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Meet the Transgender Woman Who Traveled Through Brazil in a Replica ‘Priscilla’
From fodors.com
In the early 1990s, Kassandra Taylor broke the barriers of prejudice in
Brazil by creating the first LGBTQ+ guesthouse in the country and a
replica of the Priscilla bus.“I have always been a visionary and pioneering woman,” says Kassandra Taylor, whose sex at birth was male but who has always identified as a woman. At an early age, she knew she was different from boys, and at 14, she started her female gender transition using hormones.
“It was the invention of industrial silicone [a cheap automotive product used illegally to model the bodies of transgender people], and girls would arrive from Paris with liters in their bodies, and today they suffer for it,” recalls Taylor. “I had feminine features, so I didn’t use them.”
In the ’80s, she and some friends within the LGBTQ+ community spent seasons in Itaipuaçu, a small district with more than 15 km of wild beaches in the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro. Renting a house at that time was not easy. There was a lot of prejudice from landlords, and it was the peak of the AIDS epidemic in Brazil and around the world, a disease tantamount to a death sentence at the time. Taylor promised herself that one day she would return to that place with enough money to buy a house there.
In 1995, the Australian film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Deserthit theaters worldwide and helped popularize the drag queen style. For those who haven’t seen it, Priscilla
told the story of a transgender woman and two drag queens driving a bus
called “Priscilla” across the Outback. Inspired by it, Taylor went to a
junkyard, bought an old bus, painted it pink, and turned it into a
means of transportation to take people from Copacabana to her club on
weekends. The initiative was a success. Everyone wanted to travel in the
Brazilian version of Priscilla. The trip took around an hour, but
nobody got bored. On board were drag queen performances, colored lights,
and little dolls decorating the interior as Taylor drove. “The trip was
a party,” says Taylor. “It was almost a disco on wheels.”In a period when there was no internet, if someone wanted to have fun
and meet someone else, they would have to go to nightclubs. That same
year, still in the mid-’90s, the first Gay Pride in Brazil took place,
held on Copacabana Beach by ILGA World (The International Lesbian, Gay,
Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association). Taylor went as a drag queen,
taking her Priscilla bus with some friends. When she arrived at the
famous beach, she recreated the iconic scene from the film by standing
on the vehicle’s roof, which was supported by a massive high shoe. Soon,
a horde of people and reporters surrounded the pink bus, wanting to
know what it was all about.Read the full article on-line
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