Quinceañeras mark the crossing from childhood into something new, a moment wrapped in family pride and ritual. They feature ball gowns, shimmering crowns and even a court of close family and friends. These celebrations have long centered girls, leaving boys, particularly queer and gay boys, watching from the sidelines.
“Being a cis gay male, I didn’t really get the chance to celebrate my own quinceañera because traditionally that’s not the way it works,” said Oliver DelGado, chief marketing and communications officer at the Los Angeles LGBT Center.
Delgado recalls that his cousin’s quinceañera fell on his 18th birthday, becoming a joint celebration. With his family’s support, he embraced it as the party he never had three years earlier. “The same way she was debuting or coming out as a young lady, I was formally coming out as a gay man,” he said.
Twenty years later, DelGado is helping create that same belated celebration for others who never had a quinceañera of their own. On Friday, the Los Angeles LGBT Center will host its third annual Queerceañera, or Queerce for short, the center’s signature party honoring queer Latine culture.
This year’s event will celebrate drag artist and social media sensation Lushious Massacr and bar owner and community organizer Oliver Alpuche. Its theme, “Mariposas Sin Fronteras,” or “Butterflies Without Borders,” uplifts stories of migration and the transformative power of queer and trans joy.
Born in Brownsville, Texas, Lushious famously won a Primetime Emmy Award for her makeup artistry in the HBO series “We’re Here”; since then, she has built a social media following of 219,000 on Instagram with her original “Dragvestigate” series on YouTube. In a phone call with De Los, she fondly recalled dancing “La Chacha” by norteño singer Cornelio Reyna as the chambelán de honor at her cousin’s baile sorpresa.
“I was a showgirl because I was the only boy, and the whole dance was built around me standing in the middle while all the girls danced around me,” Lushious said. “I literally stole the quinceañera from her.”
As glamorous and celebrated as she is now, Lushious didn’t see herself that way at 15. As the eldest of four brothers, raised by parents from a small rancho in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, she was embedded in a culture where machismo ran deep.
“As a Mexican kid, society, your community and your family teach you to be afraid of yourself and to feel shame,” Lushious recalls.
While she never had a quinceañera of her own, she found her queer rite of passage when she met her drag mother, her madrina de honor, Divina Garza.
Divina inspired both admiration and fear in Lushious; Divina embodied everything that Lushious had been taught to subdue since childhood.
“She taught me to embrace myself through drag in spite of the world not loving me back. I’m big, I’m brown, I’m gay and I’m fem. Everything changed after that,” she said.
Lushious now sees the upcoming Queerce as a chance to celebrate the quinceañera she never had and to fully own who she is — this time, without having to steal her cousin’s spotlight.
“I would have had the biggest quinceañera ever, with the most beautiful dress and the most beautiful hair,” she said. “Can you imagine if I had been able to truly be myself and truly be free at 15?”
For Oliver Alpuche, being honored at this year’s Queerce feels like a milestone 10 years in the making. In 2015, he opened the now-closed gay bar Redline and launched the DTLA Proud Festival, which continues to celebrate the queer community in downtown L.A. Today, he owns and operates Kiso, a gay bar that opened late last year on 4th Street.
Born in a Belizean American family, the Highland Park native didn’t grow up attending many quinceañeras — his family is mostly boys — but he sees them as a deeply rooted L.A. tradition. He’s even planning a triple quinceañera with his twin brother for their 45th birthday next year.
“We actually hosted a double quinceañera at Redline a while ago, and I love the idea of blending my Belizean culture with my queerness,” he said.
To Alpuche, the quinceañera represents more than a party. It is about being seen, celebrated, and embraced by the larger community, capturing the universal desire for acceptance and belonging. That’s the same energy he wanted to channel when he created the DTLA Proud Festival — a space where queer L.A. could belong and be their full selves.
In August, the festival celebrated its 10th anniversary by taking over Olvera Street.
“We wanted to celebrate in the heart of Los Angeles. It is such a Latin cultural space, just like this Queerceañera, we don’t have to separate our culture from our queerness,” Alpuche said.
This year’s Queerce focus on migration and immigrant rights comes as ICE raids continue across Southern California. The center’s legal services team will be on site providing free resources for immigrant community members, making Queerce not only a celebration of culture and joy, but also a space for empowerment, safety and access to vital support.
“Immigrants are the backbone of L.A., and queer people have always been at the heart of building community and mobilizing others,” said Alpuche.
For Lushious, the topic of immigrant rights is something she does not shy away from in her “Dragvestigate” videos. In a recent episode, she spoke about fellow drag queen Xunami Muse’s decision to self-deport and shared that a close family member had also self-deported to Mexico. Speaking with De Los, she added that her closest friend is undocumented.
“When I think about Mariposas Sin Fronteras, I immediately think of my friend,” she says. “With everything happening in this country, fear is an emotion she refuses to subscribe to.
“She’s the true Mariposa Sin Frontera,” adds Lushious. “She’s unbothered, honey.”