Costa: “You pay for fame with your person”

The time has come to take her out of the “trans” corset. After several years of putting his body and soul into TV, radio and theater; after dozens of notes in which she argued why she is not interested in changing her name and how bariatric surgery allowed her to trim her stomach and hereditary obesity, and refound her last name; the time has come. Perhaps the corollary was last year, when she bought her house and was able to sign a deed with a tailor-made formula: “Señora Gonzalo Costa”. And now, say no more.

now stars “President Coast” (Premier Theatre) and power and the powerful sneak into his biography: he tells that his grandmother’s birth was the result of a rape, which a man with a lot of money subjected his great-grandmother. How did she find out about what could have been a secret kept under lock and key? Because when someone in the family was asked what ship his ancestors had come from, the answer was: “From no ship, from a raped great-grandmother.” Hers is like a genetics of conflict, of breaking the rags, of provoking and moving (a word she uses a lot when she says that as an artist, she wants to move). And what is moving but shaking, shaking. She “she makes people laugh when she says that someone is bad because she suffered a lot. I suffered a lot too and I’m good, that’s a choice”, he maintains.

That girl born of abuse grew up and met a certain Felipe Costa in an itinerant fair that came to Río Tercero, Córdoba. Since the Military Factory had been installed there, the man was offered a roof and a job and he stayed. So they got married, without her being in love with her, and they had a son (years later, Costa’s father). But, at a town festival, the woman herself ran into someone very handsome, a commissioner with whom she began to correspond and with whom she ended up going to live in the city of Córdoba. She left the boy at the family home and visited him on Saturdays. She until one day she went looking for him with her partner, the commissioner, and they didn’t let them see him. “My grandmother ended up stealing her own son and fled, but after a few kilometers the police stopped them because my grandfather had filed a complaint. Since she was fleeing with a commissioner, the officers ended up apologizing to them, ”she says. The power, again.

News: Do you need to conquer spaces at a professional level?
Gonzalo Costa: Maybe I need to travel the path of popular, popular popularity. There are many people who find me too complicated. For some it is “how boring that fat lady!”. But I can’t go against myself, it doesn’t matter to me, I can’t. It always seems to me that by telling stories you can enrich and tell others and well, that’s why there are people who find me unbearable, because I think about everything. But that happened to me all my life. They always told me: “Oh, how complicated, why do you think so much?” And I said: “What do I do if I don’t think?”

News: His first forays on stage were in the midst of silence.
Coast: Of course, TikTok is what I did, it’s someone doing the voice of another, TikTok is an invention of drag queens. They were always mute characters. When I started working, not everyone grabbed the microphone. I was still shaking before going on stage and the colleagues made you feel that fear. The under is always an ungrateful place to work because they mistreat you and you earn little moneyIt’s like the right to the floor, you paid your right to the floor. But it was used, I did not see it as an abuse. I did make it a point to never do it to anyone.

News: In this same theater in which he stars today, he was a wardrobe assistant and closed the doors for the stars.
Coast: Sure, and I’ve seen stars hit the one who wore it.

News: We return to power. Is it difficult to occupy spaces and sustain yourself without overreaching?
Coast: And well, that is a job because I also have a tongue that is a well of poison. I know how to say horrendous things and when I find myself in that place… it happened to me once with my sister. I had a function in Ramallo and that day we had to take my mother to the doctor, in Lomas de Zamora, and from there return to Belgrano and go to Ramallo to do the function, driving me. We left late. My sister tells me: “How can I help you?” and I told him to carry her bags. When we got to Ramallo, my clothes weren’t there!… So I said horrible things to him, and while I was saying them, I told him: “Forgive me, but this violence reproduces all our violence and it’s a language that I handle very well, forgive me but I have to get out of this scene.” It is a place where I feel very comfortable and from which I have to flee, because just as I say flowers, I also say toads and snakes.

News: Do you take care that this mechanism does not appear in your professional life?
Coast: No, I fall for that many times. This one (points to her tongue) just as it feeds me, it has also left me without eating.

