In a touching tribute to the late transgender artist and organizer Cecilia Gentili at Them’s third annual Now Awards, author and activist Ceyenne Doroshow led a rousing chant of “Cecilia!” as flowers were spontaneously thrown onto the stage in the icon’s honor.
Doroshow, the founder and executive director of the trans housing and healthcare organization organization G.L.I.T.S., presented Gentili with a posthumous Vanguard Award on the evening of June 10, shouting her name to the rafters as the crowd launched to its feet.
“Cecilia was my beacon. She was my phone call,” Doroshow said in her remarks. “In the middle of the night, when I couldn’t tell y’all how fucked-up this community is or the advocacy around it, I could call Cecilia and she’d say, ‘Mija, mija, fuck them bitches, just do what you got to do.”
Born in 1972 in Argentina, Gentili was an asylum seeker who became a foundational figure in trans activism and organizing after moving to New York City in 2003. Gentili founded and co-founded multiple LGBTQ+ organizations and campaigns over her decades of advocacy work, including an initiative to decriminalize sex work in New York and a consulting organization that empowers trans women of color to serve as experts on their own experience. She was also an accomplished artist and performer, releasing the memoir Faltas in 2022 and performing one-woman shows like the off-Broadway production Red Ink. Widely beloved by a large community of her chosen children, Gentili’s death at the age of 52 earlier this year sparked a stunning celebration of her life in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, drawing a crowd of nearly 1,500 mourners.
Neither the passing of time nor the comparatively smaller crowd have diminished our community’s enthusiasm for celebrating Cecilia, as the footage from the Now Awards shows. Below, watch the full tribute to Gentili by Ceyenne Doroshow.
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