Cris Miró (16 September 1965 – 1 June 1999) was an Argentine entertainer and media personality with a brief but influential career as a top-billing vedette in Buenos Aires’ Revista theatre scene during the mid-to-late 1990s. Miró began her acting career in the early 1990s in fringe theatre plays and later rose to fame as a vedette at the Teatro Maipo in 1995. For years, she hid her HIV-positive status from the press until her death on 1 June 1999 due to AIDS-related lymphoma.

As Jorge Perez Evelyn in the ’70s, Cris was also a travesty celebrity in Argentina. She 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.

In the late 1980s, Miró met theatre 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. Before 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), 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 on Mirtha Legrand’s famous television program, where 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 a man”. At that time, questions like these were common to transgender guests on television but are negatively assessed in retrospect.

Legacy:

After gaining popularity as a vedette, Miró became a national media sensation for the perceived gender-bender aspects of her image and is considered a symbol of the postmodern era in Argentina. As the first Argentine travesty to become a national celebrity, she has been considered the “first trans icon of the country”. Miró’s presence meant a change in the Argentine show business of the era and popularized transgender and cross-dressing acts in Buenos Aires’ revue theatrical scene. As such, she is regarded as a symbol of the social milieu of the Argentine 1990s and an icon of the decade. She paved the way for other Argentine travestis and trans women to gain popularity as vedettes, most notably Flor de la V, who described her in 2021 as the “first trans [person] that the public recognized as an artist” and a “shooting star that lasted only a short time on earth [but] will continue to illuminate the way forever.” In an interview with Revista NX in 1997, Miró reflected on her impact:

I am very grateful for what is happening to me, and this has helped open doors for other people. (…) But I do not forget many people who were there and tried, who worked a lot and continue to do so. This regarding the commercial circuit. But it was also important because of all the prejudice that existed around travestis, who were related to [street prostitution], or with the transformistas (…). I think that in a few years these beliefs changed a lot. I do not claim all this myself, but I do know I did my bit because the doors were opened to me, and I always said that those open doors were also going to open for other people and that was the most important thing. [The arrests and torture of travestis] give me feelings of horror. I feel sorry for these things that happen in the country, although this reality occurs in other places. (…) … I have also experienced those abuses. Going down the street and having problems with the police, with other people; being at the doorstep of an apartment waiting for a taxi to come and being afraid that a patrol car will come and take me away. Some years ago I thought I was never going to live this Argentina of achieving rights or respect. For example, that a transsexual is given her documents in accordance with her sexual identity. But everything has a cost. There have been many travestis who are no longer with us, who are imprisoned, who are taken into custody daily, all so that today other people can walk more freely on the street.

Miró’s rise to fame in the mid-1990s was a watershed moment in the visibility of transgender identities in Argentine society, as it increased the visibility of the transgender community in the national media scene and opened a debate about their marginalized living conditions.But, although the rise to the celebrity of Miró happened in parallel to the political organization of travesties and the visibility of their activism, she never took part in the movement; she was initially criticized by many of its members, who resented the unequal treatment she received compared to the neglected travesty prostitutes.[3] They also criticized Miró for embodying the “patriarchal mandate” that trans women should look like an idealized vision of “the perfect woman”. In this sense, she evidenced the desire of thousands of men for the new travesti bodies, with anthropologist Josefina Fernández claiming that: “the exchange that Cris Miró makes while living from her job as a vedette, as a body inserted in a market, does not differ from the exchange that a [travesti street prostitute] is forced to make to survive.” Reflecting on her death, feminist scholar Mabel Bellucci argued in 1999 that Miró’s acceptance was an attempt by “the system” to try to show that there was not so much discrimination, presenting her as “the exception to the rule” and encapsulating her in a role that prevented her from creating ties with her [travesti] peers. She wrote: “If this had meant a greater democratization of the travesti movement she could have achieved a greater recognition of rights.” Biographer Carlos Sanzol reflected in 2016:

Cris was somehow both a “beneficiary” and victim of machismo. A beneficiary because she represented the model of “womanhood” that the imaginary of misogyny seeks: the femme fatale, the objectified woman. And a victim because the macho discourse excludes everything that is far from the canon of virility. Seventeen years after her death, these values still persist in Argentine society with their worst facet: femicides.

A portrait photograph of Miró is displayed since 2019 at the Museo Casa Rosada as part of the exhibition Íconos Argentinos (English: “Argentine Icons”).

Her death is featured in the plot of Camila Sosa Villada’s 2019 award-winning novel Las Malas. The novel’s trans main characters mourn her, regarding her as “the Evita of travesties.”

In June 2021, an Argentine producer announced that a biographical television series on Miró was in the making, potentially released via Netflix the following year.