Anji Xtravaganza



Anji Xtravaganza (circa 1966 – March 31, 1993), sometimes credited as Angie Xtravaganza, was a transgendered performer and member of the Ball culture House of Xtravaganza featured in the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning.

Her drag daughter Venus Xtravaganza was murdered in 1989. Anji Xtravaganza died in New York at age 27 from an AIDS-related liver disease. Describing the last days of Anji Xtravaganza, Jesse Green writes that the liver disease was "destroying [Anji's] hard won femininity." Historian Debra Silverman analyzed the New York Times coverage:

"Green reports that near the end Anji had to stop taking the hormones which were inadvertantly helping the progress of the disease. Green notes, 'In later pictures you can see the masculine lines of Angie's [sic] face re-emerging despite the make-up.' For Green, there must always be something else behind the make-up which disease(s) can devastatingly reveal--there is inevitably a re-emergence of what Green reads as 'true' identity.  It is the strength of Garber's book to make us aware of just how spurious this underlying or final truth really is--to show us that there is always something else behind the something else behind the make-up.  What is always still underneath, and can never fully be revealed, is Anji's most complex layer; neither a 'true' nor a 'made-up' identity, but a third term, that which both defies and defines Anji's 'masculinity' and 'feminity.'"