It’s May and I’m sitting across from Casey Plett at a diner somewhere outside Toronto. She’d spent the morning talking at workshops and panels, while I’d sat in the audience and taken notes. Over burgers and sodas, we talked about books and people we knew in common, and I brought up Cecilia Gentili, who’d been published by LittePuss Press, a small publisher ran by Plett and Cat Fitzpatrick.
I don’t remember Plett’s exact words, but I remember her enthusiasm over Faltas: Letters to Everyone In My Hometown Who Isn’t My Rapist. I remember her trying to explain how Gentili was funny, how she captivated an audience, how hard she worked not just at writing and performing, but at activism too. I said I hoped to meet her on an upcoming trip to New York City.
I didn’t meet her that summer and now I never will. Earlier today news broke of Gentili’s passing. Collectively, all the trans writers I know are sad or in shock. I feel that way too. I wrote up her debut book Faltas for Lambda Literary when it came out and it blew me away. She recapped her life story in a series of letters to people who’d meant a lot to her growing up and wrote of a life lived on the margins of 1970s Argentina - living in a single room with her family, being sexually assaulted, of absent friends and lovers.
Faltas is a book that’s sobering but it’s also a book that’s funny. Gentili had a knack for gossip and anecdotes, a way to draw you into her story and make you laugh even when writing about tragedy or despair:
“When you met me in the forest it was like a duel of bottoms,” she wrote about a teenage hookup. “We were not the ones who sucked. We were more like those baby birds we had seen in National Geographic magazines, mouths open, waiting for their mothers to feed them, except instead of waiting for food we were waiting for dick.”
The title of my review was “Starring in my own play,” a paraphrase of a line she wrote in Faltas: “No one is going to write a starring role for me. The only way I will get to be the star of a play… is if I write it myself.” But she was a star. She was in several episodes of Pose as Miss Orlando. She had a one-woman show, Red Ink, that ran at NYC’s Rattlestick Theater. She spoke at readings and at protests, and it seems from my remote vantage point that she knew almost everyone and that they all had good things to say about her.
My friend Carrie told me about seeing Gentili at the Miami Book Fair, when she returned to the city where she’d been an undocumented sex worker and now headlined a literary panel. “It was really powerful,” said Carrie.
If you haven’t already, I strongly recommend getting a copy of Gentili’s book Faltas. You can order it straight from LittlePuss or from Bookshop.org.