Indya Moore Just Wants to Be Free (2024)

The figure gliding like a lioness through a Rite Aid in Manhattan’s Lower East Side would turn heads, if there were any heads to turn here, two minutes from midnight. Indya Moore’s hair isn’t as Afro-tastic as the wig she wears to play Angel, a sex worker longing for love on FX’sPose—which dives deep into New York’s late-1980s LGBTQ black and Latinx ballroom community—but her curls are magnificent. Some fall in her face, some stand at attention, as if keeping watch over their owner, who has both a smile that makes you want to hug her and a Bronx-bred air of being able to hold her own in a fight if she has to.

(A note on gender pronouns: Indya is nonbinary and prefers to use “they” and “them,” but is also navigating how that works in a society that has long oriented around cisgender or binary trans identities. Most people around Indya use “she,” which Indya says is fine to use throughout this story. See her Instagram post in April about this very topic.)

We’re three days and some nine hours of confessional conversations into knowing each other when Indya asks if I’ll come with her to the pharmacy to pick up her hormone prescription. I don’t hesitate. It’s the kind of errand girlfriends run together, because we all have lives but company makes them better.

“Insurance is grimy,” she says, sighing, before bounding up to the counter to ask the pharmacist for a discount. She’s here for a one-month emergency hormone supply, which her insurance won’t cover (like most 24-year-olds, Indya is on her mother’s plan), but she can’t wait for the proper prescription to come through. The next morning, she’s flying to Los Angeles to join the Pose cast for a PaleyFest panel, and she refuses to vamp on the red carpet feeling like this. “I get, like, really bad headaches, and I’m super tired if I don’t take them. It’s weird. I’m so extra!”

Pose, currently shooting its second season, features more transgender actors, including Indya, than any scripted television series in history. Her shooting days involve emotional scenes about the AIDS crisis and over-the-top ballroom sequences filled with runway walks, glitter, glam, feathers, and the kind of delicious D-R-A-M-A we’ve all come to expect from Ryan Murphy, who is a co-creator. Indya’s character, Angel, wins the top prize at a winter ball, resplendent in silver sequins, before a screaming crowd as fake snow falls on her and Billy Porter’s emcee declares her “the frostiest bitch in New York!” She also has a juicy story line wherein she falls for a married white businessman, played by Evan Peters. The first season’s finale is like Pretty Woman’s, except that when the prince comes to find Angel, she walks away and rescues herself.

Even without an empowering TV narrative, Indya’s legion of fans likely would have found her. They are on her Twitter and Instagram (51K and 238K strong, respectively), thanking her for being forever a teacher, for doing the exhausting work of explaining her radical perspective that her sex organs have nothing to do with whether she can be considered a “biological woman.” Off set, she is on the ground, showing up at every premiere or award show that she can attend, representing an image of a proud trans woman of color, of Haitian, Dominican, and Puerto Rican descent.

The characters of Pose come from an era when being trans, and especially being black and brown while trans, was treated as a shameful secret. They were able to realize their identities only in safe spaces like the ballroom scene or the peep shows of Times Square, or in furtive affairs behind closed doors. Pioneers like Isis King of America’s Next Top Model, Laverne Cox of Orange Is the New Black, and TV personality Janet Mock, who is a writer, director, and producer on Pose, broke barriers in the entertainment industry. Indya, though, represents something new: a trans woman who grew up as a native of social media and is unapologetic in claiming her identity in public. “It feels like this is the first time that we are seeing a trans woman being celebrated for all the different parts of herself,” Mock says. “She’s the embodiment of our dream girl. She’s living the fantasy that all of us hoped and dreamed for, that we fought to build little by little so that someone like Indya Moore could be the center of a show, be the center of fashion campaigns, be on a magazine cover.”

Nicolas Ghesquière of Louis Vuitton took note and not only featured Indya in the luxury brand’s pre-fall 2019 look book, alongside Michelle Williams and Jennifer Connelly, but made her the host of Vuitton’s Paris fashion show and dressed her like a silver space goddess for the Golden Globe Awards. Prabal Gurung sat her front row at his fashion show. Joseph Altuzarra, whose peekaboo knit dress she wore to PaleyFest, took her to the Tony Awards as his date. Topless Calvin Klein ads are soon to come, one of which, Indya proudly tells me, features a subtle crotch bulge to go along with her pert breasts. “I think that’s so important!”

Yet, in between all of that, there is this, a midnight run to a 24-hour pharmacy, because nature didn’t quite give her the tools to present as who she is. She asks the pharmacist for a free syringe with a 22-gauge needle, and keeps sending him back until he brings out the right one. “I’m sorry, don’t be mad at me,” she says sweetly. “It’s the longer one, because it’s going into my muscle.” I marvel at how knowledgeable and authoritative she is. “It’s like my whole life I’ve been doing this, you know. It’s not a big deal.” She smiles, like she just remembered her birthday was coming up. “It’ll be 10 years next year.”

