WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly

When Shereen Inayatulla and Andie Silva invited me to eulogize Cecilia Gentili in the editors’ note section of the WSQ special issue Unbearable Being(s), I wondered if I was the best person to reflect on such an extraordinary life (cruelly cut short). I knew Cecilia, yes, but many others, I felt (and still feel), were much closer to her than I was and had already written eloquently about her unwavering advocacy, her fierce generosity, and her ability to captivate every room she entered. Then I realized that as her tax preparer (a singular kind of confidant), her coeditor, and a fellow author, I enjoyed a special comradery with Cecilia in which we each felt comfortable sharing aspects of ourselves we revealed to few others. And while a bevy of words have been used to define her legacy, among them “activist,” “actress,” “award-winning author,” and “Mother” to an entire trans and nonbinary community, the word that reverberates through my heart when I remember Cecilia is “revolutionary.”

When we consider unbearable beings like Cecilia and Angela and Sylvia and bell and Gloria (Anzaldúa) and Audre and so many more than I can name here who reluctantly don the cloak of revolutionary, we think of larger-than-life forces of nature (which Cecilia was), rebels and insurgents (Cecilia most certainly was), freedom fighters, agitators. Heroic individuals who frustrate, annoy, and topple the status quo. Immutable flaming thorns in the sides of colonial hegemonic patriarchies. But, amid all the fighting, the vulnerability that lives beneath those cloaks often goes unseen.

During one of our tax appointments, which were more “How’s life?” conversations than financial meetings, Cecilia confessed, “I have no idea what I’m doing.” When she created the trans health program at Apicha Community Health Center in downtown Manhattan, she said, “I didn’t [End Page 13] know anything about healthcare. I saw a need in my community,” and she learned how to fill it. When she signed on as director of policy at GMHC (formerly Gay Men’s Health Crisis), helping to pass the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA), she said, “I didn’t know anything about policy”; she saw a need and she learned how to meet it. When she lobbied the New York state legislature to repeal the infamous “walking while trans” prostitution law, she saw a need. Because that’s what unbearable beings, aka revolutionaries, reared in unbearable conditions in hostile environments, do: identify and address needs. They have no choice. Their lives and the lives of the communities that feed and hold them depend on it. Even when it means leaping into the unknown.

Initially, when I asked Cecilia to join our cohort of editors for Sinister Wisdom and contribute a piece to the groundbreaking special issue Trans/Feminisms, a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s 2024 Leslie Feinberg Award, she hesitated. What made me think of her? she asked. Referring to the monologues she performed for live audiences around the city, she said she had “never written anything down” before. What would she have to do? What followed was a long conversation in which we discussed storytelling and what constitutes authorship, that (at the time) telling her stories on a stage in lieu of a page in no way diminished her talent as a writer, that most of us (the cohort) had never edited a journal issue before, that we would lean on each other as we figured it out.

In the end, Cecilia agreed. As the issue began to take shape, I asked her how she felt about the process. “I’m really enjoying it,” she said. In fact, she confided, the experience inspired her to write down more of her stor(ies), and when next we spoke, she had just completed the manuscript for the memoir that would become Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn’t My Rapist, winner of the 2023 American Library Association’s Stone-wall Book Award for best nonfiction.

When I think of Cecilia Gentili, I remember a mentor who loved herself and her community without condition. An artist who pushed past her familiar to embrace...