When I opened the show at the Under the Radar Festival in NYC this past January, my husband and manager, David, turned to me before the show and said: “Who are you dedicating the performance to tonight?” I didn’t have to hesitate to say: “My dad.” He’s not around to tell me otherwise, so I choose to believe he would have been proud of who I am now. When my work on the stage can be life-affirming, it is a bonus. You think you’re making art about one thing when you’re actually making it about something else. The process of making art is not a straight line. In my case, I was born to live inside my skin, even when others weren’t ready to see me as comfortable in it. LatinXoxo is about living the truth of who you are-whether gay, straight, trans, or anything in between. When I wear women’s clothing in the show, I am inhabiting the roles of characters who come to tell the story of what I went through to reconcile with the memory of my father. It’s also not a drag performance, if we were to define drag as a performance of exaggerated femininity or masculinity for entertainment purposes. Anggelo singing, photo courtesy of David AndrakoĪnd so, LatinXoxo, my multidisciplinary performance show, is not so much about being gay, although that is a part of it. It’s a place where I explore the relationship between prostitution and scripture, romance and hatred, masculinity and femininity, and other tensions that came to represent my relationship with my father. Instead of living in my gay male body, I spend time living inside the female character of Bizet’s Carmen, for instance. The upshot of my father’s death has more to do with the way I’ve learned to love my father since his death, and the realization that his statement, “I would rather have a prostitute daughter than have a faggot son,” was, in the end was actually an inspiration for my art.

It’s not a secret, or some suspenseful surprise that the audience has to wait for. In the show, I don’t wait too long to reveal that my father died in front of my eyes while changing a light bulb when I was twelve. I wonder about how I internalized what my dad was singing for, and if that’s one of the reasons that song is just as important to me as any other art form I use in my work. All of his overtly macho strength seemed to melt away when he serenaded my mother. But when he sang, it was a time of love, calm, and beauty.

He was never a father who would hug me or pick me up, or use touch in any way to show his love for me. The times he sang were when I felt closest to him. My impulse to create music started with an exploration of the Venezuelan folk songs, boleros, and opera that I grew up with-the same songs that my father used to sing to my mother. That did not come across as supportive at the time, but when I look back on my short time, with him, I now realize that this gesture must have been some sort of nod of acceptance and encouragement, even if it wasn’t presented as such. He insisted I go and demanded that I be trained if I was going to have a life on the stage. He screamed at me: “Boys don’t say that about other men!” Oddly enough, while my dad was ashamed of my sexuality, he was the one who insisted that I take ballet if I was going to be a performer.

My father turned around while driving to hit me square in the jaw. The next moment, I felt a stinging smack in the face. I said to my parents, “Oh my god, his eyes are so beautiful!” I remember one time we were in the car going somewhere, and I saw a man with the most beautiful blue eyes in another car on the road. The rest of the time, he was hostile and ashamed of me because I wasn’t as “masculine” as our machismo culture expects men to be. The only time he was nice to me was when he was drunk. We had a terrible relationship, my father and I. That journey is one of reconciliation and learning how my father’s own story intersects with mine. However, my relationship with my father was the biggest collision I had with homophobia.

I don’t think I was naturally inclined to feel shame about any of it. I never really felt any choice in the matter, which is to say: being born gay, born to dream, born to move around the world-these are just a part of the fabric of who I am. I’ve said it a hundred times, and I’ll say it for a long as I live: I was born to be an artist. I wasn’t necessarily aware of homophobia for a variety of reasons, perhaps mostly because I always felt so comfortable in my own skin. Migguel Anggelo performing at Joe’s Pub in NYC, photo courtesy of David Andrako.

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