Venus knew what she wanted.
Relaxing on a floral print bedspread next to a collection of stuffed animals at her grandmother’s home in Jersey City, she listed her heart’s desires.
“I want a car,” she said in a soft voice, her blond hair swept up behind fluffy bangs.
“I wanna be with the man I love,” she continued, her bright lipstick and dark eye makeup accenting her delicate features.
“I want a nice home, away from New York, up the Peekskills or maybe in Florida, somewhere far where no one knows me.”
Venus rested her head on her hand, her petite frame in a recumbent position.
“I want my sex change,” she said.
Her slingback flats grazed a radiator as a window cast light on her white capri pants and the room’s wood paneling.
“I wanna get married in church in white,” Venus said.
“I wanna be a complete woman.”
And a professional model, she said — in “a high-fashion world.”
“I want this,” Venus said in her gentle way, but with an insistent, firm resolve. “This is what I want and I’m gonna go for it.”
Venus Pellagatti Xtravaganza didn’t know that she would not live to celebrate Christmas 1988.
The Jersey City local was found dead Dec. 21, 1988, strangled in a New York City hotel.
She was 23.
Venus never got to see herself interviewed on the big screen in Jennie Livingston’s landmark 1990 documentary “Paris is Burning,” a portrait of New York’s transgender and queer ballroom community in the late ’80s. But through the famous film, her dreams, words, style and sense of humor have touched generations as a legendary figure of ballroom.
More than 30 years later, both of Venus’ families, the Pellagattis and the Xtravaganzas — her ballroom family — met for the first time.
They wanted answers. What happened to Venus and who is responsible for her murder?
Far from a dramatic murder mystery or a hyped-up true crime tale, their quest brought truth into the light of day in a way that seems several lifetimes removed from the ’80s, but still somehow right there in that room with Venus and her list of dreams.
“It forced us to really open our eyes,” says Louie Pellagatti, Venus’ younger brother.
Decades after her death, he says Venus has guided his family to a much greater understanding in Kimberly Reed’s “I’m Your Venus,” a documentary arriving Monday (June 23) on Netflix.
In 1986, after Louie moved from Jersey City to California with his mother and stepfather as a teen, Venus called him to say she wanted to transition.
“I had no understanding, I was ignorant,” he tells NJ Advance Media.
In the film, Louie and his brothers honor their sister and seek justice for her murder. Their mission forced them to look inward and reexamine their actions.
“What I see is a lotta healing,” Louie says. “I see that it was something that Venus did.”
Ultimately, he says, what they found is an expression of love — “the ultimate power.”
The Pellagattis are happy to share their story, because despite their own progress in forging connections with the Xtravaganzas, both families know the dangers trans people continue to face in 2025, living in a climate where hate has been inflamed by the government and the presidency.
Louie knows where Venus would stand.
“She would probably be the biggest advocate and the biggest supporter and out there with the bullhorn and screaming for all of their rights,” he says.
‘Touch this skin’
Before her death, Louie wasn’t yet calling Venus his sister.
After announcing her plans to transition, she told him she just wanted to be happy.
Louie, now 56 and living near San Francisco, remembers telling his sister that’s what he wanted — for her to be OK, to be happy.
Starting when they were kids growing up in Jersey City, Venus had a playful personality that stood out, even in a Puerto Rican and Italian American family with a strong “Jersey attitude,” he says.
Her take-no-prisoners swagger became legend in “Paris is Burning.”
In a section of the film dedicated to “reading” — the art of delivering a well-constructed dig — she minted a quotable moment while dressing down a friend named Pedro.
“Touch this skin, darling!” Venus said, extending her right arm, then running her fingers over her left.
She wore a sleeveless button-down shirt, her big blond ’80s hair and hoop earrings shining in the sun.
“Touch this skin, honey! Touch all of this skin, OK?” Venus said, the chunky stack of bangles on her arms clinking as she moved.
She lifted up her shirt and showed her stomach.
“You just can’t take it!”
That was Venus, Louie says.
If she could be with her two families in 2025 — the Xtravaganzas and Louie, Joe and John Pellagatti — he has no doubt what she’d be doing.
