Eleanor Hystoré - Venus Rising

2025, Eleanor Hystoré, English, Venus Xtravaganza,

Full title: "Venus Rising: The Unfinished Life of a Ballroom Icon Venus Xtravaganza" by Eleanor Hystoré.

Eleanor Hystoré’s Venus Rising: The Unfinished Life of a Ballroom Icon Venus Xtravaganza is a work of deep tenderness and fierce illumination. It reaches beyond the glitter of the ballroom floor to reveal the woman behind one of the most unforgettable faces of queer history. Through graceful prose and unflinching honesty, Hystoré brings Venus Pellagatti Xtravaganza back to life, tracing her journey from a teenage dreamer in Jersey City to a radiant symbol of self-creation and resilience in 1980s New York.

 

The book opens in the small, crowded home where Venus was born on May 5, 1965, the youngest of several siblings in an Italian-Puerto Rican family. Hystoré paints these early years with sensitivity, showing a child already attuned to beauty, movement, and performance. Venus’s first steps toward becoming herself were met with the kind of confusion and rejection familiar to many transgender people of her era. She left home young, seeking a world where her reflection would match her spirit. That world, she soon discovered, existed in the shadowy brilliance of the Harlem ballrooms. It is here that Hystoré’s storytelling truly begins to shimmer.

 

The author dives into the pulse of New York’s underground drag and ballroom scene, where houses became chosen families and runways served as stages for reinvention. Venus found her second home in the House of Xtravaganza, founded by Hector Valle, a man she would later call the first gay person she ever met. The author describes their bond as one built on mutual understanding and shared hunger for visibility. When Valle passed away in 1985, Angie Xtravaganza stepped in as house mother and became both mentor and protector to Venus. Hystoré captures this mother-daughter relationship with heartbreaking intimacy, showing how their love sustained Venus amid a world that often refused to see her as human. Readers familiar with the documentary Paris Is Burning will recognize many of the moments that Hystoré revisits and reframes. Rather than retelling the film, she expands its universe, giving context to the hopes and struggles that flicker behind every frame. She recalls Venus’s infectious laughter, her dream of becoming a model, and her yearning to complete her gender transition so that she could “feel whole.” Through Hystoré’s lens, these are not just words caught on camera but the testament of a young woman imagining her future against impossible odds.

 

The author refuses to romanticize Venus’s life, confronting the harsh realities that awaited her beyond the runway lights. Transgender women in the 1980s, particularly women of color and sex workers, lived under constant threat of violence. Hystoré’s account of Venus’s final days is devastating in its restraint. On December 21, 1988, Venus was found murdered in a Manhattan hotel room, her body hidden beneath a mattress. Her killer was never found. The author does not dwell on the details, but instead focuses on the aftermath, the sorrow that rippled through the ballroom community and the quiet strength of those who refused to let her name be forgotten.

 

What makes Venus Rising extraordinary is that it does not end with tragedy. Hystoré follows the long echo of Venus’s influence, from her posthumous appearance in Paris Is Burning to her continuing presence in popular culture and academic discourse. Philosophers, artists, and drag performers have all drawn from her legacy, and Hystoré documents how her story has been reclaimed by both her biological family and her chosen one. In recent years, the Pellagatti family worked with the House of Xtravaganza to ensure Venus received a posthumous legal name change, finally recognizing her as Venus Pellagatti Xtravaganza. The book also recounts how the New York Police Department reopened her case in 2022, spurred by new attention from the documentary I’m Your Venus.

 

Hystoré’s research is meticulous, but what sets the book apart is its emotional depth. Each page carries a sense of reverence for Venus as both a historical figure and a human being whose dreams were as ordinary as they were extraordinary. The narrative lingers on small details, a laugh, a dance step, a glimmer of lipstick, that remind the reader of the life beneath the legend. Hystoré suggests that Venus’s story remains “unfinished” not only because her life was cut short, but because the world she dreamed of, one where trans women live freely and safely, has yet to fully exist. The book also situates Venus within a broader cultural and political context, exploring how the AIDS crisis, racial inequality, and the early fight for transgender visibility shaped the era. Hystoré connects these historical threads without ever losing focus on her subject. The prose is both lyrical and grounded, moving from the streets of Greenwich Village to the sacred spaces of ballroom houses with a rhythm that mirrors the beat of a voguing track.

 

In its closing chapters, Venus Rising reflects on the meaning of legacy. Venus, Hystoré argues, taught the world that beauty can be both an act of defiance and a declaration of truth. Her voice, captured in Paris Is Burning, continues to inspire new generations of queer youth searching for belonging. The author concludes with a poignant meditation on survival and memory, urging readers to see Venus not as a victim frozen in time but as a living force in the ongoing story of LGBTQ liberation. Venus Rising is not merely a biography; it is a reclamation. Eleanor Hystoré transforms archival fragments, interviews, and personal recollections into a portrait that feels vividly alive. In doing so, she restores Venus Xtravaganza to the center of her own narrative, a woman of grace, humor, and courage whose spirit refuses to fade. This book is essential reading for anyone who has ever found themselves dancing toward freedom, one step at a time, beneath the glow of an unforgiving world.

Available via Amazon

Photo by Helem Lamboy via povmagazine.com.

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