2013's Out 100 list is one of the most diverse that I've seen in a long time, with several people of color being highlighted. LGBT trailblazers such as Janet Mock, Tarrell Alvin McCraney, Laverne Cox, Brittney Griner, Kyler Broadus, Shayne Oliver, Kyle Abraham, Billy Porter and of course Lee Daniels.
Daniels who is currently developing a gay-interracial action hero movie, was elected to be featured on one of the four-collectible covers.
LEE DANIELS-ARTIST OF THE YEAR
Studying the history of slavery for his movie The Butler, Daniels was struck time and again by a simple observation: “The slaves who were laughing on the boats from Africa were the only ones who survived; those on the plantations laughing and singing were the ones who survived.” The director, lolling against a pile of cushions on his bed, throws a glance to see if his words have landed. “That’s how we made this movie — by bringing laughter into ordinary places, because that’s how we see life.” More particularly, it’s how Daniels sees life. In Lee Daniels’ The Butler, as in his earlier movie Precious, scenes of the most abject suffering are interspersed with moments of levity and camp that puncture the tension.
Whether you feel comfortable laughing during a movie that documents the lives of the marginalized may depend on where you stand. “When I first tested Precious, it was at the Magic Johnson Theater in Harlem, for an all-black audience, and it played like a comedy,” Daniels says. “And when I played it for a white audience in Sundance, you could hear a pin drop.”
That Daniels has found a cinematic language that speaks to black and white audiences is part of what makes him — a black, gay director — unique. As a child growing up in Philadelphia, he experienced both worlds, first as a beat-upon gay kid in an impoverished black neighborhood, then as a beat-upon black kid in a privileged white neighborhood. “I learned to train my bowel movements, my piss, so that I wouldn’t have to go to the bathroom all through school,” he recalls. “And then I’d run home.”
Although he plays it down, Daniels’s childhood was fogged by the kind of family dysfunction and struggle that animates his movies. He remembers his father — a cop who was killed during a raid on a Philly bar when Daniels was 15 — dumping him in a trash can after catching him in his mother’s red pumps. “When I came out it was because I loathed my dad so much — I couldn’t understand how you could, with an extension cord, beat a 45-pound kid just because he’s aware of his femininity,” he says. “For me it really created a world where I understood Precious, where you learn the power of the imagination. And that’s how it began for me.”
The narrative of Daniels’s hard-living, hard-working life is a movie in itself, and maybe one day he’ll make it. He watched lovers die of AIDS in his arms (“I was HIV-negative when everyone around me was dying — I should be dead”), hit rock bottom on crystal meth, and came by his two adopted kids in an unlikely way: after his brother was jailed. “He called and said, ‘I’m going to be there for a long time; I got this girl pregnant, she doesn’t want the kids, and I have a feeling she’s going to abandon them.’ ” No wonder he doesn’t feel comfortable in the slick, oily culture of Los Angeles. “In L.A. they make you feel insecure, like you’re always looking at the stars and you feel like you’re not one of them,” he says. “You feel like, ‘I’m nothing.’ It was what my father told me I was, and I knew I had to get out of there.”
But the man who has already won Oscars for his movies Monster’s Ball (which he produced) and Precious is aware that his insecurities are an inseparable part of his talent. “It’s always when things are really good for me that I feel I’m not worthy of it,” he says. “When Halle [Berry] won her Oscar [for Monster’s Ball], I remember her calling, saying, ‘Are you going to the Vanity Fair party?’ and I’m strung out in the Chateau Marmont, methed out of my mind, thinking I didn’t deserve it.” He pauses.
“I have to be really aware of it, and always talking about it — and be truthful about it to the point of ugliness so that it keeps my ass in check.”
LAVERNE COX-READERS' CHOICE
When Laverne Cox was a child, her mother gave her and her twin brother a Black History book, a gift she remembers carrying around with her wherever she went until it was ragged. She was infatuated with one of its photographs in particular, a shot of 1960s opera singer Leontyne Price. “She was wearing this turban and was just so regal and beautiful, and she had big, full lips like me, and I just connected,” Cox recalls. “She was the first internationally renowned black opera singer during a very turbulent time for black folks, but through her art she really made it better for all the black opera singers that followed her. When I was a kid, I dreamed that with my life, maybe I could make things better for the people who might follow me.”
With her role on this summer’s acclaimed Netflix juggernaut Orange Is the New Black, she’s realized that dream. Cox’s performance as Sophia Burset, a trans inmate in a women’s prison fighting to secure the hormones necessary to complete her transition, is less a breakout than it is a breakthrough. As the only transgender actress playing a series regular on television, she brings refreshing depth to a character that a decade ago might have been a punchline, or dead within the series’ opening moments. Sophia is the tough, quick-witted, resourceful hairstylist who makes her own slippers from duct tape; she’s also heartbroken and vulnerable, terrified for her future. Much of the show’s third episode, directed by Jodie Foster, was devoted to Sophia’s memories of her troubled past, her struggle to sustain a relationship with her wife and young son through her gender reassignment process (Cox’s twin brother, M. Lamar, plays Sophia before her surgery). In Cox’s hands, it proved to be one of the most touching, genuine story lines to air this year. “As a trans woman of color, I’ve often looked for my story in the media and I haven’t seen it, or I’ve seen sensationalized, exploitative images of trans women of color, where they’ve been the victim of a crime,” says Cox, who also spent a good chunk of her year traveling the country to speak out about transgender rights. “It’s wonderful to have this very human story about this trans woman that people are really connecting with.”