While we wait on needles, Indya finds a neon rainbow beach ball and lobs it toward me, misses, and knocks over a display of cold meds instead. She always wanted a ball like that, she says wistfully, which is when I realize that she spent so much time being bullied and fighting for survival in foster care, she never got a chance to be a kid. When a 1980 country song called “I Love a Rainy Night,” by Eddie Rabbitt, comes on, we have a stomping hoedown in the toothpaste aisle.

On the way out, I pick up a box of tampons. Indya spent $134 on her hormones, which is roughly the same as what she spends on Ubers every day to get her safely back to her mom’s place in the South Bronx, where she’s been staying in between Pose obligations. I tell her that between boxes of tampons, pads, and the clothes I’ve bled through, and the cabs I’ve had to take home to change my clothes, I spent $50 on my period that month. I cannot know her life or her trauma, but we can share a laugh over the very real, unfair pink taxes we pay as women in America. We walk out arm in arm, two girlfriends experiencing different hormonal events that the other will never quite be able to understand.

“Heyaaaa! My love!” It’s two days earlier, and Indya peeks her head around a pillar in the fashion studio of her friend, Celestino designer Sergio Guadarrama. She starts handing out hugs like she’s just won the lottery and is bursting with abundance. These aren’t just any hugs; they are long, sincere, and life giving. Everyone in the room gets one, including me, a reporter whom, until that moment, she had never met.

On Pose and on the red carpet, Indya serves up confidence as if she swallowed the spirits of Madonna, Grace Jones, and Beyoncé all at once. She and her stylist, Ian Bradley, are cultivating an image for her of an Afro-futurist warrior. Today, though, far from the public eye, she exudes serenity and a bit of exhaustion. Soft curls frame her face, as in a Jane Austen novel.

She chose to meet at Guadarrama’s studio in lower Manhattan because it is one of the few spaces in this city she feels completely safe. Rather than at a café, where she might have to guard how she speaks about being trans, here she can dig in. Everyone in the room is either queer or a person of color, including Indya’s beautiful black publicist, Alyx Carr, whom I met long ago while doing a profile of Samuel L. Jackson, and Guadarrama, who is Mexican American and makes one-of-a-kind eveningwear out of upcycled textiles.

As Indya speaks, the room grows hushed, and remains that way for the six hours it takes for her to tell the story of the 10 years between when she left her home and entered foster care at age 14 and now. Her voice rings out clear, demanding attention, as if she is speaking not just to me, or to the handful of people present, but to the global audience she knows is on the other side of my tape recorder. No one leaves the room, or checks a cell phone, or even whispers to one another, as if the work of today is to help this woman from the most marginalized of marginalized groups carry the burden of her experiences.

“I don’t know how to have fun,” she begins, explaining that trying to survive while embracing her identity has been such a relentless struggle, she hasn’t had time to concentrate on anything else. “I don’t know what my favorite restaurant is,” she says. “When I’m around people having conversations about their day, I’m looking at them, like, ‘What could they possibly be talking about? How are we not talking about deconstructing white supremacy right now? How are we not trying to save trans people?’ ” She goes on. “I don’t know who I am outside of someone who’s just trying to be free and find safety for myself and for others.”

She was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, with a Puerto Rican teen mom and Catholic immigrant father from the Dominican Republic, she says as she slips off her Louis Vuitton combat boots and pulls her knees to her chest. When Indya started displaying behaviors her parents interpreted as feminine, they “overdisciplined” her, she says.

“Because I was assigned male at birth, they expected me to be masculine or to perform the way they thought young boys should perform. And I did not.” The more she expressed her feminine self, the harsher the punishments got. “They didn’t understand. They had never experienced what it was like to have a family member who was genderqueer.”

Speaking to me later on the phone, her mother, Gloria, cries recalling Indya’s teenage years. “I wanted her to accept who she was. ‘You were born a male, and that’s who you are: a male,’ ” Gloria says. She was scared for her youngest child’s safety. In Gloria’s work as a nursing attendant, she’d treated a trans patient in the hospital who’d had no visitors. She’d watched one relative grow suicidal with depression and worried that would be Indya’s fate. So she erred on the side of overprotection until the tension reached a breaking point and Indya, at age 14, entered the foster system.

