A Trans Documentarian on the Impact and Legacy of Raquel Reyes as Author, Image Maker and Early Online Pioneer
First shared in online excerpts in 2005 and officially published in 2007 for a limited time, Goddess by Raquel Reyes emerged from the early internet underground to become a cult classic—remembered by a generation of queer readers as the memoir that dared to glamorize transformation as opposed to explain it. This site preserves Raquel Reyes's legacy and explores her memoir's ongoing impact on trans literature, art, and identity.
Goddess (2005)
When Goddess first appeared in the mid-2000s, it left a mark that was swift, sharp, and not easily erased. Self-published in an era before trans memoirs occupied bookstore shelves, Raquel Reyes’s debut held a rare equilibrium—unflinching in what it confessed, exacting in how it chose to say it. For many queer readers navigating the early web, the book circulated not through publicity but through whispers: forum posts, LiveJournal threads, word-of-mouth among club kids, artists, and seekers of beauty in unlikely places. To encounter Goddess then was to feel as though one had found a secret scripture—one that spoke of glamour not as ornament but as ontology, of becoming as art.Long after its release, scholars and readers have come to recognize Reyes’s fragmented, staccato voice as a deliberate formal strategy. Goddess now reads as an early articulation of trans authorship freed from the medicalized and moralizing frameworks that dominated public narratives. In the lineage of Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw (1994) and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (1993), Goddess distinguished itself through aesthetic literacy: a fusion of high style and emotional candor that framed fashion, nightlife, and eroticism as legitimate modes of theory. Where academic texts examined gender performativity from without, Reyes embodied it from within—each chapter a gesture of composition, each transformation a line of self-authored code. As scholar Jonathan Erickson observes, Reyes “transformed visibility into vocabulary,” offering a grammar of reinvention rooted in pleasure, discipline, and poise.Beyond literature, Goddess remains a landmark in the archaeology of the early internet. Reyes was among the first trans artists to curate her image online—through hand-coded webpages, high-resolution portraiture, and prose that blurred diary, myth, and performance art. Long before “influencer” entered the lexicon, she treated digital space as both mirror and myth-machine, a stage where identity could be sculpted and sanctified in real time. In hindsight, her presence appears as a prototype for the curated aesthetics of the social-media era—yet imbued with a vulnerability and lyricism that remain rare. To revisit Goddess today is to revisit a blueprint: a work that anticipated our contemporary conversations about self-creation, spectacle, and the commerce of beauty.
Goddess, 20 Years Later: A Conversation With Raquel ReyesQ: When you first wrote Goddess, did you think of it as a cultural document or simply survival?
Raquel: Survival. The idea of a “cultural artifact” belonged to someone with more time and safety than I had. I wasn’t curating a legacy. I was leaving proof behind that I existed.
Q: What does returning to this book mean to you now?
Raquel: It means clarity. I can look at the girl I was without flinching or worshiping her. Distance allowed me to see myself more clearly. I don’t need to mythologize her to honor her.
Q: The original book circulated like a secret. How do you feel about it re-entering the world in a more public cultural moment?
Raquel: I understand why people describe it that way. Once it went out of print, Goddess took on a clandestine quality, something discovered by accident or passed between friends. But it was never hidden. It received press, it sold out immediately, and I chose not to reprint it. My withdrawal from the internet may have contributed to that sense of elusiveness. The sense of secrecy comes from scarcity, not obscurity.
What protected me then—that deliberate distance—would suffocate me now. The terms have changed. Visibility today is not something extracted; it’s something I choose. That’s the difference: consent, agency. That said, I don’t have a desire to occupy digital space. If not for the renewed academic interest in the work, I doubt I would have “reemerged.” My story belonged to its moment, and in certain ways it anticipated the one we’re living in now—if that makes sense.
Q: Why did you digitally disappear? There were so many rumors among fans about what might have happened.
Raquel: The truth is far simpler than the stories people told. The rumors have no basis in fact—I simply retired. I wish it were more glamorous than that. I met someone, I fell in love, I got married, and we’re still married. Today, I have a beautiful life: safe, secure, some might even say privileged. I was young then, and what I did when I was young was perfect for me at the time. But eventually, I grew into another life. And if Goddess revealed anything about who I am, it’s that I’ve always believed in motion—I was always moving toward something that felt real, that felt right. I live a very different life now, but I can still look back with fondness, with a sense of appreciation. I have no shame, regret or longing.
Q: The internet you helped shape has changed beyond recognition. How do you see your digital legacy in 2025?
Raquel: I built in an era before algorithms, before virality could be engineered. I wasn’t optimizing—I was inventing. There was no such thing as beauty filters. You either were or you weren't, and people had to actually see you to believe you existed. I toured for over a decade, and I’d like to think that in person, the reality matched—if not surpassed—the legend of who I was online. Today, I’m not returning to chase the machine. I’m returning to archive, contextualize, and reclaim the narrative before history is written about me without me. I see these conversations happening about me and it only feels natural to be a part of them.
Q: I'm interested in your thoughts on social media. In many ways, you were a precursor to the influencer.
Raquel: It’s strange to be seen as a precursor to something I never consciously set out to pioneer. In those early days, we didn't have the language for what we were doing—there was no “creator economy,” no “personal brand.” I wasn’t curating a lifestyle so much as asserting an existence. I used the internet to my advantage using the tools of the time.
Social media today is a different animal. It’s engineered for visibility without depth. Influence has become a metric rather than a presence. In my time, mystery had value; now, the algorithm punishes opacity. Everything must be legible, consumable, continuous. That constant exposure feels less like liberation and more like labor.
But I do recognize the lineage. The architecture of self-creation, the understanding that identity could be authored digitally—that was definitely a part of my world. But now it feels like this ceaseless demand for proof of life. I find it exhausting and less interesting.
So yes, I can see how people draw a through-line. But what I was doing was less about influence and more about sovereignty. I disappeared when I chose to. That alone separates my era from this one. The question now isn’t whether one can be seen—it’s whether one can ever rest.
Q: What do you hope new readers see in Goddess now?
Raquel: That survival isn’t always about struggle. And that transition isn’t just physical. Transformation is continual, iterative. My gender was one facet. Important, yes, but part of a far broader evolution.
Q: And who is Raquel Reyes now?
Raquel: A wife. A friend. An artist who still believes in the power of beauty and mystery. Someone who walks into rooms both real and metaphorical knowing she belongs.
Q: Is there a way to keep up with what you're doing today?
Raquel: I’m mostly offline these days, though I’ve begun sharing occasional reflections on Medium. A 20th-anniversary edition of Goddess is coming next year—revised and expanded, not rewritten. Just shaped by distance, and by who I’ve become.
Follow the links for expanded academic and cultural context on Raquel Reyes. Her sole official website is www.thetsgoddess.com. The independent resources listed here draw upon frameworks in transgender studies, gender theory, and digital-culture scholarship to situate her work for contemporary audiences.
© 2025 Raquel Reyes Legacy. All rights reserved.
This site is an independent archival project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by Raquel Reyes. No copyright or ownership of Raquel Reyes's name, work, or likeness is claimed. The Legacy Project collaborates with the Trans Wiki Project and appears in gender studies syllabi to honor the contributions of Raquel Reyes and other trans pioneers whose creative presence helped define the cultural landscape of the early internet.