In Loving Memory of Eduardo “Aang Xiety” Ramirez Aguilar

He not only created unforgettable drag, he created spaces where people felt seen, loved, and free to become themselves.

Some artists spend their lives searching for their voice, while Eduardo “Aang Xiety” Ramirez Aguilar spent his life searching for a place where he could finally use his. When he found that place in San Diego, he wasted no time.

In what amounted to only a few short years, Aang Xiety became one of the most unforgettable emerging performers in the city’s drag community. Audiences were captivated by towering wings, mythical creatures, elaborate headpieces, and characters that looked as though they had stepped out of another world. His performances weren’t built around glamour or illusion. They were built around imagination. But to measure Eduardo’s life only by what happened on stage would miss the point entirely. The costumes were extraordinary. The person inside them was even more remarkable.

“He was always that way,” his close friend Celia says with a smile. “Even before drag, he was unbelievably creative. I used to wonder where all of those ideas came from.”

The answer, she believes now, is that those ideas had been waiting his entire life to be seen.

Eduardo was born on November 12, 1992, in Uruapan, Michoacán, Mexico, the youngest of three children. He grew up in a family that valued education and hard work, and he embraced both. He earned a degree in psychology before becoming a university professor teaching English. Later, still in his twenties, he opened his own English school, helping students build futures that stretched beyond the borders of their hometown.

Teaching wasn’t simply a career; it reflected who Eduardo was. He believed people could become more than they imagined, and he found genuine joy in helping them get there. Friends would later realize that same instinct carried into every corner of his life. Whether someone needed encouragement, advice, or simply another person willing to listen without judgment, Eduardo showed up.

“He loved helping people,” Celia says. “Helping them learn. Helping them grow. Helping them see their full potential.”

By every traditional measure, Eduardo had already built a successful life. He owned a home while still a young man. He had a respected profession and a future many would have envied. Still, something inside him remained restless. His hometown could nurture his intellect, but it couldn’t nurture his imagination.

Years later, after Eduardo had begun treatment for cancer, Celia visited Uruapan for the first time in decades. Walking through its familiar streets, something suddenly became clear.

“Nothing had changed,” she remembers. “Then I understood why he left. Someone with that much creativity couldn’t grow there.”

Leaving meant sacrificing everything he had worked for. He sold his belongings, left behind his career, and moved to the United States in 2018 to begin again.

Like countless immigrants before him, Eduardo exchanged certainty for possibility. Instead of lecture halls, he found himself bussing tables and working restaurant jobs while learning to build a new life. One of those jobs at Los Panchos in Hillcrest introduced him to Celia.

“We always joked that it was the worst job either of us ever had,” she laughs. “But it gave me one of the best friendships of my life.”

San Diego gave Eduardo something else, too. It introduced him to drag.

For many performers, drag begins with makeup or fashion. For Eduardo, it began with freedom.

“He realized there were no limits,” Celia says. “There wasn’t a ceiling on what he could imagine.”

His drag quickly became impossible to categorize. He wasn’t interested in recreating celebrities or presenting polished pageant glamour. Instead, he created fantastical creatures—forest spirits, winged beings, enchanted monsters, and magical characters that seemed to emerge directly from childhood dreams.

Sometimes friends teased him.

“I’d tell him, ‘Your stuff is so corny,'” Celia remembers, laughing. “He’d just shrug and say, ‘I don’t care what people think. This is what’s in my mind. This is what I want to create.'”

That refusal to compromise became his signature. He wasn’t creating to impress people. He was creating to heal himself.

Eduardo once told Celia that every fantastical character represented the little boy who had never been allowed to exist openly.

“He said he was healing little Eduardo,” she recalls. “The child who wanted to be magical. The child who wanted to become all these incredible creatures.”

His drag wasn’t an escape from reality. It was the first time reality finally caught up with who he had always been. But finding that freedom wasn’t easy.

Although his family eventually embraced him, acceptance came slowly. One afternoon, after being asked to change clothes because a crop top might embarrass a family member in public, Eduardo shared his heartbreak online.

Celia immediately called him.

“I told him, ‘Come live with me.'”

That invitation became a turning point. With a safe place to create, Aang Xiety flourished.

The apartment transformed into a workshop overflowing with rhinestones, feathers, fabric, glue, wings, and half-finished masterpieces. Celia would walk through the front door to find Eduardo completely absorbed in another creation.

“There were rhinestones all over my carpet,” she laughs. “I didn’t even care.”

Within months, audiences across San Diego began noticing him. His rise was meteoric.

Whether he was performing for a packed house or simply accepting a tip spot, he approached every performance with the same enthusiasm and artistic integrity. His name appeared on more and more show flyers, but fame never changed the person behind the makeup. If anything, it amplified his generosity.

“He was everyone’s biggest cheerleader,” Celia says. “The loudest person in the room, always celebrating everybody else.”

That generosity extended far beyond the stage. During one of the darkest periods of Celia’s life, while she struggled with addiction and crippling anxiety, Eduardo became her anchor.

She remembers nights when she called him convinced she wouldn’t make it until morning. He would leave work, arrive carrying pastries, and simply sit with her. Sometimes he slept on her floor. Sometimes he stayed awake all night.

“He wanted to make sure I’d wake up the next day,” she says. “That’s who he was.”

It was never an obligation. Helping other people filled his heart.

“Catching people’s tears filled his battery,” Celia says. “I’ve never met anyone quite like him.”

Then cancer returned.

Even after surviving an earlier diagnosis that forced him to relearn how to walk, Eduardo approached life with remarkable determination. He poured himself into his art as though every performance mattered. Perhaps, somehow, he knew it did.

When he returned to San Diego for one final visit after entering hospice in Mexico, something remarkable happened. Friends watched his spirit come alive. Though doctors had expected him to remain largely bedridden, he attended drag shows, reunited with loved ones, laughed over meals, and even performed again.

“He came alive here,” Celia says. “This community was home.”

His chosen family became the medicine no hospital could provide.

Shortly before Eduardo passed away, Celia traveled to Mexico to be with him. Lying beside him, she found herself comforting the friend who had spent years comforting everyone else. He apologized for what she was witnessing.

She thanked him instead.

“Thank you for showing me the love I deserve.”

It is a sentiment echoed by countless people whose lives were forever changed by Eduardo Ramirez Aguilar.

His legacy isn’t measured by how many shows he performed or how elaborate his costumes became. It lives in the students he inspired. In the friends he stayed awake to protect. In every young queer artist who watched him create without apology. In every person who found the courage to embrace their authentic self because Aang Xiety had shown them it was possible.

Asked what Eduardo would want the community to remember, Celia doesn’t hesitate.

“Just do you, bitch,” she says. “The right people are going to love you regardless.”

Eduardo lived exactly that way. He crossed borders in search of authenticity. He transformed hardship into beauty, loneliness into belonging, and imagination into hope. He proved that courage isn’t always loud. Sometimes it looks like putting on a pair of wings, stepping onto a stage, and showing the world the person you’ve always been.

His time with us was heartbreakingly brief. His impact will endure for generations.

Because artists create beautiful things. Eduardo “Aang Xiety” Ramirez Aguilar created beautiful people—simply by reminding them they already were.