Anyone who’s seen Jennie Livingston’s iconic 1990 documentary Paris is Burning about the New York City drag ball scene (and if you haven’t seen it, what are you waiting for?) remembers the tragic moment at the end of the film when the Xtravaganza house mother, Angie, finds out that 23 year old transgender performer Venus Xtravaganza has been strangled to death. Now, according to Them, over 30 years after the film brought drag culture to the screen, Jersey City—where Xtravaganza lived with her grandmother and filmed her interviews for the documentary—voted to make her home a historic landmark.
Livingston herself told NJ.com how important the move to make Xtravaganza’s house a landmark really was. “LGBTQ people live in our cities and towns, but we often are invisible,” Livingston explains. “There are virtually no statues of us. Historically, there aren’t so many records of us, of our own chosen families, our ways of expressing ourselves, of our relationships to our families of origin, to our accomplishments.”
In the same article for NJ.com, Gisele Alicea Xtravaganza—the current house mother of the House of Xtravaganza who was instrumental in getting Venus Xtravaganza’s home landmark status—talked about how much the late drag performer inspired her. “To me they were magnificent,” she says. “They were beautiful. I couldn’t believe that they were so proud to be themselves, and they owned themselves.”
The move to give Venus Xtravaganza’s home landmark status is in keeping with New Jersey’s recent history of being a safe haven for transgender people in the midst of an onslaught of anti-trans legislation in other states. In April, New Jersey’s governor, Phil Murphy, signed an executive order that protected people seeking gender affirming care in New Jersey even if they are traveling there from another state to get it. It even forbids state departments from cooperating with other states seeking to prosecute such individuals who come to New Jersey for care. So it’s little surprise that New Jersey has become one of the few states to commemorate an important LGBTQ icon with such an honor.
