Years later, when I was twenty and out (she’d forgiven me long ago about the boy), she came to visit me in London. I took her on a night out – to The Joiners – where we hung out with my friends, danced, and I kissed someone else.
‘Why did we become friends in college?’ she asked, over a drink back at my house.
‘I think I might have had a crush on you,’ I admitted.
She didn’t flinch. Or run out of the room, or do any of the things I’d imagined she’d do if I ever told her years before.
‘Do you still have a crush on me?’ she asked, avoiding my eyes. Then we had sex, and although I can’t remember it now I do remember what it felt like – it was as if all my gay teenage self-hate dissolved away in one perfect evening. Until the next day, when she told me she was straight and made me promise not to tell anyone. I felt seventeen again, and as though I should be locked up.
This would happen repeatedly to varying degrees for the next three years: different girls but the same story. I learned that shame is contagious; just when you think you’ve rid yourself of it, someone passes it back to you. In the pub with my friends, I would joke that it was a compliment that girls like this were ‘only gay for me’, but in private, I would wonder why, if they had feelings for me, it would be such an awful thing to be with me. The hours spent crying behind closed doors were not glam or cinematic like the final credits of Call Me by Your Name, or as tragic as the sparse queer films I’d seen growing up, like Boys Don’t Cry or Milk. They were tinged with the feeling of self-indulgence mixed with self-hatred, and the thought that, if I could get turned on by sex with men, why could I never develop feelings for them? Why did it always have to be girls? And, for a long time, girls who made me feel guilty about it?
I never mentioned this to anyone because it was an intense privilege that these were my only encounters with gay shame. I was lucky to have moved through life without my parents burning all my gender-non-conforming clothes as Amrou’s did (although I’m sure if Amrou saw some of the ill-fitting dungarees I wore, they would agree that they should have been destroyed), and with no one pouring a pint over my head in a pub. It felt as if a bit of internalized homophobia was the best possible outcome you could hope for as a gay person. And as I got older, and met more LGBTQ+ people from different walks of life, I realized I was right: I really had had it much better than everyone else. As these people, many of whom had had more shame and stigma to overcome, taught me to love myself the way they had managed to love themselves, I started to love people who would love me back. Or people like Salka, who didn’t love me just because they didn’t love me, rather than because of my gender.
When I looked back and asked myself whether anything could have made a difference, the YouTube videos seemed like the obvious answer. Watching them, amazed at the confidence with which young people publicly talked about their sexuality, only reinforced how much I had needed something like this when I was younger. If I’d known anyone gay who I could relate to, if I’d seen anyone that might look like the future version of me in the media, if I’d been able to access something as basic as Rose and Rosie’s videos, secretly, from my bedroom, would I have come out earlier, felt less shame, spent less of my early twenties sobbing over ‘straight girls’?
There was no way to know. But what I could be sure of, mostly from the viewing figures, was that these videos were now one of the places where young people were going to learn to be gay, either before they could go to gay bars, or because there were fewer gay bars for them to go to, or because they lived in a place where they had no possibility to explore what their gender or sexuality might be, out in the open.
The videos made me think about visibility – both a cause and an effect of how things had improved for LGBTQ+ people since I was a kid. There weren’t just these YouTubers now, but also pictures of gay people getting married in the press, Drag Race on television, and countless out celebrities, including many women, from Kristen Stewart to Cara Delevingne to Ellen Page. There was so much that hadn’t been around ten years ago. But what difference did it actually make that people who were once marginalized by the media were now visible? Did this mean anything for the lives of regular LGBTQ+ people? And was the world actually as progressive as the media would have us believe?
The only thing more annoying than going all the way to Berlin, missing Dyke March, Pride being rained off, and then blacking out for most of the eight hours you’re in Berghain (I would have explained what happened if I knew), is flying to New York to meet trans models, suddenly getting ignored by all of them, and then realizing that you have accidentally booked the trip over Thanksgiving, when most people are off work or out of the city.
