As Gay of Thrones continued to pick up momentum, I had been stung by the content creation bee. She’s an elusive little creature. Her sting is highly addictive. Her symptoms include a constant need for creative expression, an incessant thirst for validation, and a sense of having something to say but not knowing quite how to say it. For the first time, I realized there might be something more for me than doing hair. I had a curiosity and desire to expand in a way that made me passionate and gave me a drive that I hadn’t had since I was a teenager. It was my new cheerleading, my new yoga, my new mountain to climb.
When I’d first lived in Los Angeles, I had made fun of people who had moved there to become famous. I had to ask myself: Is that something that I want now too? But I was just excited to have a new creative outlet.
So I started working with a manager, and doing little auditions here and there, or filming sizzle reels for shows that would never get picked up but that I did anyway because I was eager to learn and create in this brave new digital world. One day a few months after working with them I got exciting news. I got my first big offer, from the Style network. But like so many fates at the big-offers graveyard, mine was vanquished when a day after we received the offer, the Style network was bought out by Esquire, rebranding it as a channel for men and squashing my deal.
“You’re like the T. rex the day before the asteroid hit,” my manager said.
A friend recommended me for a guest-starring part on a scripted show, but when I showed up to audition, they kept asking me to say, “Where are my dragons?” By the sixth time, I was so nervous that I forgot my lines, and then I asked for “slides” instead of “sides.” Never mind that my character only had one line, which was to say, “Cupcakes!”
For years, I went on random auditions, mostly for parts like “Gay Best Friend” or “Commenting on Red Carpet Looks,” but the opportunities that came my way just weren’t the right vehicles for this little girl right here. I realized that I needed a safe space to create content that satisfied my curiosity and allowed me to explore my interests in a new and healthy way. That led me to start my passion project, a podcast called Getting Curious. My friend Clovis worked for a podcasting network and offered to help me launch Getting Curious. I was very new to the podcast world, and our little show was rough-and-tumble. Clovis would end up leaving the network where Getting Curious got its start. After about a year there, Getting Curious was canceled for lack of funding, which was a bummer, but I knew that the concept was something I was passionate about continuing. That’s when Clovis came back in with his wife, Oxana, and helped me produce the show independently, until another network would scoop it up. I was just grateful to keep expanding my view of the world and telling stories.
There wasn’t any real work for me, though, besides Gay of Thrones. So I continued doing hair, hoping that some bigger opportunity would come along.
“Should I have, like, an agent?” I asked my manager at one point. “Maybe we need a hosting agent on the team. There’s gotta be some hosting auditions that we don’t even know about. Maybe I could do, like, a John Oliver thing. Or be, like, a big gay Christiane Amanpour.”
“Maybe you should take a hosting class,” they said. Ew.
I ended up firing them. It was one of the first times in my adult life that I’d really taken a stand, and as soon as I did, it was like jumping off the deep end for the first time.
It was scary, but also very freeing. Sometimes our insecurity and fear about being alone or independent in the world can be our Achilles’ heel. I’ve learned that several times—and I’m not just being hard on myself. I wish my future self could go back in time and tell my younger self, “Don’t be afraid to be alone, honey—you’re okay. Don’t do anything stupid. Just take your ass to Trader Joe’s and get some oatmeal raisin cookies. Get the chocolate chip ones, too, because they will melt in your mouth. Which you will need to have a few of to soothe the amount of stress you’re going to experience, queen.” When the people around you believe in you and your potential wholeheartedly, you can make your dreams come true. If they believe your dreams are out of reach, you have to open the door and make your way to people who want to basket-toss your ass right into those dreams. At the end of the day, the people we let in our space affect our ability to get to where we want to go, so if they’re in the way of realizing your potential, it’s okay to disconnect because you must choose yourself. I used to think that was selfish but really it’s just healthy.
