Dante Alencastre

For Dante Alencastre, he has found that sometimes a step toward liberation begins not with our own experience, but with our willingness to listen to someone else’s.

In 2006, Dante Alencastre sat across from Gaby Marino in a small office in Lima, Peru, for what was to be his first documentary interview. He was nervous and began by assuring Gaby that she did not have to answer anything that made her uncomfortable. What followed was much more than an interview. 

They discovered unexpected connections through childhood memories, family, and humor, and eventually shared tears as Gaby described a brutal and frightening arrest she had experienced. Dante came to understand the openness she offered him as a gift—one that carried with it a responsibility to treat her story with care. That encounter led to his first film, En el Fuego, about transgender women in Peru.

The film brought Dante into spaces he had never experienced before, including his first Transgender Day of Remembrance in West Hollywood. He was moved by what he heard, but he also became aware that his presence as an outsider was met with understandable caution. Some members of the transgender community questioned his motives. 

Dante realized that being an ally was not something he could simply claim; he had to understand his own role and learn how to explain it with confidence and humility.

That lesson deepened when Dante attended a transgender leadership summit in Berkeley intending to make another film, this time about transgender role models. Instead of focusing only on well-known leaders, he was directed toward people doing important work without necessarily receiving public recognition. 

One of them was Regina Wells in Phoenix, who had founded a transitional home for transgender youth at risk. Dante spent three days learning about Regina’s work and meeting the young people she supported. He was so inspired that he decided not simply to document her mission, but to support it and become an advocate for her work.

Over time, Dante’s relationships with transgender people became friendships. He describes learning from their courage, humor, and resilience, while supporting their events and causes, meeting their families, and being welcomed into their homes. Those relationships also became reciprocal. When Dante’s mother became ill and later died, the same friends whose stories he had once documented were there to support him.

When Dante returned to Peru for his mother’s memorial, he reunited with transgender activists from his first film and saw how their activism had changed their lives. Some had rebuilt relationships with their families, found better employment, and gained hope for the future. 

Their connection to Dante had also grown stronger: they attended his mother’s memorial as part of his family. The experience inspired Dante to continue documenting their lives, leading to his second film, El Fuego Dentro.

One particularly moving encounter came when Gaby introduced Dante to her mother. Despite the difficulties in their relationship, including her mother’s deliberate misuse of pronouns, Gaby’s love for her mother remained visible. Her mother’s own tears and expression of pride revealed another dimension of the journey toward acceptance: families, too, can change.

Dante ends by recognizing that his relationships with the people he once considered “new” friends have become deep and lasting friendships. Those connections continue to propel him to be an activist, supporter, and storyteller for transgender people. 

That is what has made him an ally, walking beside others on their journeys toward liberation.