“I could just see her right now, like, cracking jokes and also looking at me, John and Joe and just sayin’ a few words and they would probably be ‘I told you I was fierce,’” he says.
Some of his earliest memories of Venus are of her walking around snapping her fingers twice as she delivered that declaration.
“She would say (adjusting his voice to a Venus-like tenor) ‘I am fierce. I am fierce!’”
Venus died before “Paris is Burning” was completed.
In the 1990 film, Angie Xtravaganza, then mother of the House of Xtravaganza, says police showed her a picture of Venus’ body.
Angie had always cautioned Venus, a sex worker, about taking risks. She missed her deeply.
“But that’s part of life as far as being a transsexual in New York City and surviving,” she said in the film.
Angie was the one who had to tell the Pellagattis that Venus had died.
“I’ll never forget the day we got the call, my mother dropping to her knees in gut-wrenching pain,” Louie says.
Louie and Venus’ older brother, John Pellagatti Jr., remembers going with Joe and their father to identify her body. It’s a memory he’d choose not to have if he could. He knew it was Venus by the hawk-shaped scar on her hand, which had been there since she was a baby.
He’d never seen his father cry until that day.
The next time Louie saw Venus as he remembered her was in “Paris is Burning.” The documentary, which showcases voices from New York’s Black and Latino drag ball culture, was playing at Film Forum in 1991.
Louie had flown out to New Jersey with his mother to visit family. After a barbecue, he drove into Manhattan to see the film with his mother, his brother Frankie and his mother’s best friend.
“My mother was like ‘I want you to take me, Louis’ and I did,” he says. “And I walked out of there with a sense of sadness, obviously ... I didn’t know the impact that documentary was gonna have on the world.”
“Paris is Burning,” which won the grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival, would be extended to six months at Film Forum. In 2016, the Library of Congress added the documentary to the National Film Registry.
“My mother felt pride,” Louie says. “She felt like she had some peace because she’d seen the beauty of Venus in that movie, the beauty of her child. I think there was sadness there as well, because obviously she lost her child and she probably had regrets.
“But I remember it was like ‘wow, she was the star of that documentary,’” he says with a laugh.
A pain, and love, that never dies
“I’m Your Venus” director Kimberly Reed remembers seeing “Paris is Burning” in San Francisco, when she was transitioning.
“Watching that film in a theater influenced me deeply,” she says. “It made it very easy to say yes to directing the film some 31, 32 years later.”
Reed, who hails from Montana, has been living in Newark for the past decade.
“Venus made such an impression on me for these two reasons,” she says. “One, because she was so beautiful and vivacious and feisty and just vital, and also because she served as a cautionary tale for me and what it meant to be trans in the ’90s, what I would be contending with, and the life of, in many situations, danger that that would bring.”
“I’m Your Venus,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last year, is necessarily in dialogue with “Paris is Burning” because the film is a huge part of Venus’ story. That was also the only available footage of Venus.
Reed used clips of Venus being interviewed by Livingston at her grandmother’s house on Eighth Street in Jersey City, where she lived, as well as footage of her walking at balls and joyfully “reading” her peers in New York.
The challenge was to have Venus present throughout the film, to hear her voice alongside both of her families.
“Venus is still very much alive for the Pellagattis,” Reed says. “Venus is still very much present and on everyone’s minds in the House of Xtravaganza and within the entire ballroom community. There’s a little moment where three of the Xtravaganzas are walking down the street and quoting ‘Paris is Burning.’ They were a block away, they didn’t know they were on microphone. That sort of quotation happens all the time. You hear Venus quoted in a couple ballroom songs we put in the closing credits.”
Reed previously directed the documentaries “Dark Money” (2018), about corporate money in politics, and “Prodigal Sons” (2008), about her reunion with her adopted brother, who discovered he was Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth’s grandson. She also directed the 2024 documentary short “Seat 31: Zooey Zephyr,” about a trans Montana state representative who was expelled from the legislature after opposing a bill banning gender-affirming medical care for children.
