Janet Mock Makes Trans Beautiful in Marie Claire US August 2020, by Luke Gilford

African American, Hawaiian and transgendered beauty Janet Mock made history as the first trans woman of color to write and direct a television episode, which she did in 2018 for the acclaimed ‘Pose’. Subsequently she became the first trans creator to sign a comprehensive deal with a major media company — Netflix.

Mock covers the August digital issue of ‘Marie Claire US’, lensed by Luke Gilford and styled by Yashua Simmons in Alaïa, Boss, Bottega Veneta and more. / Hair by Kim Kimble; makeup by Wendi Miyake

Interviewed now by Kimberly Drew, Marie Claire also links into Janet Mock’s 2011 “coming-out story ”I Was Born a Boy.” The writer is in a reflective mood, three weeks after her Zoom interview with Mock. AOC says their names:

In a time before the murder of George Floyd, or Breonna Taylor, or Tony McDade, any good writer would dedicate three or four sentences to detailing her blue Gucci cardigan or her perfectly coiffed hair or her shimmering aura. But the reality is, lately I haven’t had the bandwidth to think much about cardigans or minor details; in the three weeks since I interviewed Mock via Zoom video call, seven Black trans women have been murdered. As I reach for important details to help frame our dialogue, I can only think of Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells of Philadelphia; Riah Milton in Liberty Township, Ohio; Merci Mack in Dallas; Bree Black in Pompano Beach, Florida; Shaki Peters and Draya McCarty in Louisiana; and 17-year-old Brayla Stone in Arkansas and how they should still be here today.

To write about Black life right now is to write in equal measure about trauma and triumph. The writer and scholar bell hooks, who is a friend of Mock’s, has said that “language is also a place of struggle.” In many ways, the struggle to find language for this moment has never felt so real. How can we make language that speaks at once of mourning, joy, and fear?

Kimberly Drew’s substantive interview is so worth the read. We jump to the ending, with Mock sharing news of her first piece of art purchased. The Gordon Parks photograph, from his “Segregation Story” series, shows a young girl wearing her Sunday best while her aunt drinks from a fountain painted with the words “Colored Only.”

 “I see it every day when I walk in,” Mock says. “It’s just to set the tone, like, ‘You live in a household that is a Black woman’s home. She owns this place.’” It’s an ethos that was inspired by none other than Oprah Winfrey. “You step into [Oprah’s guesthouse]”—Mock drops the name very casually, but I tease her about her flex nonetheless—“and you see Black images everywhere. It anchors you in the space [in a way that] if a white person walks in here, it’s like, ‘Don’t forget, just because she’s Oprah and you guys say she’s raceless, she’s not.’ And I thought, That’s the kind of home that I want. That was aspirational to me.”