* * *
There was always this drive to have a New York City moment. I met a guy named Gleb who brought me to New York with him for my first real trip as an adult. Gleb had previously dated a successful businessman who owned a brownstone on the Upper West Side that had a little pied-à-terre—like a bachelor apartment—where we stayed when we began going regularly. After Gleb and I broke up, he let me continue staying there, which was super generous of him (and his ex-lover). It made it possible for me to get to know the city and have it be financially feasible, because as a rental hairdresser and small business owner in LA, I couldn’t leave my life there for too long. It was far from luxurious, but it was everything I needed.
As soon as I got to New York, I instantly felt like I had to live there. I wanted to move there all the way. Even the hair was different: harder and edgier, blunt and choppy. It wasn’t just: “Give me highlights with blended face frames and dirty roots.” It was dynamic and interesting. You would see different shapes from different eras, diversity and style. I felt inspired by the energy, the architecture, the shapes, the cultures—the whole tapestry of life in New York.
I’d always imagined it would be too overwhelming and out of my reach. But as it turned out, it was exactly where I wanted to be. I felt like a duck that had finally gotten into the right pond and was just, like, Swim, queen.
I knew a hairstylist in New York named Bronislav, who coincidentally was a dear friend of the owner of the very first salon I had ever worked at in Scottsdale. (One word to the wise there, kids: Keep in touch! You never know when you’ll need someone’s help.) I asked Bronislav if there was any way I could speak to the owner of his salon in New York to start building a clientele there. And so I started coming to New York for just one day every month to get a start in the city. I didn’t really make any money—it was just enough for me to come for a few days, stay at that place on the Upper West Side, and get used to what New York could be. But I kept falling more and more in love with it. Every time I left, I would think: I don’t want to leave. I just want to stay here.
That fall, I got a job hosting a daily lifestyle tech show. I was auditioning to replace somebody and I had every nerve possible. It was my first grown-up job after Gay of Thrones. Luckily, the producer, Lavra, was a fan, as well as a total sweetheart. It paid $300 an episode, and it was three weeks of work.
“Have you ever worked with a teleprompter?” she asked me.
“Oh my God, all the time! Teleprompter is like my middle name,” I said. “I’m so, so comfortable with a teleprompter.” (I had never used one before and googled how to do it immediately after.) “See you in two days, girl.”
I was hardly a natural, but I figured it out pretty quickly. After three weeks of consistent on-camera work, they asked me if I wanted to extend the gig. But there wasn’t a solid contract they could offer, so I would have been moving to New York with no guarantees. I would just keep coming back and forth to New York to do hair and wait for the right opportunity to come my way.
The next day, with three days left in New York, my former manager—the one I’d fired years ago—called and told me they were casting the reboot of Queer Eye and that I was perfect for their new logline, which he’d heard was: “Turning red states pink one makeover at a time.” I thanked him for the call, hung up the phone, called my current team, and had an 8.5-level freak-out on the management-earthquake Richter-scale. “Why did my old manager just call me to tell me that a life-changing opportunity is on the table that I didn’t even know abou
t?” I said. “We have three days to assemble a pitch packet, ladies! I’ve got to get a meeting with them by Monday.”
When I think back to that time, I see myself sitting on one of my dearest friends Poliksana’s couch, defeated by one personal setback after another, trying to navigate heartbreak and loss, wondering if this was the end. I wondered if season one of Gay of Thrones was the end, or if season two would be, all the way up to season four, leading into an unfulfilling attempt at YouTube success, getting laughed out of auditions, and never knowing if the entertainment industry really had any room for a person like me. Maybe Gay of Thrones was the zenith of my entertainment content creation career.
That would have been fine—I had always loved doing hair. All my hard work honing my craft as a hairdresser had paid off. I was working really hard to build a clientele in New York that could support me on my way to becoming a successful bicoastal hairdresser. I had spent four years with nibbles of success, a bit of popularity and a small Instagram following I kept nurturing, while I waited and wondered if a bigger break was coming.
I had spent the first half of my twenties fighting to find the will to process everything that I’d survived in my childhood and adolescence. Having done that hard work, I was now in a chapter in my life where I had the clarity to pursue my dreams and passions and find some actual success. When Sergei and I finally called it quits, I had the painful realization that for years I had only been willing to save myself or care about myself for the sake of Sergei and “us.” It took him leaving once and for all for me to realize that I had been worth saving all along.