“For me, as as a trans woman myself, it’s one thing to look into what happened to Venus 35 years ago and to get answers to that,” Reed says. “That carries a lot of weight and resolutions and emotional closure for the Pellagattis and for the Xtravaganzas. That’s a really important thing to do, to get justice, but it was also important for me as a director to make sure that we were examining the difference between what happened 35 years ago and what is happening today.
“And in some ways, we have come a long way since 1988-’89 — in some ways we have not,” she continued. “And having an opportunity to ask both of those questions, to show what has changed and what still needs to happen, was the thread that was really important for me to pull on with the rest of the team.”
The meeting of the Pellagattis and Xtravaganzas was one reality that wasn’t a part of Venus’ life in 1988. Those two worlds did not converge until long after her death, when Venus’ family tried to gain some clarity on what happened to her, and cameras followed.
It was an often daunting process.
Sitting in a room together and hearing what lawyers were able to learn from police in New York about the circumstances of Venus’ death was visibly devastating for everyone. She had been found by a housekeeper under a mattress at what was then the Fulton Hotel on 46th Street. A plaid scarf had been tied tightly around her neck, and police saw ligature marks on her wrists.
Another particularly difficult, emotional moment in the film arrives when John, Joe and Louie Pellagatti meet with Jose Disla Xtravaganza, who called Venus a sister and niece.
It wasn’t an easy meeting to arrange.
“It’s important to understand that the Xtravaganzas and the ballroom community in general are still feeling a lot of loss,” Reed says. “And that’s not shocking at all ... The grim reality is that there are not a lot of people around today who knew Venus, and that’s in part because of the three decades of violence towards LGBTQIA+ folks, especially trans women, especially trans women of color. It’s what has been categorized as an epidemic, and the ballroom community feels it. Queer communities, especially communities of color, feel it.”
When Jose does meet the Pellagatti brothers in the film, he tells them that Venus was in pain because of her biological family, which is hard for them to hear.
Louie, one of several people in tears by the meeting’s end, emphatically affirms the close bond he shared with Venus since he was her little baby brother, the one she held and protected when their parents were fighting. He tells Jose that he and his brothers certainly loved their sister, but maybe they didn’t know how to show her in the way she needed. Louie calls this kind of self-reflection an evolution.
As the conversation was taking place, Reed immediately knew it would be at the very heart of the film.
“It was so genuine and sincere and honest and difficult and real,” she says — one of the ways Venus’ loved ones redefined love and family on their quest.
“We were watching those definitions shift and grow and deepen.”
That’s not her name
The spark for “I’m Your Venus” started with a rewatch.
Mike Stafford, a producer of the documentary, decided to revisit “Paris is Burning” in July 2019 after binge-watching “Pose” with his wife, June Stafford.
The acclaimed FX series and its characters had taken inspiration from the ’80s ballroom community in the documentary. The death of the character Candy Ferocity (Angelica Ross) in “Pose” was based on Venus’ death.
After rewatching Livingston’s film, they began Googling Venus.
The results that came up were full of inconsistencies.
“It kind of felt like erasure to us,” says Stafford, a TV producer and attorney who does pro bono civil rights work for the trans community. “And as important a figure as she was in the community, we just became consumed with it.”
He dove further into research and put together a plan. He reached out to the House of Xtravaganza and the Pellagattis, who had faced obstacles in trying to find information about the investigation of Venus’ death. He offered to represent them for free to get their sister’s case reopened.
They agreed.
“At that moment, I really, really felt like Venus was pullin’ a lot of strings, because a lot of things started happening fairly quick,” Louie says.
It was an unexpected development after so many years of wanting justice for his sister’s murder.
“It has haunted us as a family,” he says. “I’ve seen what it did to my parents. I’ve seen what it did to my my brother Frankie who is no longer with us, and to other family members. I know what her tragic death did to us, and it was a lot of pain and suffering, but she suffered ultimately the most, and we never thought we could ever get any answers. So as time went on, it was almost resigned to the fact, you know, we’re never gonna find out.”