News: Left her alone?
Coast: Yes Yes! There are people who don’t love me, and it’s perfect, but before I didn’t sleep because of that and now I understood that for tastes, the colors.

News: When did you understand?
Coast: One day when there were a lot of people at a premiere and I wasn’t invited and I said why, why, why. Later I understood that because maybe he doesn’t like me, why does everyone have to like me, why this need. But he hit me because I felt the exclusion, what happened to me all my life, the toad from another well.

News: Did he have great loves or did that language also play a trick on him?
Costa: No, I never dared to live a love story, it’s my cowardice.

News: Didn’t allow it or didn’t find the possibility?
Coast: No, if you always look for men who are broken to fix them, it is common for you to go wrong. The issue is that I am sincere and I say it, other people say: “Oh, poor me, what bad luck I have.” I never felt loved by a man, maybe they loved me but I never felt it.

News: Does it have to do with idealization?
Coast: Sure, it’s so idealized that it’s impossible. But it is not that those who do not idealize have done so well!

News: But then maybe what you have is fear.
Costa: No, I don’t know if it’s fear, I think it’s not knowing how.

And he says that he had a “romance” with a much younger actor, whom he had known since he was a child because he had been his neighbor. They met again while each one was doing a play at Microteatro. He started talking to her one day and she imagined herself married. They finished her performances, went down to dinner and Costa fed her in the mouth. She until one Sunday she introduced him to her girlfriend. “I said:“ How dishonest this kid!”, And then I realized that he has a relationship with the girl in which everything is fine, my head is the one that he does not allow. What happens is that for those of my generation, dating a trans girl still represents a drama, for younger boys, no, ”she says. Another story: she recently went to the cinema with another young man, to see a movie that he liked, “Avatar 2”. It was the first time she was hugged at the movies, so she didn’t care about her age difference or didn’t understand a jot about the movie. “But we went out, it was raining, he hugs me and he says to me:“ Can you give me a kiss? and I say to her: “Here?”, and she says to me: “And why not?”. She kissed him. I look and there was a man looking at me: it was the guy! The boy’s uncle! Can you be so unlucky? ”, she recalls.

News: How do you handle meeting someone being popular?
Costa: You pay with your person.

News: Is fame paid with the person?
Coast: Sure! People make value judgments about you, talk about your morals, your economy. It’s the price you pay.

News: He is a believer, to the point of going to mass frequently. Did she never quarrel with the institution?
Costa: With the institution, yes, but it is made by men and women who are imperfect, like me. God is God and God loves me, I am his creation. Then there are good and bad priests and nuns, perverse people, but it’s like in any institution; in the Argentine Association of Actors there are good people and bad people; there are good journalists and bad journalists; good cops and bad cops. I believe in a loving God, and who loves us as we are and this is what is difficult: loving me with my defects, with my darkness and with my abysses. God loves me like this, my task is, perhaps, to replicate it in another and to love despite the abysses of others.

News: Now she is “president”, but what does she evaluate when she has to cast her vote?
Coast: You evaluate the historicity, where it comes from. What happens is that, as Pinti said, we choose between the electric chair and the gallows. Here comes one and destroys what the previous one did, it doesn’t inaugurate the hospital because it has the other’s name and so, there are no public policies… but how many people want to do this analysis if maybe they didn’t even eat.

News: After the bariatric operation that was done in 2017, a hinge in your life, how do you get along with food today?
Costa: Mal, like all life, it’s “just for today”, that hasn’t changed. I have better and worse moments.

News: Does it frustrate you?
Coast: Of course it frustrates me. It frustrates me knowing I’m so labile. A year ago I had gallbladder surgery and I lost a lot of weight. Today I see photos and I say: “Oh, how good it was, what a fight!”, but hey, I’ll be able to. Or not. I keep taking care of myself as much as I can but this is forever, once you are clear about it, you no longer suffer from it.

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