Venus Xtravaganza is on screen for a few minutes of one documentary, sitting on a bed and saying what she wants, and she says it more plainly than anyone else in the film. We have not forgotten her.
Fi1m perspective
She sits on a bed and gives a list. A car, the man she loves, a home away from New York, to be a complete woman, to be a professional model. She says it the way most people read out a shopping list, small and cheerful and certain. Then, a little later, she is reading someone, in the ball sense of the word, and the temperature changes. "You wanna talk about reading? Let's talk about reading," she says, and tells whoever is in front of her to touch her skin, because they cannot take it. Both scenes are the same person. That is the point of her.
There is one film. Paris Is Burning (1991) is the whole record, and the shape of the life around it is short. She started dressing and performing at thirteen or fourteen, joined the House of Xtravaganza in 1983 after Hector Valle asked her to, and was filmed in the late 1980s while living in Jersey City, where she was born, and hoping to model. Angie Xtravaganza was her house mother. It is fair to say her reputation rests on a very small body of work, and it is also fair to say that the moment you watch the scenes, that stops mattering. What is on screen is enough.
What she does that the others in the film do not is ask for the ordinary thing without dressing it up. Everyone at the balls is performing a version of the life on the other side of the glass; Venus simply says she would like to live there, with a husband and a house in the suburbs and a washing machine, and to be, in her own words, a spoiled rich white girl. There is no irony in it and Livingston puts none on top. It hurt more than we expected a film this lively to hurt, because she was asking, quite reasonably, for the most ordinary life in America, and we knew as she spoke how far off it was. Octavia St. Laurent, who also wants to model, does something similar a few minutes later, and the two of them together are the film's argument.
She was not an actor in any usual sense. She was asked questions and answered them, and the answers have been quoted ever since by people who never saw a ball. That is a kind of performance too, and a rarer one: most people, given a camera and asked what they want, hedge. She did not. Watch the whole film, because her scenes need the room around them. But if you only remember ten minutes of it afterwards, they will be hers.
Biography
Venus Xtravaganza was an American performer associated with New York City's ball culture scene. She was a member of the House of Xtravaganza.
She appeared as herself in the documentary film Paris Is Burning (1990), directed by Jennie Livingston, which featured her life and experiences in the ballroom community. The film was released after her death.
Xtravaganza was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, and died on 21 December 1988 in New York City, aged 23. Her death was ruled a homicide by strangulation; the case remains unsolved.