Their search for answers didn’t become a film until Stafford asked Louie to see his sister’s grave. Having previously lived in Old Bridge for 13 years, Venus’ youngest brother had returned to his hometown of Jersey City before moving back to California four years ago.
At the cemetery in North Arlington, Louie said something that floored Stafford.
He looked at the grave, where Venus was buried with her grandmother and grandfather under her birth name. To Louie, it was another erasure.
He said he wanted it changed. They owed it to Venus.
“Her deadname was on the stone,” he says, and for years, he had wanted to correct that. He also wanted to change his sister’s legal name to Venus Pellagatti Xtravaganza.
Today, that’s what is on the headstone.
Stafford had told the Pellagattis that he would switch into producer mode if there were any major happenings. When he saw Louie’s resolve to change Venus’ name on the headstone, he knew he had to get a camera rolling.
“I said ‘Well, if you’re going to do that, I need to stop being your attorney and start shooting something right now ‘cause this is too important,’” Stafford says.
He brought in a friend, attorney Robyn Gigl, who had been appointed to the New Jersey Transgender Equality Task Force. She connected the Pellagattis to Jim Walden, another high-profile lawyer who also agreed to do pro bono work for the family, as well as attorney Celeste Fiore, founder of the Trans Affirming Alliance.
In 2023, Fiore worked with the Pellagattis on the posthumous name change for Venus, which the alliance believed had never been attempted before in New Jersey. The family used the document to change Venus’ name on her death certificate and tombstone.
All of this seemed to bring the brothers closer to their sister — they couldn’t change the past, but they could change her name.
While John and Joe Pellagatti were initially reluctant to be part of the documentary, all three brothers wanted to meet with Venus’ ballroom family.
“The Pellagattis, from the beginning, were always ready to do everything with the Xtravaganzas,” says Stafford, who began filming with June before Reed joined the documentary.
“People really honor Venus and love her, especially in the LGBTQ+ community,” Louie says. “She’s an icon. And I really didn’t have an understanding of that ... we heard how important she was to the trans community and to the Xtravaganzas and to New York, but I really had no idea how much of a positive impact she made on the world.”
A guiding light
Gisele Alicea Xtravaganza never met Venus Pellagatti Xtravaganza, but she always felt connected to her through “Paris is Burning.”
She saw the film in 1995, before she transitioned.
“It was the first time that I was like ‘Oh, maybe I’m not so ashamed to be this way,’” she says.
She’d play around with friends about being a member of a ballroom house long before she entered the scene.
“I come from the same realm, the same world, the same ambiance as Venus,” says Gisele, current mother of the House of Xtravaganza.
She knows what it’s like to be treated differently, to be ostracized and want to escape. Like Venus, just being who she is has put her in great danger.
“I’ve almost been killed, like, seven times,” she tells NJ Advance Media. “This is why I wanted to do this, this is not a joke! I’ve had people literally try to kill me, over and over ... It messes with you.”
In “I’m Your Venus,” the statuesque model and activist sits with the Pellagatti family in their meetings with lawyers, representing the Xtravaganza family.
“All of them were really beautiful with me,” she says of Venus’ brothers. “They were very respectful.”
Their efforts to change their sister’s name and tombstone are “almost like saying ‘I’m sorry’ to her,” Gisele says. “It’s almost like apologizing to her, like ‘look, we weren’t there for you when you were here, but we’re going to try to make it up now.’ ... Just expressing their love to her publicly is a big deal, especially for straight men ... and it’s good for men to see that.”
Because she also knows what it’s like to not be supported by people who are supposed to support you.
“This is why I wanted to do this film, because I deal with hatred within my own family,” Gisele says.
Joining her in the documentary is Amara Gisele Xtravaganza, a model who has appeared in Vogue and worked with top fashion brands like Mugler, Balenciaga and Willy Chavarria.
Venus shared her own vision for being a model in “Paris is Burning.”
“I always felt like I wanted to be a pretty lady and I wanted to do fashion shows,” she said in the film. “But for those who can’t accept me, I guess it’s just because they refuse to see it and they don’t wanna understand it.”
Amara and Gisele represent what is possible for trans women almost 40 years after Venus died.