‘It’ll be fine,’ said my friend Helene.
Ironically, Helene herself was a model, just not a trans model. She was in New York to meet American casting agents, and I was staying with her. We had booked a room on Airbnb in Bushwick, Brooklyn. When we arrived, it turned out the flat was occupied by four lesbians. Helene, not a lesbian, was confused by some of their living arrangements, like why they only had soya milk and why there were so many cats everywhere.
‘If I help you understand lesbians will you help me find trans models?’ I said.
‘Go on Insta,’ she replied dismissively, eating some room-temperature sushi. Helene always seemed to be eating something she had pulled out of her pocket from earlier. Once, most horrifyingly, some old pork that was wrapped in foil. When I saw it, I vaguely remembered it from a meal a few days before.
She was probably right: I should go on Insta, for Insta was the home of all models, and there were a few trans models that I followed. One of these was Teddy Quinlivan, a beautiful redhead who had come out as trans in the media recently and whom I also had a huge crush on.
‘Always trying to interview people you fancy,’ tutted Helene, as I emailed Teddy’s agent.
The fashion world embracing trans models wasn’t a new phenomenon. In fact, I remember seeing a trans model on TV for the first time back in 2008, when Isis King became a contestant on America’s Next Top Model. King had been asked if she would apply during a photo shoot in an earlier season where the show’s model contestants dressed up as homeless people. King, living in a homeless shelter at the time, was asked to be a backing model (in an interview later, I asked her if she thought this might be a problematic shoot concept and she told me that she was not offended, just grateful for the opportunity). King was ‘outed’ on TV, with the other girls asking her questions about her genitals, making her feel ‘like a caged animal’ (her words, when we spoke). For a lot of people, King’s appearance provided the first notion that a trans person could be a model, and by the time she returned to the show in 2011, trans models were featuring in magazines more regularly. Most famously, Lea T posed naked on the cover of Love magazine kissing Kate Moss. The same year, Andreja Pejić, a Bosnian-born model from Australia, who had been spotted at the age of seventeen when she was working in a McDonald’s, starred in a campaign for Marc Jacobs and walked for Jean-Paul Gaultier. Two years later, she came out as trans, becoming the most famous trans model in the world.
If this felt like a landmark moment for trans visibility, the truth was that trans models had actually been around much, much longer. One of the first British people to undergo gender confirmation surgery, April Ashley, modelled for Vogue in the 1960s, until a friend ‘outed’ her as trans to the press for a fee of £5. African American trans woman Tracy ‘Africa’ Norman appeared in Italian Vogue and as the face of Clairol hair dye in the 1970s, until she was ‘outed’ on a shoot for Essence magazine. And Bond girl Caroline ‘Tula’ Cossey was shot for Playboy in 1981, until she was ‘outed’ by the tabloids.
The explosion of openly trans models in the fashion industry in the 2010s came at – or heralded – a wider moment of visibility for trans people. My friend Paris Lees, the one who reminds me of Samantha Jones, grew up trans in a small town in the north of England and recently summed it up well: ‘When I was grow
ing up you rarely saw trans people in the media and only then as objects of pity, ridicule or disgust,’ she told me. ‘I’m not sure I could even begin to explain what effect this had on me and the way that I saw myself. Early on in my transition, when I didn’t blend in as well as a girl, people would often shout abuse at me in the street. For about a year or so I thought that was OK, because what did I expect? After all, I was a “boy dressing up as a girl”, and I deserved it, right?’ Paris said that every time she’d seen someone like her in public life they were being humiliated, so she naturally believed that she deserved to be humiliated, that she was, in her words, perverse, fake, ridiculous. ‘I remember walking home with my best friend Steffi, who was also trans, and talking about how we’d like to make things different one day. I must have been sixteen or seventeen back then. Trans people didn’t appear on news shows to give their opinions on important issues, they didn’t win awards or appear on the cover of magazines, and they certainly weren’t celebrated as feminists or indeed anything, really. We were literally just a joke. But I felt it was possible. That gay people had been on that journey. That people of colour had been on that journey. Why couldn’t we try and take part in society – in life – as equal members too? Then Nadia Almada won Big Brother and everything changed in my mind. I’d never seen anyone transgender celebrated in public before.’