Chapter 11
Who is She?
I DIDN’T SHOW UP FOR MY QUEER EYE AUDITION IN MY BEST LOOK.
I was running there from a job, so I had my hairstyling setcase (the case of hair tools you bring to set to work) with me. I was in all black and had done my level best with a hastily packed lint roller to remove the twelve haircuts’ worth of hair that I’d spent all day doing. I didn’t even have time to re-zhuzh my look after work as I would have liked. I was serving five o’clock shadow realness—neck beard, far from fresh. In my mind’s eye, the producers would go for a grooming expert who was masculine-presenting and least threatening to a straight audience. But as one of my best friends, Dragomira, always says: You miss 100 percent of the chances you don’t take. (I’m told Wayne Gretzky was the original coiner of this quote but we all know hockey is not my ice sport of choice, so Dragomira, queen—own it.) So I brought my low-slung-bun, hippie gay-man-chic ass over to that audition. But I was pretty sure they would never cast me for it on appearance alone. (Also, in typical Jonathan fashion, my phone was 100 percent dead and I had to do a cutesy bouncy beg to get the girl at the front desk to charge it for me. I couldn’t get back to the Upper West Side with a dead phone! She graciously obliged. She let me know I could take a seat on the little blue couch and it would be just a few moments before someone from casting would be out to get me.)
If you’re reading this with my voice in your head, now switch the voice in your head to Moira Rose, played by Catherine O’Hara, on Dan Levy’s Schitt’s Creek.
Now: As I was nervously awaiting the producer’s arrival, I looked down at my Rick Owens top and anxiously chased away the remaining hair splinters that were plaguing my décolletage. I tried to sit up a little bit straighter to cover up for the fact that I wasn’t feeling quite myself about my OOTD, David.
Okay. Now it’s safe to switch back to my voice.
When I sat down with the casting producer, she asked me why I thought I was right for this.
I told her the truth. “Queer Eye was a really big deal for me because it gave me a way to talk about my sexuality with my family that wasn’t threatening,” I said. “I watched it with my parents. And I loved it. Kyan was my first crush. I have an autographed photo of Jai under my bed.” I hesitated, because I knew I had to say something potentially controversial. “I also hate the term metrosexual,” I said. “At the time metrosexual was a cheeky term, but kind of problematic now because it seems to make self-care reductive and outwardly identifiable. For me, beauty is from the knowledge I’ve gained and how I use that knowledge to make my own individual idea of what it means to look great—find something fresh that makes me the best me I can be, not a cookie-cutter idea of a well-kept ‘metrosexual.’ I want to cultivate the idea that good hair and skin is from the inside out.”
“What do you want to see from the new version?” she asked me.
I thought about it. “If nothing else,” I said, “I just want it to be diverse. Our community has come such a long way since this came out. I just hope this version reflects that.”
The next day, I found out that I’d gotten a callback. For the next round, I had to send in a self-tape, which is an audition that you record yourself. Immediately it made me very nervous because every self-tape I’ve ever done has been garbage. I just don’t audition very well. I’ve also noticed this in my online dating life, that I feel like I’m so cute that I don’t have to work very hard to post pictures that reflect my cuteness. I just expect everyone to see the raw beauty radiating from me. My experience with self-tapes up until that point had been being elbow-deep in a corrective color, covered in hair-color spatters, stressed within an inch of my life, blubbering through lines that are completely incorrect or from a character or situation that’s not going on or called for in the self-tape at all, and submitting said self-tape, then never hearing anything ever again. But this time, that couldn’t be my fate.
I really hope what I sent in to Queer Eye has been destroyed, because as predicted, I was sweating profusely, under horrible lighting, and extremely nervous.
