Cris Miró

Although she was not the first trans woman or travesti in the history of Argentine showbusiness (with precursors like Vanessa Show and Evelyn), Miró became the first to become famous nation-wide and enter the mainstream, which caused a media sensation and paved the way for the visibility of the transgender community in local society. Nevertheless, her figure was initially questioned by some members of the burgeoning travesti activism movement, who resented the unequal treatment she received compared to most trans people. She is now regarded as a symbol of the Argentine 1990s.

• Name — Cris Miró • Born — 16 September 1965 • Birthplace — Buenos Aires, Argentina • Died — 1 June 1999 • Place of death — Buenos Aires, Argentina • Occupation — * Entertainer • actress • media personality • Years Active — 1994—1999 • Known for — Being the first Argentine travesti to gain nation-wide fame

Cris Miró was born on 16 September 1965, in Buenos Aires to a retired military man and a housewife. Although assigned male at birth, Miró was effeminate from a very young age. Her brother Esteban Virguez described Miró's childhood as a little boy: "Cris was different since he was born, (...) he did not like football, he played with dolls and my dad was the typical macho of those times and Cris was like a girl, when we were walking down the street they always confused him with a girl. At that time we were ashamed, somehow my dad and I tried to hide it. Not my mother, Cris identified with my mother, he saw her shoes, her dresses. It bothered us." After finishing secondary school, Miró began studying dentistry at the University of Buenos Aires. She studied dance at Julio Bocca's school and acting with Alejandra Boero at the same time that she studied dentistry.

• Illustration — Miró in Mar del Plata, 1998. In the late 1980s, Miró met theater director Jorgelina Belardo at Bunker—a popular gay club in Buenos Aires—who asked her to join a theatrical production group that Belardo had formed with Juanito Belmonte. Belardo became Miró's close friend and artistic director, while Belmonte worked as her press agent. Working with them, Miró made her fringe theatre debut in the plays Fragmentos del infierno—based on a text by Antonin Artaud —and Orgasmo apocalíptico, which focused on sexuality issues more explicitly. Prior to her career as a vedette, Miró made film appearances in Fernando Ayala's Dios los cría (1991) and Luis Puenzo's La peste (1992), based on Albert Camus' novel of the same name. In 1994, Miró went to a casting call at Teatro Maipo, one of the most important venues in the Buenos Aires revue theatre scene (in Spanish teatro de revistas), which was a widely popular genre at the time. She only presented herself as a female once on stage, performing a strip-tease to a Madonna song. Producer Lino Patalano immediately cast her as a vedette for his show Viva la revista en el Maipo, which premiered in 1995 and quickly made her a celebrity. Miró appeared at Mirtha Legrand's famous television program, in which guests have lunch with her and are interviewed. That broadcast is now infamous for the uncomfortable questions that Legrand asked Miró, such as her dead name or if "it bothers you that people know that you are really a man". At that time, questions like these were common to transgender guests on television, but are negatively assessed in retrospect.

On 20 May 1999, Miró was hospitalized in the Santa Isabel clinic in the Buenos Aires barrio of Caballito, where she died on 1 June. The press had long speculated that the entertainer lived with HIV/AIDS, although she and her family and friends always denied it. Miró actually did live with HIV and had been hospitalized for this on previous occasions, choosing to hide it from the media out of fear that the stigma between homosexuality and the virus would affect her career and family relationships. According to Jorgelina Belardo, a sector of the press threatened to disclose her HIV diagnosis if she refused to give interviews. Upon her death, Miró's personal assistant Jorge García and her friend Sandra Sily denied the reports of HIV complications and told reporters that she died due to a lung condition. Later that day, Miró's manager Juanito Belmonte—although maybe Jorge Belardo— confirmed that her cause of death was lymphatic cancer. Although this was true, for many years it was publicly concealed that the lymphoma was indeed AIDS-related. This was confirmed when her brother Esteban Virguez disclosed it to journalist Carlos Sanzol in 2010, who later revealed it in his 2016 biography on Miró titled Hembra.

Miró identified as a travesti, a loosely defined term used in South American countries to designate people who have been assigned male at birth, but develop a gender identity according to different expressions of femininity. The use of the term in the region precedes that of "transgender" and its definition is controversial, as it may be considered a "third sex", a non-binary gender or a regional equivalent to the concepts of transsexual and trans woman. Until the mid-to-late-1990s, Miró's gender expression alternated between that of an androgynous young man during the day and that of a woman when going out at night or on stage. Around 1997, she had breast augmentation surgery, which indicated a strengthening of her transgender identity as she was said to have taken "the definitive form of a woman". Miró also considered the cosmetic procedure to be a job requirement, as vedettes were expected to sensually flaunt their body parts. Miró is at times retrospectively referred to as a transsexual or transgender woman. According to biographer Carlos Sanzol, Miró identified as a woman, pointing out that she regularly stated to the press that she "felt like [one]". The vedette told Mirtha Legrand in 1995: "I am genetically born as a man, but I choose and live as a woman and that is the most important thing." In a 1996 television report for Chiche Gelblung, Miró explained her gender identity: "I am totally clear that biologically I was born a man. I do not want to be a woman, I am totally ok with my status as a travesti. But I do not think I am a woman trapped in a man's body. No, I am who I am and in this way I am happy." Another oft-cited statement of Miró was: Even though I was born with a certain sex, which means that I have documents with a man's name and gender, the most important thing is what I feel. I am only one person, and that is what matters to me. That thing about the opposites is seen by others. I live it in only one way.

A long-lasting rumor states that Miró was romantically involved with her close friend Diego Armando Maradona, although this was never confirmed. Pioneering travesti vedette Vanessa Show stated in 2019: "I used to wax Cris Miró. Her phone wouldn't stop. I sometimes would ask her to turn it off a bit because I couldn't work. At one point she turned it on and he was calling her. This was in the '90s. 'How's Vanessa doing?', he said and I listened. 'How is it turning out?', he asked me and I replied 'very well.' It was vox populi that she was with Maradona. There are gays and non-gays who like travestis in all walks of life. Everywhere."

• Year — Title — Role — Director — Ref. Reference(s) • 1991 — Dios los cría — — — Fernando Ayala • La plaga — La mujer rata — Luis Puenzo