, with all that stuff.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: All while working tirelessly to make sure the quality of the shows didn’t drop.
[Ángel Sheridan]: What put La Nueva Escuelita on the map, let’s say, were the productions, the money spent on sets, the money spent on decorating the place.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: She hired the divas from the old Escuelita: Jeannette Alexander, Jeannette Valentino, and Lady Catiria. And they began doing a kind of cabaret, with a whole lot of different numbers. But she also opened the doors to other artists. Among them…
[Ángel Sheridan]: Lorena. The energy, the clothes, what she did, how she presented herself. Incredible.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Lorena St. Cartier.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: People paid $25 on Saturdays to come see me, because when the others came out the audience would say, «Lorena!» And when Lorena came out, it was completely different.
[Ángel Sheridan]: She was The Latin Diva, we called her, because she was working in Queens, in all the Latino venues, right? So she already had her fans and all of them, all those people came, started coming to La Escuelita, you know, to see her.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Of course, when La Escuelita closed, Lorena didn’t waste her time. She kept working in various Latino clubs in Queens that were also part of that golden era: El Llamarada, El Lucho’s, Krash. And she kept reaping crown after crown after crown.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: People were already saying: «if she’s competing, I’m not competing.» Or, «let’s go watch her win.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: She even became the first Miss Escuelita in 1998. Without breasts, something she always likes to remember.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: All the pageants I won, I won over 30 pageants, without breasts.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: She had earned her place, regardless of her appearance. Perhaps one of her greatest legacies is a choreography she created that has made history.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: It’s «Perfidia» by Linda Ronstadt with a mambo dance from the end of the film «The Mambo Kings.»
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: It’s a dance number that begins with a very elegant and melancholic bolero, «Perfidia.» But that then jumps suddenly into a very fast and very sensual mambo.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: And I have seen all the transsexuals do my number. Some change the choreography a little. Others try to get as close as possible to the original choreography. In the end it is an honor, because even though there are no reserved rights or any of that, because that’s not how it works with us, it’s my number. Everyone knows it. And it’s like a trademark.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And that trademark reached the pinnacle of trans beauty pageants in the United States through Lady Catiria. Because she used Lorena’s number when she won the Miss Continental pageant in 1995. It was an enormous honor. Because — we hadn’t said this before — but among all the divas of La Escuelita, old and new, Lady Catiria was the queen. A Puerto Rican woman who began her career as an impersonator in the Latino gay bars of Jackson Heights, like our queens. And just like them, Lady Catiria was one of a kind.
[Ángel Sheridan]: Lady Catiria. Well, Lady… What can I tell you about Lady Catiria? I would watch her and I could never say, «ah, no, I didn’t like that number,» or «I didn’t like what she did,» because she had something that came from deep inside her.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: She had this charisma… A charm that was unique. She did a number called «Hot Shot»: «I need a hot shot. Hot, hot, hot, hot shot.» And the place would completely fall apart. Very sexual. She’d suck on her own breast in the middle of the number. She was unique.
[Larry La Fountain-Stokes]: My favorite, well, of all time, has always been Lady Catiria, who never spoke. She never spoke. So she danced, she lip-synced, she kissed, she hugged. But in all the years I went to La Escuelita I never heard her voice.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And well, so you can hear her, this is Lady Catiria speaking with HomoVisiones on that opening night of La Nueva Escuelita.
[Audio de archivo, HomoVisiones, Lady Catiria]: We want everyone, please, everyone who likes the show, the show business, whether they know us or not, come because you’re going to like it and you’re going to have a new place to be, to enjoy; gay, bisexual, straight, whoever wants to, because I adore you all.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: At the moment of speaking these words Lady Catiria already had AIDS, and was a spokesperson for the HIV community. But slowly her star began to fade. Until around 1999…
[Ángel Sheridan]: I remember, with a heavy heart, that the last time she performed at La Escuelita she came out to do a number, and at one point in the number she would lie down on the stage and do, you know, a whole bunch of things. People were throwing money at her, etc.. Then she would get up and, you know, walk off the stage. Well, she finished the number on the stage and she wasn’t getting up. And the audience stirred. And I told the DJ, «close the curtain, close the curtain.» And it was because she couldn’t get up. She no longer had the strength to stand up. And that was the last night she performed at La Escuelita, unfortunately. But she was there almost until the very end. That was what gave her life.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Lady Catiria died in 1999 at the age of 40 from complications related to AIDS. And La Escuelita was left without its queen of queens.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: There was no one to replace her because she was irreplaceable.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: But someone had to take her place. And according to Lorena, there was only one person talented enough to do it.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: People say that I am her successor, that only she and I have been the entertainers of New York. Varied opinions. Many people say that I had the biggest career.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And the truth is that Lorena had all the talent and the track record to be Lady Catiria’s successor. In 2002 she became Miss Universo Latina USA, another very important pageant for trans women. And Ángel invited her to become one of La Escuelita’s divas. With a contract and all.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: That was my home. I would go to rehearsals from two until four in the afternoon. I’d go home to bathe, to change, to shave, and head over there at 9 PM. And I’d leave at 4 in the morning. And that was Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: That’s how she spent several years, going to Manhattan from her apartment in Queens. But around 2008, the atmosphere at La Escuelita began to sour.