“A lot of times, when parents overdiscipline their children, especially when they’re queer, their intention isn’t to hurt them,” Indya says. “They think they’re saving their children from harm. But they don’t realize that they’re causing harm, that they’re doing to their kids exactly what they’re afraid of the world doing to them.” She went in and out of so many foster homes and courts and group homes that the chronology gets mixed up in her mind. The purpose of leaving her mother’s home was to gain the space to explore her identity, and the first place she landed was with a man who had locks on the inside of his apartment. “He meant well,” she says, “but it was really hot in the summer and he didn’t have AC, so I would get heat rashes.”

She started going to an after-school program at the Bronx Community Pride Center. It was there that she first saw a trans woman, none other than her future Pose cast member Dominique Jackson. Jackson’s character, Elektra Abundance, is what’s known as a “house mother,” the matriarch of a self-selected family of queer outcasts who compete as a group, vogueing down a runway in fabulous outfits at balls.

“She was not the typical 13-year-old,” Jackson recalls. “Most were crying and begging for help. She knew where she was going. At that age, she already knew what she wanted, which was to be herself and for people to recognize that being her was not a bad thing.”

Fate soon landed Indya with a foster parent who happened to be a trans woman, and she let Indya try out hormone replacement therapy using her own supply. “I remember not feeling as sad,” Indya says. “I just felt more connected to my body. I felt free. I felt attractive. I liked the way I looked in the mirror.” She started posting pictures of herself on social media, and felt validated by comments, both from people she knew and didn’t know, who told her she was beautiful. Then one day, her foster mom decided to stop giving her the hormones, forcing Indya to find ways to buy them online.

A message came through Facebook from some people in a nearby area. “They told me that they had a lot of friends who were trans and they wanted to help me in my process. And that they could help me to get the money that I needed to be a woman,” Indya says. “Such a weird sentence, right?” Indya takes a drag from a “spliffie” she’s rolled from tobacco and non-THC cannabis she keeps in her bag. Smoking helps her relax as she does the hard work of explaining to a cisgender person like me the very specific traumas of her life.

She accepted the invitation of these strangers, she says, “and they told me that all I had to do was play with these men who will come in for a moment to see me and play with me and then they’ll give me money.” Indya speaks in a soft monotone, as if blocking emotion from entering her words. The silence in the room grows heavier.

“So I said, ‘Okay,’ ” she continues, “and I did that. I stayed with them, and they had men come over and have sex with me.” They taught her to use protection and told her she was safe because they would stay in the room to watch as it happened. In exchange for that protection and for getting her clients through an ad they placed on Craigslist’s personals section (which was shut down in 2018), they’d take a cut of her profits. “They told me I needed to do it continuously so that I could afford hormones,” she says. She was 16 years old. “I didn’t understand what sex trafficking was at the time,” she says. “The language I knew was that they were, basically, my pimps. I was just a kid.” Over a year into working for them, she found herself bloodied and beaten in a dispute over her hormone therapy. She carries the memory of that day in the form of a small scar on her cheek. “I remember thinking, ‘You messed up my face,’ ” she says. “Feeling like I wouldn’t be able to make money anymore because the way they showed me how to do it was the only way I understood that I could.”

A boyfriend in the Bronx and his mother took her in. She wanted to repay their kindness, so, she says, “Whenever they didn’t have money, I secretly sold myself online to bring money and food to the house.” What followed were more foster homes; a police record; time in prison on Rikers Island on an assault charge from a fight with a boyfriend; a stint in an institution where she was misgendered, taken off her hormones, and given anti-depression medication; and a drug addiction. She escaped to foster care in a group home, only to be placed among LGBTQ boys rather than in an all-girls unit, as she’d begged them to do. Bullying was incessant, even worse than what she’d endured in high school before dropping out in tenth grade. Her sister, the one member of her family who hadn’t shunned her, began to grow distant.

“I was just really alone,” Indya says. “I didn’t have anybody.” She wrote a note apologizing to everyone she loved and said a prayer. "I asked God—if this is all that I have to expect of my life, just let me go. But if there's something more, please let me stay." She attempted to hang herself. The rope snapped. And whether she wanted to or not, she says, “I survived.”

Sometimes, Indya says, she has dreams so vivid she wakes up thinking they’re real: “I’ve been dreaming every single day for the last month.” Dreams, so elusive for a trans kid of color growing up in foster care, somehow propelled her outside the tent for New York Fashion Week in 2015. “I was just standing there at the entrance, seeing celebrities walk into this big hall, and just hoping that a photographer or somebody from a modeling agency would notice me,” she says. She saw Rita Ora walk by. "She smiled at me in passing," says Indya. "It was the closest I'd ever been to a celebrity, and I remember thinking how inviting she was, and feeling like I was welcome in a space I never thought I'd be able to enter."

