San Francisco's queer nightlife world and San Francisco at large lost an icon Tuesday night. Miss Gina LaDivina, a longtime performer at Aunt Charlie's, The Stud, and Oasis has passed. The cause reportedly was complications from cancer.

"I never thought I'd be doing this this old," Miss LaDivina said during a January 2020 revue she did at Oasis — which squeaked in just before the pandemic and is thankfully captured on video that you can see in full, via YouTube, below. She was 70 at the time, and as she said onstage between lip synching to Shirley Bassey songs, "I'll be doing this shit 'til the day I drop."

She added, "Because it's fun. And you people are fun. And goddammit I like a good time."

Gina LaDivina made it to 74, and she was true to her word, performing at the reopening night festivities at The Stud barely a month ago. She was, just in the last couple of weeks, waylaid by illness and briefly hospitalized, where friends say cancer was found. And she reportedly died peacefully at home on Tuesday.

Gina LaDivina was dubbed, cheekily, "The $65,000 Silicone Wonder" whenever she was introduced as performer and emcee of Aunt Charlie's longtime drag revue, The Hot Boxxx Girls. A trans pioneer who hailed from Santa Rosa and spent much of her career performing in SF venues, she hosted that show with the sultry, throaty ease of a wizened bombshell between the late 90s and early aughts, departing Aunt Charlie's around the same time as her legendary elder peer Vicki Marlane — who passed away at age 76 in 2011.

Performing alongside many younger, edgier drag queens at club nights like SomeThing at The Stud and at Daytime Realness, Gina LaDivina spanned several very different eras as a Bay Area performer, from the unironic female impersonation era of Finocchio's to the world we now know that takes too many cues from Rupaul's Drag Race.

"She was a showgirl, a hair goddess, a mentor and a muse," writes SF Drag Laureate D'Arcy Drollinger today. "Unapologetically herself, Gina charted her own path, never suffering fools lightly. She was fiercely loyal and dedicated to her chosen family up until the very end."

Drollinger adds, "Throughout her life, Gina fearlessly reinvented herself, often in the face of harrowing adversity. She was a true trailblazer — outspoken on her views of what it meant to be a trans woman — a pioneer since the 1970’s. Gina challenged societal norms; redefining perceptions of aging and remaining a captivating force until her final moments."

Below, please enjoy "An Evening With Gina LaDivina" from 2020.

This obituary will be updated and expanded.