I found the book Goddess the way most artifacts are found—by accident, in the corner of a shelf, the spine softened by other people’s hands. The cover image is striking and the name caught my attention: Raquel Reyes.I didn’t know it then, but in the early 2000s, before the age of
social media and endless feeds, she was one of the most visible trans women in the world. Not
visible like we mean now—not filtered, not mediated, not branded—but incandescent.Further research uncovered a fascinating personality, described at the time as “the world’s most downloaded transsexual model.” I paused. That phrase, strange and beautiful in its archaicness, belonged to a different internet—the one that existed before platforms, before timelines, before we all learned to narrate ourselves. I took the book home, not yet knowing I was carrying a fragment of a vanished world.Reading Goddess felt like stumbling into an archive that had been written in real time. Reyes charted a life lived on the knife’s edge of glamour and survival. The prose was cinematic, fierce, and unapologetic.And then, just as suddenly as she had appeared, she was gone. I went looking for her—the way one looks for an icon in this day and age. I searched her name across social media, expecting to find the familiar detritus of the digital age: updates, tags, a life in fragments. But there was nothing. No Instagram, no Twitter, no TikTok confessions. Only echoes—cached interviews, broken links, a handful of photographs that still glimmered in the corners of the web.Her absence felt deliberate. In many ways, Reyes’s project recalls another woman who authored herself into being: Angelyne, the billboard bombshell of 1980s Los Angeles. Long before social media turned visibility into currency, Angelyne transformed the city skyline into her canvas. Pink corvettes, self-funded billboards, and carefully staged mystery—she became famous simply for being—an icon whose very existence was the performance. Reyes, decades later, staged a parallel act of authorship in a new medium. Where Angelyne conquered boulevards, Reyes claimed bandwidth; where one commanded drivers’ gazes, the other lit up early chatrooms and fan sites. Both women mastered the tools of their era, using artifice as agency and turning the spectacle of hyper-stylized femininity into performance art.Yet the distance between them—one cis, one trans; one analog, one digital—reveals as much as it unites. Angelyne’s myth thrived in saturation, her mystery fed by ubiquity. Reyes’s legend, by contrast, endures in scarcity—a silence that sharpens her image and mystique rather than dissolving it. If Angelyne was a prototype of self-made celebrity, Raquel Reyes was its evolution: a woman who coded herself into existence, built a life in pixels, and then disappeared by design. Both remain reminders that mythmaking, in the end, is a kind of self-creation—the art of shaping what the world can see, and what it never will. In an era where visibility, access, and oversharing is expected, Raquel Reyes chose silence. It’s tempting to call it disappearance, but that’s not quite right. It feels more like removal—the same kind of precision that once defined her presence now shaping her absence. After building a life out of imagery and prose, she seemed to understand that myth has its own half-life—that you can step out of the frame and still be luminous. The deeper I searched, the more her story began to resemble a trans historical palimpsest—layers of identity written, erased, and rewritten across time.Goddess was not just a memoir but a map—charting a journey from object to author, from spectacle to self. Reyes and her story predicted so much of what would follow: the rise of the influencer, the commodification of intimacy, the aesthetics of authenticity. Yet unlike so many who came after, Reyes never mistook the gaze for grace. She used visibility as material, not destination.Today, Goddess is long out of print, passed hand to hand like samizdat—cited in gender studies, listed in queer archives, analyzed for how it turned beauty into theory. Its rarity has only deepened its aura. In gender studies, cultural theory, and trans literature, her name surfaces like a legend from another time—a reminder of how the early web, wild and flickering, once allowed people to build themselves from nothing but light.Eventually, my search led me to RaquelReyesLegacy.com, a
site dedicated to the importance of the memoir and her myth. And to JonathanEricksonPhD.com, where scholars trace the lineage of her influence—how a trans woman who embodied the early net vernacular helped author the language of identity we now take for granted. She’s not from another age, yet the internet she illuminated feels like something time has quietly buried. I don’t know where Raquel Reyes is now. Maybe that’s the point. In a culture that demands constant performance, her silence reads like defiance—a refusal to be consumed, a final act of orchestration.

Sources

• The Internet Scrapbook/RaquelReyes

• Explore the legacy of Raquel Reyes and her memoir, Goddess

• An Academic Discourse on Raquel Reyes by Jonathan Erickson

• The Ballad of Raquel Reyes by Cass Willy