I'm Your Venus: The Documentary, the Pier, the Hotel Room, the Flight
What the documentary made me remember—and why I cried on the flight
I watched I’m Your Venus on the flight out of Oaxaca, and somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, I started crying so hard the man sitting next to me shifted like grief might be contagious. I didn’t care. I let it fall. I let it hit hard. Because watching that documentary wasn’t just about Venus. It was about all the girls like her. The ones we lost. The ones we never even learned the names of. The ones I met and talked to on hot summer nights under the blue haze of a streetlamp on Christopher Street.
The documentary follows Venus Xtravaganza—the soft-voiced, big-dreamed Puerto Rican and Italian trans girl we fell in love with in Paris is Burning. The girl who wanted to be a model. Who just wanted to be “comfortable.” Who was found strangled and stuffed under a hotel bed in 1988, and whose murder remains unsolved like the world simply shrugged and moved on.
But this film tried to pause that shrug. Tried to rewind, dig deeper, honor her, find answers, restore something. Maybe dignity. Maybe truth. Maybe justice. Maybe just a little time. We met the new legends in the House of Xtravaganza and heard their stories. Listened to them. The heart of the doc was really her brothers—the same ones who couldn’t fully see her when she was here. The same ones who laughed her femininity away, tried to make her into their version of normal, of acceptable. Of safe.
They sat in front of the camera with all their hindsight and regret, trying to piece together a version of her they could finally love out loud. And I’m not gonna lie, there were moments I wanted to turn it off. Moments it felt like the documentary was trying too hard to redeem them. Like we were supposed to be moved by the fact that they came around 30 years too late. That they could now say "Venus was our sister" without choking on the shame of having never said it when she was alive.
But then came Jose Disla Xtravaganza.
Jose sat with them—shoulders tight, jaw clenched, not there to perform softness—and told them exactly what Venus told him back then. The pain. The loneliness. The not-feeling-safe-in-her-own-family kind of grief. The you called me a faggot pain. The I had to become someone else to survive in this house kind of pain. And Jose didn’t blink. Didn’t sugarcoat. He said it the way she probably said it to him—full and bitter and with her whole chest.
That scene gutted me. Because that’s what grief really sounds like. It’s not always pretty. It’s not always a neat little apology and a hug at the end. Sometimes it’s someone telling you you fucked up, and the person you fucked over isn’t here anymore to say it for themselves.
Watching her brothers squirm under the truth of their own actions felt necessary. I’m grateful the filmmakers left that in. I’m grateful they let those uncomfortable pauses hang. Because too often we clean these stories up. We make them easier to swallow. We write in forgiveness before it's earned.
I wanted to hug Jose. I still want to hug Jose.
That plane was dark and quiet, and I couldn’t stop thinking about all the other Venuses. The ones I used to walk with, talk with, look for as I walked by the back seats of cars driving down Weehawken St.
Back in 2008, my first real job in New York was as a researcher, sent out to gather data on the sexual behaviors of men who had sex with men in the city. That’s the sanitized version of it. The real story is we went where the sex was. Backrooms. Bars. Bushes in the park. Adult bookstores. And in exchange for an interview, we’d give them $20 and condoms. If they got tested for HIV, we’d give $30 and more condoms.
But the place that sat with me most was the Christopher Street Pier. That edge-of-the-city sanctuary. That cracked cement runway where Black and brown queer and trans kids catwalked into survival. We went there because that’s where the community was. Where the risk was. Where the love was. Where the data was. But mostly, that’s where the kids were. Like Venus.
I talked to 13- and 14-year-olds who hadn’t seen their parents in years. Who were tricking, doing what they had to do to eat, to stay warm, to feel something other than disposable. I’d see a kid get into a stranger’s car with dead eyes and a pink hoodie. I’d see another asleep under a public bench with makeup half-wiped and shoes too tight. I’d listen to them tell me that the pier—this peninsula kissed by the Hudson—was safer than their bedroom back in Jersey. Safer than their auntie's house in the Bronx. Safer than the church pews they were dragged to every Sunday before they got cast out like demons.
They were kids.
And they were everywhere in this documentary. Even though it was about Venus, I saw them in every frame. Every time they showed Christopher Street, I remembered the nights I stood right there, wondering if I was just bearing witness or complicit in something I couldn’t stop. I remembered the ones who laughed loudest, who posed for my camera, who wrote their numbers on my hand and said, “Call me if anything happens.”
And 17 years later, I don't know what happened to most of them.
I hope they’re okay. I hope they found safety. Found softness. Found someone who didn’t flinch at their reflection.
But watching I’m Your Venus, I grieved them all over again. I cried for Venus, yes. But also for the girl in the orange wig I met by the payphone. For the boy with bruises on his neck he pretended weren’t there. For the teen who told me his real name, then begged me not to write it down. For the one who said, “I’d rather die out here than go home.”
Grief is layered. It stacks like bricks. Venus is the top of the stack, but she’s resting on so many others who went unnamed.
I’m grateful this documentary exists. Grateful it reminded us of the cost of not showing up in time. Grateful that Jose didn’t let anyone rewrite the story for comfort. But I also left it wanting more. More rage. More context. More follow-through. Because we didn’t just lose Venus. We keep losing.
So I sat on that plane and let the tears come. Let myself be seen weeping for someone I never met but always knew. And when the plane landed, I wiped my face and whispered her name under my breath—Venus—like a prayer. Like a promise. Like I won’t forget.