First, a sidebar: The GIF I chose up there makes me think Hunter Schafer and Elizabeth Debicki could/should play relatives. Somebody get on that!
Second: Hunter is an artist and activist — against North Carolina’s HB2, which banned trans people from using bathrooms that didn’t align with the gender on their birth certificates — turned model turned actress, and we’ve seen ample proof that she can wear the hell out of any number of ensembles, even ones that are basically just a boob feather. So there’s no WAY this was the best thing GQ could figure out to do, right?
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Here’s a direct link for those who can’t see Instagram embeds. It’s not… TERRIBLE? There is more interesting modeling happening with the interior photos, and while I don’t unreservedly love them all, at least they’re trying something. But this cover feels like a 1997 throwback based on the style of the 90210 crew after they hit college, and fronting stories like, “The Pimple Project,” and, “Six Ways to Snag Him.” It’s YM, not GQ – and worst of all, Hunter, being a model as I said, has a GREAT face and great angles, and can do things so much more alluring than looking like some boy’s fantasy of playing strip poker at the Yearbook office after dark.
The story by Emma Carmichael is very in-depth; I admired her openness about everything — from her dating life to her activism, to the complexities of being an actress who understands that the importance of visibility and representation will bring with it the “trans” qualifier, but who also wishes it didn’t always have to and hopes maybe it won’t. I liked this, which references a musician named Anohni:
“I don’t have that many trans elders in my life, and this one thing that she said just kind of burned into my brain,” Schafer says, and then paraphrases it for me: “Mother Nature persists. There have been trans people for so long, and they keep making more of us. So there’s something there. There’s something there… I think there’s something kind of cosmic and mystical about that.”
