Venus Xtravaganza’s Story
Venus was born in 1965 in Jersey City, N.J., and was of Italian-American and Puerto Rican descent. She took the name Venus after a close friend suggested it. Though she moved to New York City in her early teens, she was largely raised in the Hamilton Park neighborhood of Jersey City, where her childhood home is now a historical landmark.
NJ.com reported that the designation, which was given in 2023, was made in effort to preserve the city’s LGBTQ+ history, and it exemplified what Venus—and her impact—meant to her community.
“I don’t think there was … an image that had more of an impact on me than seeing Venus Xtravaganza sitting on that pier smoking a cigarette,” transgender writer, TV producer and activist Janet Mock told TV Guide in 2018. “You can’t write and make up characters like that. They’re all so real about the little humble goals that they wanted and I think that is what the lasting impact of that film is.”
Venus’s family has also worked to keep her legacy alive and was instrumental in securing the historical marker. Her nephew, Mike Pellagatti, told Billboard, “I want people to know that my family wasn’t oppressive towards her. There’s this perception that my family kicked her out, no, it wasn’t like that at all … She didn’t want her family to get wrapped up with who she was deep down. She didn’t want them getting involved with the ball scene or anything like that. Like she said in the movie, she didn’t want to bring any embarrassment to her family, and that’s not the words of somebody who got kicked out of a household.”
Venus was a member of the House of Xtravaganza, a group of ball performers based in New York City that remains one of the longest continuously active houses on the scene. Houses also often act as surrogate families for their members. Gisele Alicea, the house “mother” since 2015, first learned of the House of Xtravaganza and Venus by watching Paris Is Burning as a teenager.
“I definitely was inspired by Venus and inspired by the whole scene,” Alicea told NJ.com. “To me they were magnificent. They were beautiful. I couldn’t believe that they were so proud to be themselves, and they owned themselves.”
In Paris Is Burning, Venus, in her calm, soft-spoken tone, talked about a violent encounter she had while doing sex work. She said a client threatened to kill her when he found out she was transgender and “totally freaked out.” He called her a slur and accused her of trying to give him AIDS.
“I was really terrified, so I grabbed my bag, and I just jumped out the window,” she said in the documentary. “Now I don’t like to hustle anymore.”
Venus is not the only person from the House of Xtravaganza who has been killed. Lorena Xtravaganza, 25, died when her Brooklyn apartment caught fire in May 2012. Though firefighters said the blaze was “suspicious,” and New York City police received reports that she had been visited by two unknown men earlier that day, it wasn’t until February 2025 that a man was charged with second-degree murder in Lorena’s death. Henry Pacheco was already in prison for killing his ex-girlfriend when he was connected to Lorena’s killing.
Angie Xtravaganza, the house mother when Venus was killed, told the Advocate that police did little to find Venus’s biological family. Angie was the one who had to break the news to them.
“She was like my right hand,” Angie said in Paris Is Burning. “I miss her. Every time I go anywhere I miss her. That was the main daughter of my house … but that’s part of life, as far as being a transsexual in New York City and surviving.”
A New Look at the Case
The investigation into Venus’s death turned cold quickly. But around 2024, new documentary filmmakers spoke to her biological and chosen families, and together they attempted to push the New York Police Department to reopen the case.
I'm Your Venus details Venus’s brothers, John, Joe and Louie Pellagatti, hiring attorneys Jim Walden and Deanna Paul, who were able to obtain police records that weren’t publicized during the original 1988 investigation. It also portrayed their successful journey to legally change their sister’s name to represent both her biological and chosen families.
In a scene from the new documentary, Walden reads from a police report that states that investigators identified an early suspect. “The police were able to identify someone by the name [of] Robinson,” the report says. (His first name was redacted in the report.) “The way this name came to them, he was incarcerated in Nassau on an unrelated rape case.”
Robinson apparently confessed to a detective that he killed a sex worker in a Manhattan hotel. Walden reads the attorney's notes, which said the man “does not say the words, ‘I strangled her,’ but says, ‘I bound her. Once I believed she was dead, I put a mattress over her to hide her body.’" This aligns with how police found Venus. A day or two after his confession, the man died by suicide.
While Venus’s family believed the confession was enough for them to get closure, the NYPD reopened the case during the filming of I’m Your Venus. Police took DNA samples from Robinson and tested it against DNA found under Venus’s fingernails, but it didn’t match. Walden told her family in the movie that that doesn’t mean Robinson isn’t a suspect, but that the DNA could have issues due to how old it is and how it was collected and stored decades ago.
Venus’s case remains open.
