Midorexia Club

Indya Moore is a celebrity. Indya Moore is a lead in one of the shows fundamentally defining a modern television renaissance. Indya Moore is a model signed to IMG, and Indya Moore is a face of Louis Vuitton, appearing in campaign imagery and sitting front row at the Paris collections. Indya Moore is also, as they put it, “a black trans person from the Bronx who comes from poverty”, who is non-binary and uses ‘they’ pronouns. It might be tempting to ascribe an American Dream mythology to their meteoric rise, but the magnetic 24-year-old would probably tell you that such a narrative is an invention of the imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy, a fiction designed to prove that people can work hard to overcome entrenched structural inequalities, and give those more privileged a get-out clause to ignore their struggles. 

 Deep-thinking and deeply political, Moore has had a life that, in many ways, isn’t dissimilar from a character’s on "POSE", the Golden Globe-nominated TV series set in the New York ballroom scene that shot them into the spotlight after its release in the US last summer. After growing up experiencing extreme gender dysphoria (“I was always just very upset because I felt like there was nothing in this society that made me feel like it was OK for me to be me,” Moore says), transphobia led to a family rift, and Moore left home at 14. Years of moving frequently between foster and group homes followed (it was a foster parent, a trans woman, who first provided them with hormones), with Moore eventually living in all five boroughs of New York City. Modelling, joining the legendary ballroom house of Xtravaganza – first immortalised in Jennie Livingston’s seminal 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, which charted the black and Latino ballroom subculture of New York – and a role in the indie film Saturday Church followed. A momentous audition led to them scoring the role of Pose’s Angel, a streetwise sex worker with romantic, idealistic tendencies, all Afro, fluffy coats, platform boots, big dreams.