“When I was growing up, it seemed impossible,” Gisele says. “Now, I’m not even exaggerating, if you’re a beautiful trans woman, you can go to any agency ... Back then, when I used to go to agencies, if they knew you were trans, they wouldn’t accept you.”
Goddess of ballroom
When Jennie Livingston had her first brush with ballroom, Venus was one of the first people she saw.
The “Paris is Burning” director, a graduate of Yale who studied photography, moved to New York in 1985 and was taking a class in filmmaking at New York University when she started exploring the scene.
She saw Venus at her first ball. It was a mini ball, what would today be called a kiki ball, held earlier in the day. Livingston was “just agog,” she says, having a fun time taking photographs and getting acquainted with people in the scene.
The filmmaker, who would go on to serve as a consulting producer on “Pose,” is also an executive producer of “I’m Your Venus.” She remembers Venus as “very funny, very sharp, but not mean,” a talented person who radiated intelligence and heart.
“I don’t think Venus had read Simone de Beauvoir, but obviously she could make the connection between sex work and marriage ... she was just astute that way,” Livingston tells NJ Advance Media.
In an interview for “Paris is Burning,” Venus told her that though she had stopped hustling, she would meet with friends who would give her money. Most of the time they wouldn’t expect sexual favors, but some of the time they would. She likened the arrangement to a suburban woman going to bed with her husband because she wants a washer and dryer set.
“In the long run, it all ends up the same way,” Venus said.
At her grandmother’s house in Jersey City, she told Livingston she would like to be “a spoiled, rich white girl” because “they get what they want whenever they want it.”
“Maybe one day I’ll meet a rich millionaire and he’ll take me all around the world,” she said with a laugh in an outtake from “Paris is Burning.”
In the film, Livingston, who identifies as genderqueer, interviews ballroom veterans about balls, voguing and how gay and trans teens found new mothers and fathers with houses like Xtravaganza after being rejected by their families.
Venus told Livingston she started dressing up as a girl when she was 13 or 14, at first without her family knowing. She didn’t want to “embarrass” them, she said, so she left her childhood home for New York. She met the Xtravaganzas when she was 15 and they became her other family.
As a glamorous queen at balls, her regal gowns, floating walk and fan-blown hair made her look ethereal, like an actual goddess of beauty and love. But outside of ballroom, hate threatened to dim her light.
Venus recounted one harrowing experience she had as a sex worker after a customer found out she was trans.
“You’re a victim of AIDS and you’re trying to give me AIDS. What are you, crazy?” they barked, calling her a freak. “You’re a homo, I should kill you.”
She jumped out a window to escape. It was one of the reasons she stopped hustling, she told Livingston. Another was the risk of being exposed to HIV.
Angie Xtravaganza told Livingston that Venus would get into cars with strangers. She’d warn her about the danger.
“In a way, she knew how dangerous it was to live the life she was living in terms of doing sex work and spending time on the street,” Livingston says. “And in a way, she didn’t, because ... you just don’t think bad things will happen. You know they happen, you don’t think they’ll happen to you.
“When she was murdered, it was truly shocking ... It was very traumatizing. It was hard to decide how to portray it in the film.”
Old hurt, new family
Livingston never encountered John, Joe and Louie Pellagatti when Venus was alive.
That remained true in the wake of her death. It took the 2024 Tribeca premiere of “I’m Your Venus” to bring them together.
She found the experience very moving.
“Meeting them now in light of this film, I really wish there had been a way for us to meet back then,” she says.
Joe Pellagatti, 63, appears in the film with his daughter Jillian, who was born seven years after Venus was killed.
His sister would have turned 60 in May.
In Reed’s film, Joe is all smiles as he tells a story about a day he clocked an attractive woman in downtown Jersey City. As soon as the woman saw him, she took off her heels and made a mad dash to a PATH station.
It was Venus.
He’d seen her dressing up in their mother’s clothes and shoes as a child, but he thought Venus was gay, not trans.
“As heterosexual Italian Puerto Ricans, we wanted to beat the s--- out of everybody,” Joe tells NJ Advance Media. “So when you have your sibling acting like that, you shake them, like ‘what’s wrong with you? Something wrong with you?’ But there was nothing wrong with her. That’s who she was. And it took us some time to realize that.”
