Vetor Interviews: Star Amerasu

NO APOLOGIES, NO PERMISSION, NO SHAME

Text and interview by Alexandre Mortagua

Photography by Alexandre Toffoli

January 2021. Itaim Bibi, São Paulo.

It was in the courtyard of the Centro Cultural da Diversidade that I met Star, seated — always smiling — next to a poster of “It is not the homosexual who is perverse, but the society in which he lives,” a film by German director Rosa von Praunheim. I had discovered Star’s work three years earlier, introduced to the ironically powerful video for “Meg Ryan” from her debut album, Rebecca.

And I was in Seattle, and I was thinking about white privilege and being in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, there's a lot of white people. And I was just writing about my experiences with wanting to fly. That was actually what the song started from. I was writing about wanting to fly.

So vivid at 29, Star told me about the album she was recording with a Brazilian producer, answered some curious questions her Rebecca had stirred in me, and — right before and after — left me stunned, immersed in the spell of that Black artist who sang with such confidence “I'm a white woman, I can do whatever I want.”

Photography by Alexandre Toffoli

It was there, at the Centro Cultural da Diversidade, which had open doors but no culture or diversity, that Star cast a spell on me — both very similar and very different from the ones she casts each time she takes the stage. A stronger spell, made from ingredients older than entertainment, capable of tying a red and lavish bow around any relationship: a “collaboration”.

Filling the voids with her own art, Star was preparing to release the brilliant Hopefully Limitless and to vomit out some of what sickened her. Fantasy was our first shared space, the first decanter: while Star sang about the man who disappeared after being invited to move in together, I directed the celebratory-funeral video that we created.

And I think that when I made that album, the emotional state that I was in was really fully going through every single thing that the songs I was singing about, you know? I was in those, in the feeling when I was in the studio, it was the same as when I wrote the songs. My life hasn't, hadn't really changed that much at that point. Like, I was in it.

Following an artist beyond the phase of life they’re in is a privilege: it is over time that an artistic work and the intellectual heritage born from lack are shaped and organized. While trying to fill the emptiness, it’s possible to look deeply into the abyss — and it’s there, way back, that the story is understood beyond a single chapter. Reading this book is a stroke of luck, more than a privilege: it’s as beautiful as the Taj Mahal to witness what our loved ones do with what life does to them.

Star was a party when we reunited at the end of 2022, and the party stretched from the neighborhood of Vila Buarque to Itaquera. That December, Star and I danced until our legs tangled at the Batekoo festival, and I swear I saw her eyes sparkle every moment as she tasted the Black-Latin sauce — so different from the African American flavor she was used to. The Latin babes kept the flame of curiosity and interest burning much hotter and more wide-eyed than the viscous oil that rolled our eyes back at the festival.

Photography by Alexandre Toffoli

"I think my life is definitely way different than it was. I'm sober. I was not sober back then. I had a problem with pills, like Klonopin. I wrote this song about being on pills. These days, it's just so different. And I think what I thought I could achieve back then is, I've already passed those points, you know? I think my goal at one point was I just want to be able to pay my rent from performing, which is actually hard to do in this economy. But I had multiple years of being able to do that now. And I feel confident, “okay, I can figure it out.”

Our reunion in January 2025 was a promise to keep burning the fire of our collaboration. Now, Star is promoting her new never, really alone and, with great class, stepping into cinema: her short film After Hours, executive produced by Elliot Page, is making the rounds at U.S. film festivals. Oh yes, Star is American. While the United States dismantles the rights of trans people, Star persists in her search for a hot, inclusive, and welcoming dance floor. And in that, Brazil, my friends, is a great teacher.

Despite all our differences, we met again in February to insist on what we share: the desire for a home away from home. Bigorna, the party lovingly produced by João Rigoni and me, is our exercise in belonging, making a party with what remains. And there was Star once again. At her first show in Brazil, lovingly surrendered to the dance floor we’re building, Star was everywhere — above and below that little hellhole on February 14, 2025. At a certain point, I asked Star about her first clubbing experience: she was 16 and went with her friend Reno to a club in Austin, Texas.

Photography by Alexandre Toffoli

Doing the math — and giving away my friend’s age — that was in 2008. What else happened in 2008? We’re less than fifteen days away from Gagacabana and the dream, though just beginning, is already over. It’s been sixteen years since Star danced with Reno for the first time — and sixteen years since the release of Lady Gaga’s Just Dance. Do you remember what you were doing and where you were in 2008?

"And I was getting skinny and I'm going to get hot era. And I would listen to the Fame, start to finish. And it was my workout album. So that's where I was. I was in Walla Walla, Washington. At that point in my life, my mom had lived there and I was visiting her over the summer. I was living with people from my church, my youth group. I think a lot of us queer people go through these sort of hard times in our teenage years for some reason with our parents because I think it can be hard for some parents to accept the fact that their child that was like a little child is now growing up into the person that they want to be."

“...growing up into the person they want to be.” I remember hearing those words for the first time in a Lady Gaga song. I mean, hearing those words as a young gay guy who needed a maternal figure beyond the one shouting insults at the teen who swished, did theater, and, well, liked boys. Also a visitor to her maternal home, Star drank from the endless source of freedom that The Fame inspires, while becoming who she was.

From the outside, it may seem simple. But being who you are hurts in the head and relieves the back. An exercise that cisgender and heterosexual youth are not used to experiencing. Maybe, just maybe, that’s why those of us who challenge any rule under number 2 are the lucky ones.

I've been everywhere. I'm a global doll. Here's the thing: the world is a big place. And there's queer people everywhere. And my mom never went nowhere when we were young. We only traveled all around the United States. Like, we moved. And I just always was “why don't we leave the country?” We gotta get out of here. Like, let's try something, see something.”

