- 10 hours ago
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00So, creators and influencers are taking the lead in beauty by not conforming to the gender roles that society expects of them,
00:08redefining the word norm and antiquated ideals of beauty.
00:12It's important that as we forefront diversity, we are inclusive and recognize all representations,
00:18no matter what gender, sexuality, or ethnicity.
00:22New Orleans owns Gerard DeGray, is a prime example of what it means to be yourself without any boundaries.
00:29As a black, indigenous, 24-year-old culture bearer from the 7th Ward of New Orleans,
00:35Bulbanka, is that right how you say it?
00:40Bulbantia.
00:41Bulbantia, there we go.
00:43Gerard is a spiritualist and environmentalist who works to balance art and healthy survival as a southern, black, femme, and queer person.
00:51Y'all, Essence, please put your hands together and give a warm welcome to Gerard DeGray.
00:57Hi, guys.
01:00So, it's Gerard DeGray.
01:01Actually, that's how you pronounce it.
01:04I'm so honored.
01:05I'm from New York.
01:05I'm sorry.
01:06I'm from New York.
01:06I do not have a very good...
01:07I apologize, baby.
01:10I'm so honored to be here today to discuss representation with all of you in this panel,
01:16which is called Beauty Beyond the Binary.
01:18As somebody who is multifaceted and expresses on a lot of levels, I personally view Beauty Beyond the Binary as something that affirms that we are all whole and we are all capable of not being limited.
01:33You know, we decide who we are and what we want to be.
01:37So, joining me for this conversation today is actor, model, dancer, and activist, Lena Bloom and actress, model, creative, Yari Jones.
01:48Bloom became the first trans woman of color to lead a feature film at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival with her movie Port Authority.
01:57In 2021, she became the first trans woman of color to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Edition.
02:06Recent film and TV credits include Asking For It opposite Kirstie Clemons and the FX series Pose, which we love.
02:14Yari Jones is a black transgender actress, curve model, activist, and creative.
02:20Yari has been featured in publications including British Vogue, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.
02:26Yari recently was the coverstuffer for both Teen Vogue, Out Magazine, and Paper Magazine following her historic billboard with Calvin Klein.
02:36She is currently a fashion ambassador for Adidas.
02:40Yari has recently been seen in Amazon's Transparent, Netflix Tales of the City, the Sundance film Adam, and the Oscar shortlisted and Emmy-nominated documentary, Coded, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.
02:53Yari is also known for making history with her film Port Authority at the Cannes Film Festival.
02:59I watched it yesterday. It was really good.
03:01Well, she became the first black trans producer to have a film compete.
03:05Yari can next be seen in the indie feature On Our Way opposite Jordan Brewster, Paul Ben Victor, and James Badgedale.
03:14Before we get into this session, I feel it's important to define what non-binary is.
03:19Non-binary can mean different things to different people.
03:23Essentially, it's used to describe someone whose gender identity cannot be described as exclusively man or woman.
03:30Some people who are non-binary experience their gender as being both man and woman.
03:37Some people experience it as being neither man or woman, as not being within the binary at all.
03:42It is valuable to address that being non-binary is not always the same thing as being transgender.
03:50Being transgender is when you don't identify with the gender you were assigned at birth.
03:55But as we know, beauty and representation is a spectrum.
04:00So let's explore more of what it's like to immerse ourselves in the expansive world.
04:07Hi, guys.
04:07Essence Fest.
04:08Hi, everybody.
04:10Hi, Essence.
04:11Thank y'all so much for coming out to support this talk.
04:15It's really, really important.
04:16And we're so happy to be here.
04:19Thank you, guys.
04:21So our first question that we have is, how do you preserve yourself in a binary world?
04:29And why do you think people are so attached to binaries?
04:34I think for me, preserving myself in a binary world would have to be surrounding myself with people who affirm me.
04:44I think, you know, so often we're in spaces where people don't know who we are.
04:49And that kind of like hits the soul a little bit.
04:51But I think why people attach themselves to the binary is that they're afraid to see what's outside of the construct, right?
05:01I think all of us have been conditioned to stay within a bubble or get in line.
05:09So the idea of stepping outside of what society has already told us is scary for a lot of people.
05:15So I think that's why people attach themselves fully.
05:19No, I totally agree.
05:21I think that for so many years we have seen things in such a black and white point of view.
05:27We have seen things as you're putting the entire human race into two genders and one sexuality.
05:32And we are so much more richer.
05:34We're so much more beautiful.
05:36And we come in such variety of beauty of different walks of life.