TARELL ALVIN MCCRANEY-PLAYWRIGHT
“I don’t know if people of gay, lesbian, or queer status are more active dreamers than others,” McCraney says, “but when you are sort of pressed to have an inner world to yourself, you populate it with some fantastic people and things.”
Even before he was named a MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, the extraordinarily gifted writer was having a pretty great year with all those stories he’d been crafting for the stage. McCraney’s latest play, Head of Passes, had its world premiere at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, where he’s an ensemble member; Choir Boy had critically acclaimed productions in both London and New York City; and he received Yale’s prestigious Windham-Campbell Literature Prize.
McCraney, who writes primarily about the Southern African-American experience, says he has always “been scripting my life the way I wanted it to be in my mind, rather than the way it was happening.”
KYLE ABRAHAM-CHOREOGRAPHER AND DANCER
Since 2006, Abraham and his company, Abraham.In.Motion, have used personal experiences to create some of the most impressive contemporary dance to come out of New York. Using hip-hop, classical music, and themes of struggle — be it family, illness, or gay history — Abraham has brought his avant-garde approach to original productions such as The Radio Show, A Ramp to Paradise, and an urbanized reimagining of Pinocchio. His originality has not gone un-noticed: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater commissioned a work from him, and he just received a MacArthur “Genius Grant.”
BILLY PORTER-ACTOR
After many years away from the Great White Way stage, Porter returned with a vengeance, starring as Lola in Kinky Boots, the Harvey Fierstein–Cyndi Lauper show for which he won his first Tony Award, for Best Actor in a Musical. Although he has to wear sparkly, thigh- high boots and belt out diva-worthy ballads eight nights a week, Porter is basking in the power he has to connect with audiences from the Broadway stage.
“There are many parallels between Lola and myself — mainly the idea of being an outsider and holding on to who you are,” he says. “I think the joy and the pleasure of Kinky Boots is that it transcends sexuality, it transcends stereotypes, and it transcends fear, which I think motivates a lot of the bigotry and homophobia that exists in the world. It’s nice to reach people at a human level.”
As a board member of the Empire State Pride Agenda, he’s been working to spread marriage equality to a wider audience; now he finally has the biggest platform of his life. “I wanted to represent, but I didn’t think that marriage equality was something that mattered to me, until it actually happened,” he explains. “I used to live in a world and in a space where I didn’t think that my love mattered, and so my behavior was representative of that. I’m thankful that this is happening, because it’s causing me to look inward and to respect myself more. And to respect my love.”
JANET MOCK-ADVOCATE AND AUTHOR
“My dream started by seeing Clair Huxtable on The Cosby Show,” says Mock. “I wanted to be her; I wanted to be beautiful, be successful, and maybe have a great family and a brownstone in Brooklyn.” As she explained in her contribution to the “It Gets Better” project, “My gender was my very first ‘This I know for sure’ moment, as Oprah likes to call it.”
After coming out as a transgender woman in a 2011 Marie Claire essay — her first act of trans advocacy — Mock launched #GirlsLikeUs, a wildly successful Twitter campaign that works to empower trans women. In June, she joined the Arcus Foundation’s board of directors and is currently touring the nation to talk about her experience and speak out against transphobia. Her memoir, Redefining Realness, the first memoir from a young trans person, will be published in February.
BRITTNEY GRINER-BASKETBALL STAR
It’s been a banner year for Phoenix Mercury center Brittney Griner. She completed her senior year at Baylor by setting a NCAA record — for both men and women — by blocking 748 shots; she was the WNBA’s No. 1 draft pick; and she announced to the world that she’s a lesbian. “I knew once I went pro that I wanted to come out because I wanted to work with LGBT youth — to let them know it’s OK,” she says. “To younger girls and boys I would say, ‘It’s never too late — you can come out at your own time, but it’s definitely rewarding knowing you can be who you are and have a good support group around you. It makes your life 100 times better.”
KYLER BROADUS-LAWYER
Broadus, who last year became the first openly transgender person to testify before the U.S. Senate, is an acclaimed lawyer and speaker who in September was made the head of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s Transgender Civil Rights Project. The founder of the Trans People of Color Coalition and a law professor at Lincoln University in Missouri, he told his story of workplace harassment during his transition as part of his Senate testimony.
SHAYNE OLIVER-FASHION DESIGNER
This September, Oliver, the 25-year-old creator of Hood by Air, received a stamp of approval that many young designers long for: Kanye West sitting frontrow at his runway show. “I’m at the first steps of living the dream for myself,” Oliver says. “This is just the beginning. I think now I’m able to dream larger.”
Launched as a minimalist T-shirt line in 2006, HBA has enjoyed the endorsement of the hip-hop scene to become gospel to the “ghetto gothic” generation. “I don’t plan on stopping until I stop dreaming,” Oliver says.
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