Crime Immemorial

As the holiday season of 1988 approached, a transgender performer would be savagely murdered in a New York City hotel room in a crime that would be immortalized in an iconic 1990 documentary.

Born Thomas Pellagatti in New Jersey, Venus Xtravaganza moved out of her conservative family home in the early 1980s and made her way to New York City, where she became involved with the burgeoning ballrooms of the underground LBGTQ+ community. Like many other gay and transgender teenagers at the time, Venus found a new family in the ballrooms, specifically at the House of Xtravaganza, an influential hub of dance, visual arts, and flourishing creativity that would put on lavish events featuring competitions in modeling, dance, costume design, and drag.

By 1988, Venus had become a fixture as a drag performer and had won several competitions in Harlem. She was saving up for gender reassignment surgery, and had also been extensively interviewed for Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris Is Burning, which would go on to become something of a cultural milestone.

But it all came crashing down on Christmas Day, when the body of Venus Xtravaganza was found stuffed beneath a bed in a room at the Duchess Hotel. She had been strangled to death approximately four days prior to being discovered.

Venus had made no secret of being involved in sex work, and it is generally believed that she was murdered by a client; indeed, transgender women were (and are) disproportionately likely to be victims of violence and murder. And Venus herself, in one of her filmed interviews, relates an experience whereby she narrowly escaped a john who became enraged after he discovered she was transgender.

The case has never come close to being solved, though Venus’s legacy lives on, and the House of Xtravaganza remains a significant force in the LGBTQ+ community worldwide.