Journalist
Zaya’s bravery is contagious.
Her willingness to be who she is at such a young age not only sets an example, but her family’s public navigation of it—especially in regards to her exemplary father Dwyane Wade—shows families across the country that they can learn from their children just as much as teach them.
This bio is short, because Zaya has only been on this earth for 13 years, but I’m sure her excellence and advocacy will continue to inspire others for decades to come.
#QueerHeroes Day 6
Angelica Ross.
It was acting that made Angelica Ross famous, but it’s her determination and raw intelligence that make her a mogul.
Her career started in tech when she taught herself computer code. Using this knowledge, she founded TransTech Social Enterprises—a networking firm that boosts visibility of transgender people in the tech industry.
In 2015, she was a featured speaker at a White House LGBTQ Tech and Innovation Summit.
Then she started her acting career.
After working on the web series Her Story, Ross got her breakout role as Candy Ferocity in the FX series Pose. Candy would become one of the show’s most beloved characters and the conscience for the series as a whole.
She’s currently working on her second season of American Horror Story.
Last September, Ross hosted the presidential summit on LGBTQ issues making her the first ever openly transgender host of a presidential forum.
#QueerHeroes Day 5.
Patrick Kelly.
Patrick Kelly was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi in 1954. His mother was a home economics teacher and he learned to sew in his teenage years.
After graduating high school, he moved from Mississippi to Atlanta, where he worked in a thrift shop. He began modifying the donated designer fashions and constructing pieces of his own, which he sold outside his store within a beauty salon.
He became a favorite designer of Black supermodel Pat Cleveland. She encouraged him to move to Paris, which he eventually did.
It wasn’t long before Kelly became one of the city’s premiere fashion designers, becoming the first American EVER admitted to Fédération française de la couture, du prêt-à-porter des couturiers et des créateurs de mode—the governing fashion body for all of Paris fashion.
Every celebrity from Bette Davis to Grace Jones to Madonna to Cicely Tyson became clients of his. He held runway shows at the Louvre.
Kelly was just about to reach his peak, developing lingerie, perfume, and menswear lines before he was diagnosed with AIDS.
He died in 1990 at only 35 years old. He’s buried in his beloved Paris today.
#QueerHeroes Day 4
Tracey Norman/Tracey Africa
This is one of my favorite stories of queer resilience and ultimate triumph.
Upon graduating high school in the late 60s/early 70s, Tracey came out to her family as a transgender woman. Despite her understandable fears, she was met with an embrace from her mother.
She began using birth control pills as part of her transition and soon found someone in the trans nightclub scene to supply her with underground hormone shots.
Keeping her assigned gender a secret, Tracey began a modeling career. She did a shoot for Vogue Italia in 1971, but she’d be most noticeable in 1975, on the box of Clairol’s “Born Beautiful” hair color. Number 512: Dark Auburn.
It was her first big contract and her face was in every drug store in the United States. Soon, Avon was calling and she landed a contract with them as well.
Then there was a fateful shoot with Essence Magazine five years later. The assistant to Tracey’s hairdresser found out her assigned gender and soon told the editor at Essence. The photos were never published. She moved to Paris and did a six month stint with Balenciaga, but work quickly dried up.
She accepted that her modeling career was over.
She began performing in peep show booths in New York City but found a home in the city’s Ball scene.
Thirty six years following the shoot with Essence, Clairol—the hair color company that was her first big contract—reached out to her after reading about Tracey’s story in The Cut.
They made her the face of their new campaign: ‘Nice ‘n Easy Color As Real As You Are’.
Since then, she’s become one of the first transgender women—along with Geena Rocero—on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar.
If her story sounds familiar to you, that’s likely because she partially inspired the character of Angel Evangelista, Indya Moore’s role in the FX series “Pose”.
If you want to honor Tracey and uplift young trans artists, you can donate to House Lives Matter, an organization founded and run entirely by queer people in the Ball scene. House Lives Matter is dedicated to strengthening alliances, healthcare opportunities, mentorships, and other crucial forms of advocacy within the Ball community. You can donate to them here.
#QueerHeroes Day 1 – Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Stormé Delarverie
I can’t stress enough that anyone telling you they know definitively how the Stonewall Riots began should be met with skepticism. Everyone present those nights saw the same picture from a different angle. I’ve talked with people who were there only for them to directly contradict each other. So much of it is legend or lost to history, the effect is what matters. These three are some of the people who began the revolution that resulted from the riots.
Marsha P. Johnson insisted that she didn’t begin the Stonewall Riots, as is widely believed. She joined the riots later in the first night, after they had begun. She was seen crawling up a lamppost where she then dropped a cement block onto a cop car.
With Sylvia Rivera, Johnson formed the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, which focused on getting resources to homeless queer youth in the early 70s. The two worked together toward trans liberation and mobilization for the rest of their lives. They were met with backlash from many cis gay people in the movement, who said their ostentatious nature made them look bad. Toward the end of her life, Rivera was frustrated at the movement’s emphasis on marriage and military service, feeling they’d strayed from their radical roots.
Stormé Delarverie was a butch lesbian who, in her youth, rode horses in the Ringling Brothers Circus and toured the country as a drag king with the Black performance troupe, the Jewel Box Revue.
On the first night of the riots, a woman matching Stormé’s description was being led roughly through the crowd by police. She began punching the cops and encouraging others to fight back.
She would later say:
“It was a rebellion, it was an uprising, it was a civil rights disobedience – it wasn’t no damn riot.”
Into her 80s, she would patrol the lesbian bars of Christopher street with a pistol, ready to fuck up anyone who messed with her “baby girls.”
I want to emphasize what actually happened at Stonewall: bar patrons began throwing change, rocks, and bottles at police until the police were forced back inside the evacuated bar.
Protestors began breaking the windows of the bar and attempting to set it on fire.
The cops who raided the bar contacted the tactical police force, who came in full riot gear to disperse the crowd.
Instead of cowering, trans girls and femmes and drag queens formed a kick line and began approaching the riot squad, mocking them with chants.
Stonewall was absolutely anti-police. It was violent. It was destructive. And it was liberating.
The riots marked a turning point from so-called respectable protests, in which organizers imposed traditional dress codes and forbade shows of same-sex affection, like holding hands. Groups like the Gay Liberation Front emerged with unapologetic demonstrations and unmistakable anger.
Evan Brechtel 