Some time after Nadia won Big Brother in the UK in 2004, the broader climate started to change slightly. Paris became a prominent spokesperson, presented on Channel 4 and Radio 1, and became the first trans person to appear on Question Time, our biggest political debating show. Something similar started to happen in America: in 2014, Orange is the New Black star and trans activist Laverne Cox graced the cover of Time magazine. A year later, Caitlyn Jenner was shot by Annie Leibovitz for the cover of Vanity Fair and debuted her inane TV show I Am Cait, a spin-off from Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Around the same time, trans TV presenter and Allure beauty columnist Janet Mock published two iconic autobiographies. One of my favourite artists, Anohni, formerly of Antony and the Johnsons, became the first trans woman nominated for a Brit Award (and the second for an Oscar, but she boycotted the ceremony). And the TV drama Transparent attempted a nuanced portrayal of a father from a Jewish family in LA transitioning to become a woman (before the lead actor, Jeffrey Tambor, was released from the show following sexual harassment claims).
In March 2017, French Vogue ran its first ever issue with a trans cover star: then twenty-year-old Brazilian-born model Valentina Sampaio. It wasn’t just the first edition of Vogue to put a trans person on its cover, but also the first magazine in French history to do so. What stood out to me, though, was the headline, which read: ‘Transgender Beauty, How They’re Shaking Up the World’. I decided to write an article about it, and spoke to Shon Faye, a brilliant British journalist and commentator on trans issues who objected to the headline quite strongly.
‘Most trans people are not trying to “shake up the world”,’ Shon said, pointing out that, although kinder than the coverage of recent years, it was still a ‘sensational representation’ of trans people. ‘Being trans is not a political statement designed to make everyone rethink gender,’ she explained, with her usual acerbic eloquence. ‘It may have that effect sometimes, which is good, but we are not a style aesthetic. “Shaking up the world” is not always positive for trans people. Shaking people up often means they won’t give you a job, or that they throw you out on the street, or that they rape you.’
I agreed with Shon that the headline was offensive, that ‘they’ seemed to denote trans women as other. For me, it summed up everything about the strange moment we were living in for LGBTQ+ representation more broadly. There was a thin line between visibility and spectacle. There was the question of how sincere a gesture it was to put a trans model on the cover of your magazine or in your latest campaign at a time when it seemed to be a sure-fire way to garner publicity. And then there was the blatant fact that this assertion had come too late: if trans people were shaking up the world, they’d been doing it for a while.
A couple of days after we got to New York, I received a helpful email. Not from Teddy’s agent, who had fobbed me off – ‘YouTubers and trans models, more famous than God,’ I noted – but from a woman called Cindi Creager. Cindi’s company, CreagerCole Communications, taught LGBTQ+ celebs how to handle vicious right-wing media and tense television interviews. ‘Before the premiere of my VH1 reality show, TRANSform Me, Cindi Creager prepared me for a myriad of press interviews about the program,’ wrote Laverne Cox in a testimonial on the website. ‘I employ the spokesperson techniques Cindi taught me to this day and I highly recommend her services.’
When I learned that Cindi had coached Teddy to announce that she was trans at the start of 2017, I suddenly wanted to interview Cindi more than Teddy. I emailed asking if I could meet with her and I quickly got a message back: she told me that she was too busy to meet me face to face while I was in New York, which seemed like exactly what I would say if I were a New York PR guru trying to manage my own public image. Instead, she generously offered to let me call her for a chat. I had come all the way to New York to phone someone in New York. Still, if this woman coached gay and trans people in coming out, she would be the perfect person to talk to about what positive LGBTQ+ representation ought to look like: she was one of the people who shaped it.