05:40And we're not often seeing that in media.
05:43We're not often seeing that on TV and in fashion, which is the mecca of culture, essentially.
05:51But nowadays, since we have social media, we can see different people from different walks of life.
05:56We can see what the world looks like through their ideas, through their dreams, and also through their imagination.
06:03And when you give a person, especially a person of color, who takes up literally so much power and art and culture,
06:12when you give them a camera, when you give them a stage, you can see what you look like also.
06:17Because you're a reflection of that.
06:20Thank you all so much.
06:21Our next question is, what is an early memory that you have of feeling beautiful on your own terms?
06:30And what would you want to say to the person who is inside of that memory for you?
06:36Okay, so when I was a kid, I was a dancer on the south side of Chicago.
06:40And I often felt like, you know, why was I born in this body?
06:47Why was I born in this mind?
06:48Why was I born exactly like this?
06:51And I was taught in my community that I wasn't beautiful.
06:56You know, black people are supposed to look this way or supposed to look that way.
06:58And we were under this, like, police everywhere we go.
07:02You know what I mean?
07:03And it was just, like, really, really hard to, like, break out of that.
07:07So I started taking dance classes.
07:09And I started to learn about my body.
07:11But I also started learning about my soul.
07:13And a lot of black people are not taught to go inside their soul.
07:16Back in the day, before social media, we wasn't taught to just, like, go in here.
07:20Because most of our identity has been erased.
07:24You know what I mean?
07:24And we were taught that this is who we should believe in.
07:26Or this is what we should worship.
07:28Or this is who we should vote for.
07:29But we essentially need to start looking in ourself and loving ourself and starting from there.
07:34And that's when I started learning, like, with this body, with this mind, I can go out in the world and change it.
07:39And not just stay in my community.
07:41Not just stay, you know, in the same neighborhood where I see everybody that always look the same, think the same, the same conversation, the same tea every day.
07:50I wanted to take my ideas and the way I saw myself around the world.
07:54And when you go around the world, you collect pieces of your identity that make you different from everyone else.
08:01But you have to ask yourself, where's your passport?
08:04Growing up on the south side of Chicago, I didn't know anyone that had a passport.
08:08Now we are, like, in this new wave era where everybody is traveling.
08:12People are moving out of the States.
08:13People are moving to Mexico, back to Africa.
08:17And you're seeing who you are.
08:18You're seeing where you come from.
08:19And you see where it all started before it was a race.
08:24Yeah, I totally agree.
08:26I think, you know, growing up in a community that was very black and white.
08:31So growing up, hair was my first, you know, introduction to what I consider myself to be beautiful.
08:38You know, I had to get a haircut every week.
08:42You know, couldn't have hair.
08:44That was past my shoulders.
08:45And, you know, there was one time where my mom was like, you know, you can grow your locks out.
08:50And I did everything I could with locks.
08:53I braided them.
08:54I curled them.
08:55I styled them.
08:56And though I didn't have the vocabulary of transness, you know, I was allowed to explore my femininity in that way.
09:04And that was very instrumental in how I was going to see myself as beautiful.
09:10And I think if I can go back to that person now, I would tell them to keep going, you know.
09:15I think so often we forget to tell ourselves that we are in the right place and that we are doing the steps to get to our most authentic and true selves.
09:25So I would definitely tell younger Yari that you are on the right track.
09:28And don't let anybody else tell you what you were going to do with your hair or with your body or with, you know, how you wanted to show up.
09:35And also, I just want to conclude because that's really, really amazing.
09:38I feel like we get so stuck in, like, one look.
09:43And, like, right now, people are taking their lace farts off, putting curly, putting green, putting blue, putting sparkles.
09:49Like, who you are right now is not who you're going to be 10 years from now.
09:53You're allowed to change.
09:54You're allowed to change your identity.
09:55You're allowed to change your name.
09:57You're allowed to change your gender.
09:58You're allowed to change whoever you are.
10:00This is your life.
10:01And you were only on this earth for so many years.
10:03And if you're literally being exactly what your mother told you to be, then you're living for her, not for yourself.
10:09And I want it to not live for anybody but myself.
10:13Thank you, guys.
10:15How do you feel the beauty industry represents trans people and beauties beyond the binary?
10:23I think we have a very this or that kind of representation right now.
10:28I think what I'm hoping that we can move forward to is to see the expansiveness of transness, that we're not a monolith, that we have very we have so many identities in how transness shows up.
10:43I think, you know, we all don't have to have surgery, we all don't have to, you know, look cis, or we all don't have to adhere to certain pronouns.
