“I always had the attitude that if I want to do something, you are not going to stop me.” Aida Rentas

Chris and I postponed our nuptial celebrations from February until May of 2024 so my good friend Aida Rentas could make it from her home in Puerto Rico. Brent Duncan filmed her at my house speaking on her life as part of his Queer Stories series with me and the Georgia LGBTQ History Project.

If you don’t know Aida’s name, then you were not plugged into ATL life in the 1980s, the aughts, and beyond. Aida was here.

Our Boricua fireball did virtually everything: ensured Latino representation on boards; organized the queer response to the Olympics, National Black Arts Festival, Latin Jazz Festival, the Quilt, etc.; established Latinos en Acción, an organization centered around socializing as well as politics; opened a down-home queer store in Avondale Estates; created Grass Roots Institute, pairing kids with chaperones to visit Puerto Rico.

Her papers from 1950s — 2010 are collected at the Auburn Avenue Research Library.

So, how was it that a little beige-colored baby born in San Juan made it to the States and began to turn things upside down?

“My dad is white, got red hair. My mom looks like me. Back in 1938, in Puerto Rico, they could not marry,” Aida said in the Queer Stories interview. “She was pregnant … she was the maid [at] some rich house and he was the gardener. So, they had to get the hell out of Puerto Rico.”

Her father came to New York and later sent for four-year-old Aida, her mother, and her little brother.

She had to learn English and how to navigate among the three different gang presences (Black, Latino, Italian) between their 102nd Street tenement and her primary school.

School became important. Later, Aida would go to night school to become an accountant, which provided a steady income. A good work ethic and a distaste for drugs and booze allowed clear-eyed, but “crazy,” Aida to purchase a car at age 21.

“Fuck you, I’ll buy a car, and then I’ll learn how to drive,” she said. “A friend of mine got beaten up in the train by some drunk and I was like, I’m not taking the train with a woman in the middle of the night going to the Village … you needed [a car] if you were gay and dressing in drag … I didn’t do drag that much. I had the drag at night when I was going to the clubs, but my job, I needed to look like a girl.

“People thought I was exotic, I had long hair, big tits and that attitude, good hair,” she said. “I danced and I wanted to be on the dance floor all the time and I was loud. I have bad feet because I put on these spikes. And I’ll be out there … And people wanted to learn how to Latin. And I was … the dance teacher.”

After Stonewall, LGBTQ organizers were trying to form a gay community center; Aida helped look for a location and found a firehouse that would become the home of the Gay Activist Alliance. But it was pretty white.

“So we started this group called Salsa Soul Sisters because it was all Black women,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Fuck, what about the salsa?’ So, they came south and we were really integrating the Village and the community. They were famous.”

During her Greenwich Village days, Aida provided jobs in her penis-and-vagina sexy jewelry-making business for women freed from the Detention Center on 14th Street, not far from the Stonewall Inn. The freed women gratefully did not need to disguise their pasts or their sexualities and were hard workers.

But New York became so difficult when “everyone started dying,” and Atlanta beckoned. Aida wasted little time, plugging into small cultural and political groups and then quickly expanding into things such as being the volunteer coordinator for the National Black Arts Festival from 1998–2003. Aida recruited, trained, and scheduled volunteers for all the venues and provided support for performers with wildly differing needs.

Recognizing talent, talking to anyone and everyone, and getting people to work together have always served her and others well.

Never far from controversy, in 1994 Aida opened “Obvious Choices,” an eclectic store at a conspicuous corner of Avondale Estates, where people browsed, lazed, listened to writers, and built community. But the city did the death by a thousand cuts until she had to close in 1997.

But Aida = community, with attitude. Nothing stops her.