When she heard what the indie film was about, Bloom felt like the part was meant for her. She’d been a part of the ballroom community since she was 15, when she began walking in the Face category and picking up trophies and checks for $500 or $1,000. So when this opportunity came, I was like, ‘This is a way to bring respect to my community.’ ”Ĭasting directors Damian Bao and Kate Antognini found Bloom at a voguing ball in Philadelphia. “Trans women were completely non-visible in pop culture unless it was on ‘Maury’ or ‘Jerry Springer.’ I don’t want to be a gimmick or a source of entertainment - I want to be respected. It inspired me and gave me the oomph I needed.’ I didn’t have that with trans women. “I want people to look at my movie and have people say: ‘Your movie changed my life. “Me growing up seeing ‘Pretty in Pink’ and ‘Flashdance’ and all these leading females - you’re like, ‘I want to do this, I want to have a moment like this,’” she continued. She was sitting at a crepe restaurant across the street from her hotel, dressed in a minidress and wearing her sunglasses inside. This is a continuation of having to go through that, and it’s a very surreal moment,” Bloom said, a few hours after getting off a plane from New York, where she lives in Brooklyn. “A lot of places I go in the world, I’m the first to do something. She strutted on the runway for Tommy Hilfiger during Paris Fashion Week.īloom is fully aware of the importance of her presence in the South of France this week. She landed an international advertising campaign for H&M and Moschino. In 2017, she became the first openly transgender woman of color to appear in Vogue India. ![]() Slowly, in between waiting tables, she started to gain traction as a model. She trusted, she said, that “the universe will never put you in a position you can’t handle,” and she was right. So when the academy refused to allow her to dance as a female - or even transfer departments to, say, musical theater - she decided to head to the Big Apple. “I was living my life for people saying, ‘You are a boy.’ I was like, ‘I don’t fit this.’ I’m gonna do pas de deux as the male? I’m the woman, I’m the soloist, I’m the princess! Life is too short to be someone who someone else wants me to be. “I slowly started to fall into pressure, but I wasn’t living my most authentic self,” Bloom, now 25, recalled. She appeared inside the magazine, not the cover. An earlier version of this post said that Leyna Bloom appeared on the cover of Vogue India. So she shaved off all of her hair, bought boy’s clothing and started presenting as a male.ģ:30 p.m. She wanted to be a dancer, and feared this could be her only shot. But the school would recognize only the gender she was assigned at birth. ![]() ![]() When she was granted a scholarship to the prestigious dance program in her sophomore year, she’d already transitioned. She felt she needed to take her life into her own hands after dropping out of the Chicago Academy for the Arts months earlier. She’d come to New York City in the hopes of being discovered. But it wasn’t enough to pay rent, so she spent her first few weeks sleeping on the train, traveling between SoHo and Chelsea and Alphabet City, surviving on $1 slices of pizza. She’d saved up a little money working part time at McDonald’s and Starbucks on the South Side of Chicago, the place she’d left behind 22 hours before. Leyna Bloom turned up at the Port Authority bus terminal at 17 with one red suitcase and nowhere to put it.
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