10:53You know, there is a wideness and a variety that if we show it within fashion, within film, within, you know, media industries, we're allowed to humanize all of those people, right?
11:07I think we have a duty, especially when we're in media, to show different narratives of transness, of queerness.
11:15And I feel like when we do that, we are opening the door for people to understand all of us and not, you know, those who just have proximity to Eurocentric features or those who have proximity to cisness.
11:27We're understanding everybody.
11:30I totally agree.
11:31Um, so I first started modeling like literally 15 years ago, and 15 years ago, the idea that having conversations in spaces like this was absolutely non-existent.
11:41It was literally just one day, I hope, one day, this is my dream to be on a stage like that, because we were literally non-existent in these spaces at all.
11:51So, I think it's really, really important to know where we come from and appreciate the people that paved the way for us to be here, because back then there was no social media.
12:01There was no YouTube.
12:02There was no Facebook.
12:03It was MySpace.
12:05You know what I mean?
12:05And now we have a plethora of, like, channels.
12:08We have a plethora of networks.
12:10We have a plethora of social media platforms where you can see so many different diversity and so much collectives of energies in society.
12:18But right now, we're still in a very distant that state.
12:23We're in a very sensitive state where the world is changing, and we are the leaders of that change.
12:28And we don't know what we're doing, essentially, because there's no rulebook on being the first.
12:32There's no rulebook on how to do this.
12:34We just are trying to navigate ourselves just like you are in a society that told us that we're not supposed to exist.
12:40The system was not set up for us to win, so we're doing the best we can.
12:43And at the end of the day, we're all human.
12:47You know what I mean?
12:47And I just feel like once you start befriending people that are different from you, you start seeing how beautiful the world really, really is because it's a different perspective.
12:56It's a different idea.
12:58And once you see that, you see what really beautiful looks like, what beauty and authentic and rawness looks like fully.
13:06Thank you so much.
13:07Can you both describe a defining moment with sharing your opinion about underrepresentation in the beauty industry challenged and or changed things?
13:18So I was part of a collective of beautiful women, marginalized women, who went up against one of the most famous lingerie companies that we shall not name.
13:32And, you know, going against what their president was talking about, saying that transness or trans women and plus size women weren't part of a fantasy or weren't desirable to put in the thread of their company.
13:49And I believe that that group of people, there was an op-ed letter that led to the catalyst of taking them down and essentially forcing them to rebrand, right?
14:04I think that was a moment especially within, you know, not only the trans community, but the plus size community to really step forward and say that we're not going to stand for it, to say that the narrative that they're putting out was untrue, right?
14:20We know that people desire trans women.
14:23We know that people desire plus size women.
14:25And to say that it isn't was a lie, right?
14:28So we went up against that and they didn't have a famous show that they always do.
14:33They had to rebrand and now they're very inclusive of trans body, plus size bodies, and a lot of different people.
14:40Yeah, I think in today's society, brands are really rethinking about what the methods they've been using and how toxic they are.
14:48I mean, when you go into a lot of these stores that are big businesses, big juggernaut business, when you go in, the people that are working there look like us.
14:56But why are we not on the billboards?
14:58Why are we not in the advertisements?
15:00Why are we not in the boardrooms?
15:02Why don't they look like us?
15:04You know what I mean?
15:05So the whole world doesn't just look white, blue eyes, and skinny.
15:09The whole world looks so much beauty.
15:13There's so much beauty.
15:14And when you're going to buy a product, you want to make sure that product is speaking to you, but also to your sister, also to your brother, also to your cousin, also to your best friend.
15:22And I just feel like right now, a lot of brands are hiring people like us to help rebrand, to show what the future is looking like today and tomorrow, because it's not going to look like what it used to be yesterday.
15:35It's going to move forward.
15:36It's going to move forward.
15:37And this is what it looks like.
15:38This is what the future looks like.
15:40I like that, but that's okay.
15:44But we still have to be here, because at the end of the day, when it's time to eat, we all get hungry.
15:49When it's time to use the washroom, we all got to release ourselves.
15:52And that's something that is very human.
15:54And if you're trying to eliminate me from having access to survival methods, and I'm up against survival tactics, it's unfair.
16:03It's unfair.
16:04And we all can look around and know someone or a cousin or an auntie or a brother that is queer, that is trans, that is non-binary, that has been fighting for to be seen.
16:14And finally, we are here.
16:16And the brands are recognizing that.
16:18And they have to take maybe three years off to figure it out.
