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The figure gliding like a lioness through a Rite Aid in Manhattan’s
Lower East Side would turn heads, if there were any heads to turn here,
two minutes from midnight. Indya Moore’s hair isn’t as Afro-tastic as
the wig she wears to play Angel, a sex worker longing for love on FX’s
Pose—which dives deep into New York’s late-1980s LGBTQ black and
Latinx ballroom community—but her curls are magnificent. Some fall in
her face, some stand at attention, as if keeping watch over their owner,
who has both a smile that makes you want to hug her and a Bronx-bred
air of being able to hold her own in a fight if she has to.
(A note on gender pronouns: Indya is nonbinary and prefers to use
“they” and “them,” but is also navigating how that works in a society
that has long oriented around cisgender or binary trans identities. Most
people around Indya use “she,” which Indya says is fine to use through-
out this story. See her Instagram post in April about this very topic.)
We’re three days and some nine hours of confessional conversations
into knowing each other when Indya asks if I’ll come with her to the
pharmacy to pick up her hormone prescription. I don’t hesitate. It’s the
kind of errand girlfriends run together, because we all have lives but
company makes them better.
“Insurance is grimy,” she says, sighing, before bounding up to the
counter to ask the pharmacist for a discount. She’s here for a one-month
emergency hormone supply, which her insurance won’t cover (like most
24-year-olds, Indya is on her mother’s plan), but she can’t wait for the
proper prescription to come through. The next morning, she’s flying to
Los Angeles to join the Pose cast for a PaleyFest panel, and she refuses
to vamp on the red carpet feeling like this. “I get, like, really bad head-
aches, and I’m supertired if I don’t take them. It’s weird. I’m so extra!”
Pose, currently shooting its second season, features more transgen-
der actors, including Indya, than any scripted television series in his-
tory. Her shooting days involve emotional scenes about the AIDS crisis
and over-the-top ballroom sequences filled with runway walks, glitter,
glam, feathers, and the kind of delicious D-R-A-M-A we’ve all come to
expect from Ryan Murphy, who is a co-creator. Indya’s character, Angel,
wins the top prize at a winter ball, resplendent in silver sequins, before
a screaming crowd as fake snow falls on her and Billy Porter’s emcee
declares her “the frostiest bitch in New York!” She also has a juicy story
line wherein she falls for a married white businessman, played by Evan
Peters. The first season’s finale is like Pretty Woman’s, except that when
the prince comes to find Angel, she walks away and rescues herself.
Even without an empowering TV narrative, Indya’s legion of fans
likely would have found her. They are on her Twitter and Instagram
(50K and 216K strong, respectively), thanking her for being forever a
teacher, for doing the exhausting work of explaining her radical per-
spective that her sex organs have nothing to do with whether she can be
considered a “biological woman.” Off set, she is on the ground, showing
up at every premiere or award show that she can attend, representing
an image of a proud trans woman of color, of Haitian, Dominican, and
Puerto Rican descent.
The characters of Pose come from an era when being trans, and es-
pecially being black and brown while trans, was treated as a shameful
secret. They were able to realize their identities only in safe spaces like
the ballroom scene or the peep shows of Times Square, or in furtive
affairs behind closed doors. Pioneers like Isis King of America’s Next
Top Model, Laverne Cox of Orange Is the New Black, and TV personal-
ity Janet Mock, who is a writer, director, and producer on Pose, broke
barriers in the entertainment industry. Indya, though, represents some-
thing new: a trans woman who grew up as a native of social media and
is unapologetic in claiming her identity in public. “It feels like this is
the first time that we are seeing a trans woman being celebrated for all
the different parts of herself,” Mock says. “She’s the embodiment of our
dream girl. She’s living the fantasy that all of us hoped and dreamed for,
that we fought to build little by little so that someone like Indya Moore
could be the center of a show, be the center of fashion campaigns, be
on a magazine cover.”
Nicolas Ghesquière of Louis Vuitton took note and not only featured
Indya in the luxury brand’s prefall 2019 look book, alongside Michelle
Williams and Jennifer Connelly, but made her the host of Vuitton’s Paris
fashion show and dressed her like a silver space goddess for the Golden
Globe Awards. Prabal Gurung sat her front row at his fashion show.
Joseph Altuzarra, whose peekaboo knit dress she wore to PaleyFest,
took her to the Tony Awards as his date. Topless Calvin Klein ads are
soon to come, one of which, Indya proudly tells me, features a subtle
crotch bulge to go along with her pert breasts. “I think that’s so cool!”
Yet, in between all of that, there is this, a midnight run to a 24-hour
pharmacy, because nature didn’t quite give her the tools to present as
who she is.
She asks the pharmacist for a free syringe with a 22-gauge needle,
and keeps sending him back until he brings out the right one. “I’m sorry,
don’t be mad at me,” she says sweetly. “It’s the longer one, because it’s
going into my muscle.”
I marvel at how knowledgeable and authoritative she is. “It’s like
my whole life I’ve been doing this, you know. It’s not a big deal.” She
smiles, like she just remembered her birthday was coming up. “It’ll be
10 years next year.”
While we wait on needles, Indya finds a neon rainbow beach ball
and lobs it toward me, misses, and knocks over a display of cold meds
instead. She always wanted a ball like that, she says wistfully, which is
when I realize that she spent so much time being bullied and fighting for
survival in foster care, she never got a chance to be a kid. When a 1980
country song called “I Love a Rainy Night,” by Eddie Rabbitt, comes on,
we have a stomping hoedown in the toothpaste aisle.
On the way out, I pick up a box of tampons. Indya spent $134 on her
hormones, which is roughly the same as what she spends on Ubers every
day to get her safely back to her mom’s place in the South Bronx, where
she’s been staying in between Pose obligations. I tell her that between
boxes of tampons, pads, and the clothes I’ve bled through, and the cabs
I’ve had to take home to change my clothes, I spent $50 on my period that
month. I cannot know her life or her trauma, but we can share a laugh over
the very real, unfair pink taxes we pay as women in America. We walk
out arm in arm, two girlfriends experiencing different hormonal events
that the other will never quite be able to understand.
“Heyaaaa! My love!” It’s two days earlier, and Indya peeks her head
around a pillar in the fashion studio of her friend, Celestino designer
Sergio Guadarrama. She starts handing out hugs like she’s just won
the lottery and is bursting with abundance. These aren’t just any hugs;
they are long, sincere, and life giving. Everyone in the room gets one,
including me, a reporter whom, until that moment, she had never met.
On Pose and on the red carpet, Indya serves up confidence as if she
swallowed the spirits of Madonna, Grace Jones, and Beyoncé all at
once. She and her stylist, Ian Bradley, are cultivating an image for her
of an Afro-futurist warrior. Today, though, far from the public eye, she
exudes serenity and a bit of exhaustion. Soft curls frame her face, as in
a Jane Austen novel.
She chose to meet at Guadarrama’s studio in lower Manhattan be-
cause it is one of the few spaces in this city she feels completely safe.
Rather than at a café, where she might have to guard how she speaks
about being trans, here she can dig in. Everyone in the room is either
queer or a person of color, including Indya’s beautiful black publicist,