Photography by Alexandre Toffoli

By the time ARTPOP came around, the world already knew that Lady Gaga was more than just a pop artist. She was, above all, a political project. In high heels and blonde hair, her image provoked, confused, and above all, liberated. While Star took refuge in churches and youth groups in the American heartland, Gaga was on the VMA stage dressed in meat, challenging not only fashion but also the codes of respect and belonging imposed on women — especially those who dared to perform masculinity, extravagance, and autonomy. The act of literally wearing what the world consumes became a landmark. And in that gesture, perhaps we could glimpse a rearview mirror between her and Star Amerasu: both build with their bodies and images a new alphabet for reading difference.

Gaga opened doors that Star flung wide open. While the former shouted “Born This Way” through the speakers of a generation in search of mirrors, Star invites us inside, makes us sit in the living room and listen to her wounds through the same headphones. If Gaga performs the explosion, Star leads us into the silence after the impact. And maybe that’s precisely the main power of their intersecting journeys: where one shines a light, the other deepens — like a diver heading toward the abyssal sea. Star is Gaga’s daughter, but also her continuity — a queer lineage of resistance that feeds itself between the beats of dance music, the communities that created house music, and the noises of daily life.

It’s no coincidence that both found in electronic music the safe space to reconstruct themselves. For Gaga, house and disco were sanctuaries since her early days in New York clubs, long before The Fame. For Star, electronic music reveals itself as both a time capsule and an escape pod — a place where she can reimagine her identity beyond the pain and violence she faces as a trans, Black, independent artist. Dance floors, in this sense, are not just spaces of pleasure, but political arenas where dissident bodies can exist with desire, rage, and vulnerability.

Photography by Alexandre Toffoli

And it’s beautiful to see how, at different moments in recent history, the two articulate the same desire: to exist fully. Gaga did it for the spotlights. Star does it under the lights of a small show, at an underground festival, in a 3 a.m. WhatsApp conversation. Both perform the desire for continuity — Gaga with her monumental shows and albums-as-manifestos, Star with her home videos, her handmade cinema, her interviews where she speaks of the past as a path in constant rewriting.

While Gaga was elevated to the status of a global icon, Star constructs an intimate mythology, made of collages, whispered voices, confessions, and a contagious sense of humor. Gaga’s impact on the mainstream created room for artists like Star Amerasu not only to exist, but to be heard. And Star, in turn, expands that space by calling it into question: her work is not about occupying a place, but about creating a new one — fairer, truer, more hers. She doesn’t just want to enter the party. She wants to change the music that’s playing.

In the end, perhaps the relationship between Star and Gaga lies in what can’t be named. A gesture, a look, a note that echoes differently for those who grew up hiding in school bathrooms, dancing in secret in their rooms, or erasing parts of themselves to fit in. The music of both is that invisible embrace that unites generations of queer, Black, Latinx, trans, marginalized, and magical people. Gaga might be the pop mother. Star, an older sister who held your hand when everything felt too dark. And together, they continue to tell us that even if the world ends out there, the dance floor remains alive — and full of possibilities.

In the end, perhaps the relationship between Star Amerasu and Lady Gaga is precisely in what only art can translate: the possibility of creating new worlds while walking through the ruins of the old one. In every phase of Gaga’s career, it’s possible to see mirrors, contrasts, and dialogues with Star’s journey — not as a copy or linear continuation, but as reverberations that transform, intersect, and expand.

Photography by Alexandre Toffoli

If The Fame was Gaga’s inaugural scream, the glittery announcement that pop could also be bizarre, theatrical, and political, then Rebecca served a similar function for Star: an album born of pain but delivered with biting humor and an aesthetic that defies what is expected from a Black trans artist. In both, there is a life force that resists erasure — Gaga in a bombastic way, Star in an intimate one, as if whispering a secret for everyone to hear.

Born This Way may be the most direct point of connection. When Gaga wrote her manifesto for queer freedom, Star was still navigating the confusing years of youth. That album was not only an anthem of self-acceptance, but also a shelter — and it’s moving to think that, years later, Star would herself become a builder of shelters, offering in her music places where pain and pleasure can coexist. The song Fantasy, for example, serves the same purpose as Hair or Marry the Night: turning abandonment into beauty, loss into catharsis.

With ARTPOP, Gaga dove into fragmentation, excess, emotional collapse — all wrapped in futuristic electronic beats. Star does the same in Hopefully Limitless, where electronic production wraps lyrics overflowing with trauma, addiction, clarity, and healing. The two artists, each in their own way, use the artifice of dance to say the unspeakable. The difference lies in scale, not in power.

With Joanne and Chromatica, Gaga embodies loss, reconciliation with origins, the return to bodily pain. Star, at that same time, had already exposed her guts in self-directed videos, texts, collaborations with Brazilian artists, and in cinema itself — such as her short film After Hours, which, like Chromatica, emerges from darkness to create a sonic space where surviving becomes an aesthetic act.

Photography by Alexandre Toffoli

And now, in 2025, with the release of never, really alone, Star seems to speak directly to the Gaga who just stepped onto the sands of Copacabana. The show on May 3rd — affectionately nicknamed Gagacabana — is not only a landmark in pop music history: it is an offering.

A woman who sang about queer freedom in the 2000s, now, outdoors, by the Atlantic Ocean, in a country that has killed and exiled its trans and Black daughters. Gaga descends from the heights of pop divinity to touch the beach; Star rises from the underground to make the ground into a stage, a party, and a bonfire. And both teach us that freedom — that often-spoken and hard-to-live word — might only be real when danced.

Gaga’s show in Copacabana was, for many, a collective catharsis. But for people like Star, and for all who see themselves in her, it will also be a point of arrival — and, hopefully, a new starting point. The dance floor, here, is a temple.