Early Life
Carangi was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was the third and youngest child of Joseph Carangi, a restaurant owner, and Kathleen Adams, a homemaker. She had two older brothers. Her father is Italian, and her mother is of Irish and Welsh ancestry. Joseph and Kathleen had an unstable, violent marriage, and Kathleen abandoned the family when Carangi was eleven years old. Those who knew her blamed her "fractured childhood" for the instability and drug-dependence that plagued her adult life. She was described as "needy and manipulative" by relatives who recalled her as spoiled and shy as a child and a "mommy’s girl" who did not receive the motherly attention that she desired.
In her adolescent years, Carangi found the attention she sought from other teenage girls, befriending them by sending flowers. While in high school, Carangi bonded with "the Bowie kids", a group of obsessive David Bowie fans who emulated Bowie's "defiantly weird, high-glam" style. Carangi was drawn to Bowie for his fashion preferences and his ambiguous gender play and outspoken bisexuality. A friend of Carangi described her "tomboy persona," describing her relaxed openness about her sexuality as reminiscent of the character Cay in the 1985 film Desert Hearts. Carangi and her "bi-try Bowie-mad" friends hung out in Philadelphia’s gay clubs and bars. Though she associated with the lesbian community, she did not want to take up "the accepted lesbian style".
Read more about this topic: Gia Carangi
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”
—Eudora Welty (b. 1909)
“If we are on the outside, we assume a conspiracy is the perfect working of a scheme. Silent nameless men with unadorned hearts. A conspiracy is everything that ordinary life is not. It’s the inside game, cold, sure, undistracted, forever closed off to us. We are the flawed ones, the innocents, trying to make some rough sense of the daily jostle. Conspirators have a logic and a daring beyond our reach. All conspiracies are the same taut story of men who find coherence in some criminal act.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)