16:21And they come back, and then it ends up in Soho and in Calvin Klein ad.
16:28Huge.
16:28You know what I mean?
16:29So it's happening, you know?
16:34But we need more.
16:35Absolutely.
16:36Because it's not a trend.
16:37My lifestyle and who I am is not a trend.
16:38It's not to be fetishized or sexualized.
16:40It's to be respected and be revered.
16:43And I think also that's what we're doing as, you know, pioneers in this community,
16:48is making sure that it's our responsibility to make sure that the brands are doing that.
16:53Right now, I don't work with any brand who puts me on a campaign and doesn't have the size inside of the store, right?
16:59I'm not working with any makeup brand that doesn't have my shade or shades darker than me in the stores.
17:05It makes no sense to be a face of something that doesn't have the product there.
17:09So I think we definitely have been a part of that, making sure that these brands are not only listening to us
17:15or not including us just in the campaigns and the fashion, but actually in the thread of the company, right?
17:21I want people that look like me who are behind the scenes, who are the photographers, who are the production people,
17:27who are working as the designers, right?
17:29You know, when I first started with Adidas, I was just a model, and now I'm one of their brand designers, right?
17:34I'm one of their ambassadors, their consultants, right?
17:37Because I want to make sure that if we are going to fight for the things that we want and the product that we want,
17:43that make sure that we're in the room, that people understand our needs and necessities for that brand.
17:48Exactly.
17:49And also, I don't know if you guys know this, but we did a movie together called Port Authority.
17:55Sure did.
17:55And what's so crazy about that is, like, even on set in movies, it's not very, it didn't look like us.
18:02And it's important if we have the position and the power to make decisions, we can hire our own people.
18:08Like, I was in the beginning of my acting career, and I needed an acting coach, and I hired this person right here.
18:14And then that person, I fought for this person to get their producing credit.
18:17And we, I was like, we need to make sure everybody gets to the Cannes Film Festival as a family so we can all experience together.
18:24And that is what it's like, is when you have a position, is to speak up, bring your people in, especially if they're not there.
18:31Why are we, why am I the only trans person on set?
18:34I need this person every single day here to help you do your job and also help me do my job.
18:43So, our time is coming up.
18:46We have maybe time for one more quick question and a quick answer.
18:50And we want to affirm that just by existing in the world, you are beautiful, you are rare, you are valid.
18:56You don't have to do nothing extra.
18:58In the future, what do you want to see more of when it comes to beauty representation in the spectrum?
19:05Y'all can see the time.
19:07And so, I would like to know that last piece from y'all.
19:10Yeah, I think mine is simple.
19:11I just want to see a more expansive, expansive representation of what beauty can be, right?
19:18I want to see, you know, the people who aren't fitting a proximity or aren't close to what the beauty standard is already, right?
19:27I want to see trans people.
19:28I want to see queer people who we don't see in the movies and the films.
19:33I want to see the people who walk down the street.
19:34I think that's important for us to understand that our community is expansive and that we are more than just what, you know, media puts out.
19:43Yeah, I agree.
19:46I think in the future, I mean, you're talking about fashion, right?
19:50I'm talking about fashion, but it's not just fashion.
19:53It's movies.
19:54It's sports.
19:55It's medical.
19:56It's educational.
19:57It's every diaspora of our existence when we are in public spaces.
20:03And when we, in the future, it's going to look like it's going to be black.
20:07It's going to be beautiful.
20:09You know what I mean?
20:09We have been neglected for so many years to be in those spaces.
20:12But in the future, as we've come together as people of color, because we take up the majority of this world, that's what the future is going to look like.
20:22Us coming together and loving each other and supporting each other and not let anyone dictate who we are and what we deserve and what we should get, but us taking it.
20:33You got to go out in the world and be aggressive about what you want.
20:37You have to align yourself with people that understand that and respect that.
20:40And you got to go out in the world and say, you know what?
20:44I might be sacrificed today, but at the end of the day, I leave this on this earth because tomorrow's not promised.
20:49So I might not be here in the future.
20:50We might not be here.
20:51Trans women are being killed every single day.
20:53The year, 2021, it was 375 trans people that was killed that one year.
20:59So in the future, I just want to see black people loving black people loving black things, black experiences, all different forms of blackness, because at the end of the day, we all black.
21:09Yep.
21:11And that concludes our panel.
21:13Can we get a round of applause for our panelists, Lena Bloom and Yari Jones?
21:18Thank you all so much for coming and participating.
21:20Thank you for waiting.
Comments