The reasons are not clear. But both Ángel and Lorena agree that Big Ben, the Israeli entrepreneur, was responsible. According to Ángel, Big Ben took away the divas’ contracts to save money during the economic crisis of those years. And according to Lorena, he didn’t want to pay her the amount she was owed for performing at a New Year’s party. So she quit.
Big Ben died in 2017 so we cannot corroborate this. Ángel stayed at La Escuelita, but she no longer had creative control. And so, Big Ben began hiring for the shows very beautiful but untalented trans people.
[Ángel Sheridan]: They were all pretty. But you’d see four people doing a ballad in a thong. That’s not a show.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: That’s where the decline began. You have a show with girls with breasts, but no talent. Very beautiful, no talent. And people said, «this is not what we used to see, at all.»
[Ángel Sheridan]: Then he started hiring one who comes for $50; this one who comes for free because she wants to do a number at La Escuelita. So then you know the quality kept dropping, dropping, dropping.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: That was the last straw. Ángel said goodbye to La Escuelita in 2012.
That same year, the State Liquor Authority, the agency in charge of issuing alcohol sales licenses in the state of New York, revoked La Escuelita’s permit due to two minor altercations at the venue.
Big Ben filed a complaint. He argued that the authorities wanted to push La Escuelita out of the neighborhood because its customers, mostly people of color, were frightening the white tourists who were beginning to arrive at the new hotels in the area. He said, and I quote: «Minorities are no longer welcome because they don’t fit the city’s gentrification plans.» A judge ruled in Big Ben’s favor. But the liquor agency kept up the pressure. Until 2016, when La Escuelita closed for good.
Today, the nightlife of New York’s trans Latino community survives in the bars of Queens, in Jackson Heights, on Roosevelt Avenue. The ones we have visited so many times in this series.
Lorena continued her shows there, and also her transition. She finally got her breasts. Today she is also a house mother. She has her family, the St. Cartier family. She has taken it upon herself to train new generations, including her daughter Jennifer. She participates in beauty pageants around the country.
But Lorena opened up to us a little. She told us that today, the art of drag performance in New York City is not at its best. First, because there isn’t enough supply…
[Lorena St. Cartier]: I mean, if you ask me where you can find a good show, I don’t know what to recommend you.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: Second, because in the bars where there are shows, some owners pay little.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: I am an artist, my work costs money. And I don’t need to be on a stage, but if I’m going to be on a stage, it’s going to be with dignity, it’s going to be with respect. And they are going to have to pay me what I deserve.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And third, because, according to her, the quality of the art is being neglected.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: If I’m not going to see a high-quality show, I don’t want to see it.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: The subtlety and precision of lip-syncing, the playback, are being lost.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: What I find not so good is when they put a girl who doesn’t even know the lip-sync of the song. That’s our job!
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: And also the quality and creativity of the costumes.
[Lorena St. Cartier]: That’s the truth. And it’s sad that it has come to that, because this show has always been defined by fantasy, creativity, feathers, and sparkle.
[Rula Ávila Muñoz]: All its life. Lorena has dedicated just that, her whole life, to this art. Perhaps that’s why she sounds so pessimistic when it comes to new generations.
Of course it hurts when time passes and so many names, so many places, that made the community what it was are lost. It’s natural that with all that past behind you, the future can only sound like decline. That’s why it’s necessary to look more closely at what the art of drag performance is today.
In the next episode we return to Roosevelt Avenue to experience, from beginning to end, one of these trans beauty pageants, where a new generation of queens will seek to lay the first stone of a new legacy.
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 from iHeart Radio.
This series was produced by Diego Senior and Pablo Argüelles with additional production and reporting by Nikol Pizarro, Joana Toro, and Andrés Sanin.
The editors were Daniel Alarcón, Silvia Viñas, and myself.
Fact-checking by Bruno Scelza and Nikol Pizarro.
María Linares did the sound design and mixing, as well as the original music.
The archival HomoVisiones material was provided by Gonzalo Aburto and Cándido Negrón.
The graphic design and art direction of the series are by Diego Corzo.
Product development for Las Reinas de Queens was handled by Natalia Ramírez. Digital production was done by Ana María Betancourt and Óscar Luna. Lina Rincón was in charge of the English translation.
Business development and strategic alliances were handled 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 Sanin.
The 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 the support of the John Templeton Foundation.
You can follow us on social media as centralseriesRA and subscribe to our email newsletter at centralpodcast.audio.
I’m Rula Ávila Muñoz. Thank you for listening.