Ana Lupez, a trailblazing transgender performer, died Wednesday at the age of 82 from heart cancer in the city of Mendoza, Argentina. She was one of the first Argentinian women to undergo gender-affirming surgery and made a career as a renowned actress and dancer, touring through South American countries and making a name for herself in Spain’s emerging LGBTQ+ venues.
Born on March 28, 1944 in the Argentinian town of Guaymallén, she began suffering panic attacks at the age of 7 whenever her mother insisted on dressing her in boys’ clothing, according to the Argentinian newspaper Diario Uno.
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“From a young age, I believed I was a girl and behaved like one,” the newspaper quoted her as saying. “My poor mother didn’t understand and took me to the doctor to be ‘cured,’ and they admitted me for tests at the old Emilio Civil Hospital. But I took advantage of it to improvise shows. I dressed up in bed sheets and paraded around the beds. When my mother came to see me, the nurses would tell her, ‘Madam, your son is strange.’”
Her culture at the time still viewed trans identities as a medical illness or a moral failing, the music website That Eric Alper reported. After her mom remarried and had seven more children, Lupez left home at age 14 and worked in poverty at circuses and at harvest festival performances.
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By age 15, she moved to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and began performing in cabarets. By age 20, she moved to Montevideo, Uruguay and began appearing alongside other trans performers on the comedy show Telecataplúm, who encouraged her to explore her talent and gender through transformismo (drag performance).
She studied ballet and Argentinian folklore and, by the end of the 1960s, she was performing on the stages of the Teatro Maipo and the Teatro El Nacional in Buenos Aires. During her time there, police discovered that she wore clothes that “were not appropriate for her sex.” As such, she risked possible arrest each time she publicly appeared.
By the 1970s and 1980s, she began performing under the name Ana Lupez while touring her home country as well as Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Venezuela. Most of these countries had laws forbidding dressing as the opposite sex as well as vague public morality, “prostitution,” and vagrancy ordinances that they used to harass and detain trans women.
Her home country had fallen to a military dictatorship that persecuted gender-nonconformists and any artists perceived as political or ideological threats. So, in 1979, she left Argentina and eventually found a new home in Spain, where citizens and artists had far greater freedoms. She debuted at Madrid’s Gay Club, a groundbreaking queer venue.
By 1981, Lupez was hired by the renowned countercultural, LGBTQ+ showman and nightlife impresario Antonio Gracia José — who went by “Pierrot” and was himself a drag artist/quick-change artist — to perform at Barcelona de Noche (Barcelona by Night), a cabaret spot known as “the Gay Cathedral.” There, she became its headlining star, appeared in the show Locas de Amorrr (Crazy Women of Love) and went on to perform in stage shows in Madrid, including ones called E.L.L.A.S. (the Spanish plural feminine pronoun) and Escándalo Gay (Gay Scandal). She eventually led shows at the New Centaurus, a major cabaret house in Madrid.
She had gender-affirming surgery in Barcelona in 1986 and proclaimed, “I was the first trans woman to have surgery in Spain… when the law was passed, and was the first Argentinian to do so, when nobody [in Argentina] talked about it. For me, it was an indescribable liberation, because for me, of everything I’ve achieved in my life, my greatest triumph was becoming a woman.”
Lupez celebrated her transition in her stage show Ya Soy Yo (It’s Me Now), which included her original song, “Soy lo prohibido” (“I Am the Forbidden”).
The following year, she purchased Barcelona de Noche with two Argentinians colleagues and launched the shows Las Tretas de Ana (Ana’s Tricks) and Un Desplume Diferente (A Different Kind of Plucking).
Though the venue only stayed open for three more years, closing on September 16, 1990, over the following decade, she achieved fame as an actress in film and TV, including appearances in the film Las edades de Lulú (The Ages of Lulu) and on the TV shows Eva y Adán (Eve and Adam) and Agencia Matrimonial (Marriage Agency).
During that same decade, she relocated to the the Canary Islands, where she ran the Paradise Show Theatre in Maspalomas, two restaurants, and a custom shoe store.
She stayed in a relationship with her longtime Italian partner until his 2003 death, upon which point she returned to Argentina to be close to her loved ones. She sold most of her belongings to stage her 2006 comeback show, Otro tipo de Mujer (Another Type of Woman) on the Corrientes Street arts district.
Eventually returning to retire in Benidorm, Valencian on Spain’s Medditeranean coast, she was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Miss Transformarte event in 2019.
She died yesterday, in the early morning hours, leaving behind “a remarkable legacy of courage and glamour,” musician Eric Alper wrote, “at a time when simply being herself could mean arrest.” In the process, she opened doors for international trans performers, an important contribution in the present day, when trans identities are still stigmatized and criminalized.
“In my career, I achieved more success than I imagined,” she said, “but what I am most proud of is having achieved the dignity I sought as a woman.”
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