Cecilia Gentili
“As much as I think it is wonderful to create a narrative that highlights the LGBT community as ‘beautiful’ and ‘thriving,’ it is a big group of us who live in extreme poverty,” transgender activist Cecilia Gentili tells GO. “Some of us still go to jail for using our bodies to survive.” It’s a reality Gentili knows firsthand. During the ten years she’d spent as an undocumented immigrant after coming to the United States from Argentina, she turned to sex work as one of the few economic opportunities available for her. For Gentili, this path led her to drug use, frequent run-ins with the police, immigration detention, and eventually, asylum and recovery. From her experience came a determination to stand up for others like her who’d found themselves on society’s margins. Gentili served as the Trans Health Coordinator with Apicha Community Health Center and the Managing Director of Policy with GHMC and is currently on the steering committee for Decrim New York, a grassroots organization to decriminalize sex work in the state. She’s now gearing up to embark on a new venture with independent agency Trans Equity Consulting, which she founded in 2019 to improve services and accessibility to LGBTQ+ persons in the workplace and beyond. “We all have an obligation to look at those in the community who are suffering and do something about it,” she says. “We can all donate our time, our money, our expertise to do something to make the ones in our community better because the community doesn’t end with the beauty of it. It goes beyond it and reaches the ones who are disenfranchised and marginalized.” —RK
