Angie Xtravaganza: "The Slap of Love"

"The Slap of Love"

By: Michael Cunningham

This is the story of Angel Segarra, a Puerto Rican kid from the South Bronx who became Angie Xtravaganza, doyenne of the drag world made briefly famous by Jennie Livingston’s acclaimed 1990 documentary, Paris Is Burning.

Angel, neé Angie, died in New York City on April 6, 1993, at the age of 27.

She died of complications from AIDS, but she also had chronic liver trouble, probably brought on by the hormones she’d been taking since the age of 15 to soften her skin and give her breasts and hips. She’d lived for over ten years as her own creation, a ferocious maternal force who turned tricks in hotel rooms over a bar called the Cock Ring and who made chicken soup for the gaggle of friends she called her kids after they came home from a long night on the town.

The hard facts about Angel neé Angie are scarce. She believed in her ability to eradicate the past, to be renowned simply and purely for what she had made of herself. She had reason to believe it was possible. As she lay dying, RuPAul was becoming the first drag queen to have a record in Billboard’s Top Ten. Lypsinka had appeared in a Gap ad and was about to open at the Cherry Lane Theater, a legitimate off-off-Broadway house that seats six hundred.

Angie refused to talk about her childhood, to anyone. She’d never been a scrawny boy named Angel Segarra, one of 13 children, most of whom had different fathers. She wasn’t the son of an abusive Puerto Rican woman in the South Bronx. She hadn’t had a rotten, violent childhood haunted by Catholicism. She was and had always been triumphant, dazzling, the fiercest thing in high heels.

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