She developed an Instagram following, until she drew enough interest that she was forced to make a choice. “I didn’t want anyone to out me as trans,” she says. On social media she sometimes saw transphobic people circulating Internet memes showing trans women before they presented as their true selves, and after. “I didn’t want anyone to have control over how people saw me,” she says. “I wanted to have that power myself.”

A video she posted to YouTube about how it wasn’t gay for men to be attracted to trans women went viral. NBC Out featured her in an article depicting her life as a young model living in a “hostel-style living situation.” In reality, she was still in a group home in foster care. And a week after the video posted, one of the girls in the home jumped her, ripped out her hair, and attempted to strangle her while screaming, “You f*cking man.”

Though it took years before she signed to an established modeling agency, IMG, Instagram proved to be her safe space. Fans not only accepted her as trans, they celebrated her for it. Oak, an independent brand, put her on the runway. Man Repeller called her to be in a shoot with Dior. She even joined the aughts version of the ballroom scene depicted on Pose, becoming a member of House of Xtravaganza, which led to her getting cast in a movie called Saturday Church, which led to her meeting her manager, who got her an audition for Pose.

When she stepped in front of Ryan Murphy and co-creators Steven Canals and Brad Falchuk to read for Angel, no one in the room knew that a few months prior, she had fled foster care for the final time and had wound up homeless. Indya remembers that as she finished her two scenes, “Ryan jumped up and he said, ‘I have nothing.’ I didn’t know what he meant.” She was in a park getting ice cream when she got the phone call. “I just knew my life was going to change,” she says. “I knew I had a chance to teach the world something that would help more people to be safe.”

Indya can’t stop twerking. “I have to. It’s necessary. I’m claiming my cultural space in this dress.” Even though she laments her “skinny ass,” she still knows how to shake it, as is her heritage. “That’s how you know I’m from the Bronx,” she says. “I’m twerking one ass-cheek. That’s talent.”

It’s the night of our pharmacy trip, and we’re in the walk-up apartment where her stylist, Ian Bradley, has amassed a collection of clothes for her to wear in Los Angeles. Indya seems a million pounds lighter than during our first meeting, as if unburdened now that I know her life story. She strips in front of me and picks out an Altuzarra knit dress that she refuses to wear with its modest slip. “People are going to make fun of my skin no matter what I step into,” she says. “What am I covering up?”

She takes her public image seriously, almost as a political act. Getting to appear in Louis Vuitton’s campaign and represent the brand at Paris Fashion Week was downright revolutionary. “Working with Indya on our pre-fall portfolio and on the show, I also got to know her better and was left with the feeling that I had met an exceptional person,” Ghesquière says. “She is showing all of us that not only trans people, but every person who has been labeled by society as being out of the norm, can define their own path and go on to conquer the world. And yes, she also looks gorgeous doing it.”

Pose may have changed Indya’s life, but it also amplified every trauma she’d been carrying with her. Certain scenes in Angel’s arc, as a sex worker who falls in love with a client but who longs for a sense of belonging, would render her dazed or leave her in tears. And she wasn’t alone; a few of her costars faced the same kind of rejection and homelessness that she did. She bonded with co-creator Canals in particular, who happens to be a queer man of color who grew up in the same neighborhood she did.

“I think for us there’s just an understanding of the work and the strength and the resilience that it takes to get to the point that we’re both in now,” Canals says. Whenever he and Indya have a moment alone on set, or backstage at an event or award show, he grabs her hands and looks into her eyes and says, “From the Bronx to here.”

But there’s also been so much light. Indya’s mother is back in her life. Although they’d already begun to reconcile, Pose sped up the process by allowing Gloria insight into a trans world she hadn’t been able to visualize. It’s been a hard road, but Gloria tells me she started to come around when she realized she was able to care for trans people in her work as a nursing attendant. Could she really not see a way to treat Indya with the same love and respect? And she now understands the importance of using proper pronouns. “I can’t say ‘he’ in the street,” she explains. “That’s jeopardizing my child’s life, is how I have to think about it.”

We close out the night noshing at the 24- hour restaurant Empanada Mama’s. A group of young women walk by our table, then turn back and shyly ask Indya for hugs. A young man at another table asks the waiter to slip her his number. Another young guy outside invites us over to his apartment to smoke weed. We decline. I say goodbye to Indya as she heads home with a bag full of empanadas for her mom.

Hair by Hos Hounkpatin for Prose; makeup by Vincent Oquendo for Dior Beauty; manicure by Marisa Carmichael for Essie; prop styling by Evan Jourden; produced by Michelle Hynek at Crawford & Co Productions.

This article originally appeared in the June 2019 issue of ELLE.

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