Joe lives in Rutherford and owns a subcontracting company that sells doors and door hardware.
When he watched “I’m Your Venus,” he cried.
“I’m hoping that this film will help people see what my brothers and I didn’t, and then we lost her,” he says.
The Pellagattis have come far in that understanding. In the documentary, they attend their first ball in Brooklyn with the Xtravaganzas.
“My sister, she was it,” Joe says admiringly. “People came to see her … She was happening, man, in that world.”
He remembers trying to warn Venus about the dangers of the street.
“I would tell her all the time ‘please be careful out there. People are crazy in the city. They don’t understand you and they’re gonna look to hurt you.’”
She’d shrug it off and say she was fine.
“She wasn’t fine,” Joe says. “My worst fears is what came true.”
“I’m her older brother,” he says. “I’m supposed to protect her. I didn’t do that, I wasn’t there and it’s difficult to deal with that stuff.”
In the course of filming “I’m Your Venus,” John Pellagatti Jr., the eldest of the Pellagattis, started calling the Xtravaganzas his sisters.
“Speaking with them is like talking to her,” says John, 64, who lives in Bayonne. “It reminds me so much of my sister.”
In the film, he meets with Venus’ friend Helen, who tells him that his sister’s chosen name came from a song, though not the one that inspired the film’s title (that would be “Venus,” the 1969 song by Dutch band Shocking Blue, covered by Bananarama in 1986). Helen suggested she take the name Venus from the echoey 1959 Frankie Avalon song of the same name, in which he sings about “a lovely girl with sunlight in her hair.” Venus loved the idea.
After the Pellagattis filmed “I’m Your Venus” two years ago, John finally watched “Paris is Burning.”
“We didn’t know what trans meant back then,” he says, and he regrets how he reacted to his sister being trans.
“That didn’t mean I didn’t love my sister,” he says. “I shut my mouth, opened my ears and said ‘listen to how people live their lives and what she was all about.’ You learn a lot.”
Over the years, his sister’s death had even become fodder for “interactive murder mystery” theater in New York. In “I’m Your Venus,” attorneys tell the Pellagatti brothers and Gisele Xtravaganza about a real potential lead police received in 1990. A man who was incarcerated on a rape charge confessed to binding and killing a sex worker and hiding her body under a mattress in a Manhattan hotel. Soon after that, he died by suicide.
This seemed to be a possible answer to who killed Venus, one that two of her brothers could accept (John remained unconvinced). But after police reopened the case and tested DNA from the possible suspect, it wasn’t a match to a sample collected from under her fingernails. Walden, the attorney, told the family that results weren’t necessarily definitive and couldn’t be used to say whether that man was innocent or guilty. The case remains open.
“This late in the game, with tainted DNA, it’s gonna be very difficult,” Joe says. “I personally don’t have any closure ... It’s 37 years ago, so maybe this person’s still walking around.”
‘We want you alive’
For Dominique Jackson, solving Venus’ murder is “very personal.”
As a Black trans woman of ballroom experience, she remembers how Venus’ death reverberated through the community.
“Venus’ murder is the one that really was used to help me stay alive,” she tells NJ Advance Media. “Before you left to go anywhere, the older women always reminded us ‘Remember Venus. We want to see you back here. We want you alive.’”
Jackson, an executive producer of “I’m Your Venus,” is an actor and model known for starring as house mother Elektra Abundance in “Pose.”
She says the story of Venus is a call to action as President Donald Trump and his administration continue to attack trans people, endangering their rights and access to gender-affirming health care.
“We need to put these stories out there because lives are being lost,” Jackson says.
“Since Venus, we have thousands of deaths of people of trans experience, including nonbinary and gender nonconforming people,” she says. “We’re talking about globally ... We have done nothing to anyone but exist.”
The Human Rights Campaign tracks violence against trans people in the United States. The LGBTQ+ advocacy group’s November report said that since 2013, 372 trans and gender-expansive people have been killed in the United States as a result of that violence. The report said 83% of those killed were trans women and 84% were people of color.