Cindi had set up CreagerCole with her spouse Rainie Cole in 2012, she explained over the phone.
‘We founded CreagerCole as a boutique public relations firm with expertise in LGBTQI issues and we offer media training and message development,’ she told me.
‘What does that mean?’ I asked.
‘Really that means we get great press for LGBTQI organizations, individuals and causes. We help clients deliver clear, compelling and concise messages when speaking to the media. The care and sensitivity we bring to the issue, that’s our value proposition.’
Cindi was an advert for her own business: very clear, compelling and concise. She explained to me that after working as a TV anchor in Alaska, she went to Columbia University’s graduate journalism school in the late nineties, then landed a job producing documentaries for ABC News, which was when she started to identify that she might be a lesbian. It was 2005 when she scored the job as Director of National News at GLAAD (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), where she worked with Laverne Cox, she said. There, she ran campaigns that held the media accountable for homophobic, transphobic and defamatory journalism, campaigned for the Associated Press to change their style guide to be more inclusive and modern (switching ‘transsexual’ to ‘transgender’, for example, or using ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ instead of ‘homosexual’), and advised celebrities and activists on representing the community appropriately in the media.
Another part of Cindi’s job back then was to work with everyday people who wanted to get a story in the news, in order to raise awareness about the difficulties LGBTQ+ people and their families experienced. She had worked with Elke Kennedy, whose son Sean W. Kennedy was punched in the face by a man called Stephen Moller in a homophobic attack that took place in South Carolina in 2007. Sean fell to the pavement, hitting his head so hard that he died. Elke, with the help of Cindi and GLAAD, ran a media campaign that highlighted South Carolina’s lack of hate-crime law at the time (Moller ended up serving less than two years for involuntary manslaughter), and Cindi believed the work they did contributed to the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009. She also worked with Janice Langbehn, who in 2007 was about to leave on a cruise from Miami with her wife Lisa Marie Pond and three of their four children when Pond collapsed and was rushed to a local hospital. Langbehn and the kids were barred from seeing Pond, a decision justified by a member of staff who told her that Florida was an ‘anti-gay city and state’. Pond died of a brain aneurysm without her wife and children by her side.
‘These were serious stories, but stories that helped persuade politicians,’ said Cindi. ‘The woman tur
ned away at the hospital helped persuade President Obama to say hospitals need to provide visitation for same-sex couples; the law was changed.’ Cindi’s experience at GLAAD taught her the power of the media to shape not just representation but legislation too. A lesson, I would learn, that she carried over to her next endeavour, at CreagerCole.
Cindi described the PR firm’s work with models as ‘proactive work: you know you’re going to be making an announcement and you plan for it’, as opposed to ‘crisis PR: when someone outs you or you find yourself having an unexpected media moment and you need to respond to it’.
‘Say I was a model,’ I started, ‘which I am about two feet and one face graft away from ever becoming. Say I was a model and I was famous and I wanted to come out as a lesbian . . . how would you help me?’
‘Well, we can’t all be models!’ Cindi laughed cheerily. ‘So we’d start by asking you questions in a safe space: Why are you coming out? What is your reasoning? Do you want to speak out for lesbian rights? Once we get those messages down we’d start to write a press release, shape that with you. Does this seem accurate to you? Possibly you want to get into your childhood: What was it like being gay growing up? We’d sit in a room and practise talking across the table, then we’d get a camera out and start to put you on camera, longer interviews with someone who has more time . . . or pretend you were on CNN for three minutes. We’d make sure you’re ready for any curveball questions as well. Who do you vote for? What do you think of Trump? I would caution the client to keep the interview on the topic at hand. We’d teach you how to speak to things on your terms. Then we’d plan and strategize media outlets that would handle your story properly. We’d bring you options, and then when the time is right, a few months in advance, we’d plant the seeds . . . and when you’re ready, and you feel comfortable, the interview takes place. We field and vet the requests that come in the door.’
Queer Intentions Page 16
