Ana Lupez spent her life on stages that weren’t built for women like her, and then she bought one.

The Argentine actress, dancer and vedette died in the early hours of Wednesday, October 14, in Mendoza, the province where she was born. She was 82. The Asociación Argentina de Actores y Actrices, Argentina’s actors’ union, announced her death and called her a trans pioneer of Argentine entertainment. Local media described her as the country’s longest-living trans woman.

Her career ran from circus tents in Mendoza to the revue theatres of Buenos Aires to the cabarets of Spain. It’s worth knowing, especially in LGBTQ History Month.

The short version

  • Who: Ana Lupez, born in 1944 in Guaymallén, Mendoza, Argentina. Vedette, dancer, actress and choreographer.
  • Known for: headlining, and from 1987 co-owning, Barcelona de Noche, a famous cabaret in Barcelona.
  • Why she matters: one of the first Argentine trans women to have gender-affirming surgery, in Barcelona in 1986, and a visible trans star in the decades when police in Argentina were arresting women like her.
  • Her own words: in a 2013 interview with Diario UNO, she said her greatest triumph was achieving what she had always dreamed of: being a woman.

From the harvest festival to the Maipo

Lupez left home as a teenager and worked in circuses and at the grape harvest festivals in Mendoza, PinkNews reported. She went on to work in Montevideo on the TV comedy show Telecataplúm, and then in the great revue theatres of Buenos Aires, the Maipo and El Nacional, according to the actors’ union.

She shared bills with some of the biggest names in Argentine revue, including Moria Casán and Nélida Lobato, C5N reported.

Behind the sequins was constant danger. The union’s tribute describes repeated arrests and police abuse. Lupez recalled that she could perform in a dress on the Maipo’s stage, then be detained for wearing the same clothes on her way home. In 1979, during Argentina’s military dictatorship, she left the country.

Barcelona’s “Gay Cathedral”

After performing in Brazil, Lupez settled in Spain and debuted at Madrid’s Gay Club. In 1981 she joined Barcelona de Noche, a cabaret run by the performer and impresario known as Pierrot and nicknamed the “Gay Cathedral,” and became its headline star, PinkNews and music writer Eric Alper reported. She also headlined shows in Madrid, including E.L.L.A.S. and Escándalo Gay.

In 1986 she had gender-affirming surgery in Barcelona. She marked it on stage in a show called Ya Soy Yo (“It’s Me Now”), featuring her own song “Soy lo prohibido” (“I Am the Forbidden”), according to PinkNews.

A year later, in 1987, she and two Argentine colleagues bought Barcelona de Noche. Under their ownership it staged shows like Las tretas de Ana and Un desplume diferente, until the club closed in September 1990.

She kept working. She appeared in Bigas Luna’s 1990 film Las edades de Lulú and the TV series Eva y Adán, agencia matrimonial, then moved to the Canary Islands, where she ran the Paradise Show Theatre in Maspalomas.

Coming home

After her longtime partner died in 2003, Lupez returned to Argentina and put on a comeback show in the mid-2000s, Ana Lupez, otro tipo de mujer (“Another Kind of Woman”). In 2019 she received a lifetime achievement award at the Miss Transformarte event in Spain, PinkNews reported.

Her life is told in a biography by Bárbara Di Rocco, ¡Que me quiten lo bailado!, roughly “No one can take away what I’ve danced.”

She died at the Santa María clinic in Mendoza after a relapse in her health that required emergency hospitalisation, C5N reported. According to C5N, there was no wake, at her request, and her ashes are to be scattered on the stage of the Teatro Quintanilla, where she first performed.

Why her story matters now

It’s easy to read a life like this as ancient history. It isn’t. Lupez lived through a time when, as PinkNews notes, laws on cross-dressing and vague “public morality” rules were used across much of South America to harass and detain trans women. She left her country because of it, and spent the next decades making a living, and a name, by being exactly who she was in public.

The young trans performers working today inherit stages that women like Lupez kept lit. The country’s Instituto Nacional del Teatro put it simply in its tribute, quoted by Diario UNO: “May the applause never fade. May her memory live on.” (Our translation from Spanish.)

“I’m still happy and I don’t regret anything,” Lupez once said, as quoted by C5N (our translation). That sounds about right for a woman who bought the cabaret.