The story of the Pellagattis and Xtravaganzas helps to show the devastation of each lost life.
“I hope it opens people’s hearts a bit,” Reed says. “Not asking to be tolerated or accepted, even. We deserve to be treated like everybody else. And it’s barbaric when you don’t.”
Stafford points to GLAAD Media Institute’s Accelerating Acceptance survey, which reported that just 22% of non-LGBTQ adults say they personally know someone who is trans. He thinks about that other 78%.
“I hope that what this film can do is possibly reach some of those people and demonstrate that humanity — that it’s mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers,” he says. “Everybody’s impacted by this.”
Jackson wishes that her own family connected with her ballroom family.
Seeing the Pellagattis and Xtravaganzas share their pain was “major,” she says — “It was really important to have these people come together and tell the truth.”
“To me, the Pellagatti men are now role models to the rest of the world ... They’re showing up for a community that needs them. They’re showing up for their sister.”
The promise of Venus House
Those who love and value Venus have also shown up in another big way.
They worked together to make the place she called home a historic landmark in Jersey City. And if plans materialize, that same place will become a lifeline and resource for trans people.
Venus’ safe haven in Jersey City was 343 1/2 Eighth St., where she lived with her grandmother, Justina Salicrup (who died in 1990). Salicrup’s house, located in the Hamilton Park neighborhood, was part of a community so close-knit, neighbors were actual family.
“Directly across the street from her was my other grandmother, so I had the Italians on one side, the Puerto Ricans on the other, all on the same block in the same city,” John Pellagatti says.
But 343 1/2 Eighth St. was where Venus was her grandmother’s “baby,” as she shared with Livingston. It’s where the director filmed the ballroom denizen talking about her dreams in scenes that remain poignant all these years later.
It was a rare sanctuary for a trans woman to have within her biological family.
In “I’m Your Venus,” Gisele Xtravaganza makes a strong case to the Jersey City Historic Preservation Commission that granting the home historic landmark status would serve as its own form of justice for Venus, the House of Xtravaganza, the Pellagattis and the wider community.
Both of Venus’ families, past and present, delivered remarks to city officials in support of the landmark designation. And on Trans Day of Visibility in 2023, they gathered to celebrate the recognition of Venus Pellagatti Xtravaganza House. Posing for photos in front of the blue-accented brick home, Gisele and Louie started to sing:
“I’m your Venus, I’m your fire, (at) your desire.”
The group crossed their arms into “X”s for Xtravaganza.
Jonovia Chase, an “I’m Your Venus” executive producer who played Kiki Pendavis in “Pose,” is working with Garden State Equality, Hudson Pride Center and the ballroom community organization House Lives Matter to make Venus House a resource for LGBTQ+ people in need.
The plan is to buy the home and turn it into a museum, temporary housing and a community space.
It’s about “creating a pathway for people to actually see how we can protect trans lives, invest in trans lives and support making the world a better place,” Chase tells NJ Advance Media.
Organizers are fundraising for the project.
“That’s great for Venus’ legacy,” John Pellagatti says. “Just think how many kids she could help with that house.”
And what would Venus think?
“She would say ‘look what we have done as a family and what we can do for other families,’” Louie Pellagatti says. “That is my motivation.”
He went to get a tattoo on the inside of his right arm while filming the documentary — “Venus” emblazoned on a lustrous crown over roses. Inked at the top: a gleaming “X” for Xtravaganza.
“I think of the sadness that somebody might be feeling because they believe that their family don’t love them or they hate them,” he says. “That’s a very sad feeling. And if someone could see this documentary — and I think Venus would say it — it might save someone’s life. That’s the most important thing, man.”
As for the Pellagattis and the Xtravaganzas?
They’re still in touch.
“I’m Your Venus” is streaming on Netflix.
For more information about the Venus Pellagatti Xtravaganza House and to donate, visit venus.house or gardenstateequality.org/venus-house.
Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter/X, @amykup.bsky.social on Bluesky and @kupamy on Instagram and Threads.
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