a trans showgirl said she could wear the dress onstage in buenos aires, then get arrested walking home in it. she has died at 82. rest easy, ana.

via the Asociación Argentina de Actores y Actrices, C5N, MDZ and Noticias al Instante

Ana Lupez used to tell a story about the years of Argentina's dictatorship. She could go onstage at the Maipo, one of the grand revue houses of Buenos Aires, in a dress. Then she could be arrested on the way home for wearing the same dress.

So she left. And she became a star anyway, just somewhere that would let her walk home.

Lupez, a vedette, dancer and actress the Argentine press calls the country's longest-living trans woman, died in the early hours of Wednesday, Oct. 14, at Clínica Santa María in Mendoza, the national actors' union and C5N reported. She was 82. C5N said a relapse had put her back in the hospital as an emergency.

from the circus to the maipo

She was born in 1944 in Guaymallén, Mendoza, and started out in the circus and in the shows of the region's grape-harvest festival, the Vendimia. The union traces her from television in Montevideo to the revue stages of Buenos Aires, where she shared bills with Moria Casán, Zulma Faiad, Nélida Lobato and José Marrone. As a child, it says, she was hospitalized because her identity was treated as an illness. As an adult she was detained, again and again, by the police.

the star of barcelona de noche

Abroad, she played Rio's Teatro Alaska in 1980, then worked in Madrid before becoming the headliner and later a co-owner of Barcelona de Noche, the city's legendary cabaret, with shows like Locas de amorrr and Las tretas de Ana. She choreographed at the Teatro Apolo, turned up in Bigas Luna's film Las edades de Lulú, and had gender-affirming surgery in Spain in 1986, which she called the greatest triumph of her life, per C5N.

"What I'm proudest of is having won the dignity I was looking for as a woman," she said in a 2013 interview the union quoted, in Spanish. To C5N's question of whether being a woman had been her success, she said her great success had been being a fighter: "I'm an artist, and I didn't become trans to be one."

She asked for no wake. Her ashes, C5N and Noticias al Instante report, will be scattered on the boards of Mendoza's Teatro Quintanilla, the first stage she ever stood on. Of course they will. Where else would she go.