In 2000, Cecilia Gentili worked late nights as a sex worker on Roosevelt Avenue, a dusty corridor linking Queens’ most diverse communities, under the shadow of the clattering 7 train. It was the only way she could survive as a new immigrant. After coming out as trans, she had been shut out by employers in her native Argentina, and in New York, “I really thought that things would be different,” she says. “But in a way, it was a double level of discrimination: being trans and being undocumented. So again, I found myself engaged in street sex work.”
She rented a $150-a-month room in a shared apartment in Jackson Heights, a neighborhood full of other immigrants and queer and trans sex workers trying to help each other scrape by. “When I needed a place to live, it was not the city of New York that facilitated it, it was another sex worker. When I needed to eat, it was another trans person,” she says. If she felt unsafe on the street, she’d walk to a late-night street vendor and stand in their lamp’s warm glow.
