Gilda Love

Eduardo was born in Cádiz on 21 August 1925. Her mother married at 14 and had 20 children of which 16 survived. Eduardo was supposed to have a twin sister; she was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck and did not survive childbirth.^[3]

Eduardo grew up with six brothers and nine sisters. Her brothers subjected her to systematic mistreatment and violence from an early age. "They were always harassing me, because they knew what I was," Eduardo told El País. When she was two, her dressmaker sister put her in a Sevillian suit. "She and my mother said it was pretty and that I looked like a girl," Eduardo recalls, "My brothers, when they saw me dressed like that, put a match to my dress and tried to burn me like Joan of Arc. I still have the scars on my back. They were horrible to me, but by some miracle they never killed me,” she said. ^[4][3] She is the cousin of the first trans vedette, Sandra Salomé.^[5]

At the age of 17, she enlisted in the army as a paratrooper where she served for three years.^[6] After completing her mandatory military service, she left home, fleeing violence. After a brief period as a legionarre, Eduardo abandoned Spain and moved to Marseille, France, and then to Paris. There she met several of the French trans pioneers, like Bambi and Capucine.^[4]

Eduardo first performed as Gilda Love in the Madame Arthur, in Paris.^[2] She quickly began performing under her stage name in various cabarets in the 1960s and throughout her career she acted and shared a dressing room with the cuplé Carmen de Mairena.^[1]

In 2022 she starred in the documentary film Cantando en las azoteas, directed by Enric Ribes, and whose title comes from the verses written by Federico García Lorca in his poem Canción del mariquita.^[7] The documentary is based on a short film of the same name that Gilda Love produced in 2017.^[8]