There, whilst my mum was still at work, my teenager sister looked after me. I loved her because she would take a break from her own home-work and set up some kind of performance space for me. Using leftovers from my mum’s seamstress work, she would create lots of costumes for me and I was in heaven because I could perform.
But as a transgender child who lived in a traditional working class 1970s Italian environment, I soon learned that I had to blend-in in order be able to live in peace and possibly get some kind of bread-and-butter job. I had to repress my natural affinity with dresses, makeup, heels, as well as Bette Davis, Sophia Loren and Deborah Kerr. I coped very well because I was doing what I was born to do. I was pretending to be someone else. I was playing the part of the boy I really never was. Yet, in the end, performing saved my life.