But it must have worked. Because a few days later, I found out that I’d been selected for the final fifty. (This was something torn from the America’s Next Top Model playbook, honey. I was about to be the next girl who had come up against so many nos but wouldn’t take them for an answer. I was Jaslene, cycle eight winner, who had been turned away in cycle seven but came back triumphantly to take the crown. Interestingly enough, she and cycle six winner Danielle were the only two winners, that I could find, who had CoverGirl renew their contracts.) The next stage was to come in for a chemistry test, which would be a three-day audition in Glendale. The first night was at a local bar.
We got an email saying, in so many words, “This is our chance to see you guys working together, so don’t be a wallflower!”
I was basically Svetlana Khorkina in the 2000 Sydney Games. As I’m sure you recall, the vault was set too low in the all-around final, so everyone in the first rotation who was on vault had crash landings on both of their attempts—including Svetlana, who had all eyes on her, since everyone was sure she was going to win. This could be leaving her unable to come back and possibly claim gold. But then in the second rotation, an Australian gymnast noticed that the vault was over a foot too low. When the judges confirmed that everyone in the first rotation had done both of their vaults on a vault that was set at over a foot below regulation level, the judges determined that each gymnast in the first rotation would be given another chance to vault. But Svetlana was the first one to go up on the second rotation, which, in her group, was uneven bars. She was already so rattled from her experience that she fell on uneven bars, rendering her chance to revault useless because the damage was already done. I knew that I could not let all this pressure of Olympic glory derail my vaulting into the gold medal of this competition. No matter what this audition apparatus was set to—I was going to nail my vault. But also, Svetlana, I’m still so personally sorry for you.
One of the things I remember from that first night is meeting Karamo. As soon as I saw him, my vagina melted into a puddle all over his cobalt blue suit. When I found out he had a long-term boyfriend, now fiancé, my vagina resolidified and collected itself back inside my body and then I realized that we were actually ebony and ivory sisters. I didn’t meet Antoni or Bobby the first night, but I saw Tan from across the room. I was so
intimidated by the sheer perfection that was his bone structure, I didn’t dare approach him.
The second and third day were in a ballroom of a Glendale Embassy Suites. I had heartburn the whole time—just this unmoving, burning sphere of agita right in my solar plexus. But I was also very much enjoying the process of turning it on. In our first exercise, we went table by table, group by group divided by your vertical, so ten of us in each group, talking to different people—the Netflix people, the production company people, the creators of the show. After you finished, you’d regroup with the other boys to talk about what had just happened. “What did you say?” they’d whisper. “What did they ask you?” I was meeting the other boys but mostly I was trying to save my energy for when it was my turn to do the round robin.
When they asked me about body hair, I knew just what to say. “If you want it, keep it!” I said. “Why are you waxing? Do you feel more confident? Could we do some gorgeous exfoliation and toning so we’re not getting acne from our waxcapades?” My philosophy was very much to embrace yourself and love what you are, instead of making you something you’re not. Refine what you already have—don’t change it at its core. That’s always been my whole ethos. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that acceptance is the key to so much, and we find so much freedom in feeling fierce about what we’re accepting. (One big exception to this philosophy would be if you’re dealing with something like gender dysphoria. There’s also so much freedom to be found in owning your truth about what needs to be changed on your outside to reflect your insides!)
For the second exercise, we had to do a “show and tell” thing. I had planned to do yoga, but I didn’t realize that we were going to be mic’d and on camera, which wouldn’t quite work. I realized that my Züca bag, which I used for shoots and styling people on the go, was in the trunk of my car. All the other contestants were forming little groups in the green room and mingling each other to death. But despite that note about not being a wallflower, I knew that with the way that I am and the level to which I’d need to be able to serve all out in this setting, I needed to stay inside myself and not burn up all my energy in the off-camera green room. I knew because of so many failed attempts and different chemistry auditions I’d been on previously, it was important for me to stay focused on the goal and not let the other boys’ posturing and peacocking derail me from my focus. I was Morgan Hurd in the 2017 World Gymnastics Championships. All eyes were on Ragan Smith to take all-around gold, giving America its would-be seventh consecutive individual all-around title, but she sprained her ankle warming up, so it all came down to Morgan to keep our hopes alive. I was Morgan Hurd, headed into the most intense competition of my career.
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