Indya Moore is an actress, writer, director, model, social activist and founder of Beetlefruit Media, Inc., a production company focused on storytelling in various mediums. Born and raised in the Bronx, they have appeared in Vogue and OUT, as well as assignments for GQ, Gucci and Christian Dior.
1: “Tradition is nothing but ancestral peer pressure.”
2: “My love is political. My body is political. I talk even when I don’t speak.”
3: “My love is not measured in reciprocity. That’s not the way I learned love.”
4: “I don’t like following the rules – the patriarchal rules.”
5: “Historically, our culture has not made room for the nuances of humanity. People have not been kept safe: women, people of colour, queer people, transgender people.”
6: “Laverne Cox, Isis King, Janet Mock, Our Lady J, Ryan Murphy, Steven Canals, the people I’ve met growing up, and even me – all have inspired me to see that it is possible to get far anywhere and that the capacity for positive and motivating influence is truly unlimited.”
7: “We will fight ignorance and a lack of information with information.”
8: “We have so many different television programs and various things that teach us about the lives of people we will never meet otherwise.”
9: “As a person of color, I feel like I’m socialized to feel like a remnant of poverty or something primitive, and I don’t feel like that at all. I can be myself and be me.”
10: “As a black woman of trans experience, my position in this society leaves me really no choice but to stand for the intersectional identities I hold.”
11: “I didn’t want anyone to have control over how people saw me. I wanted to have that power myself.”
12: “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.”
13: “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?'”
14: “A lot of times, when parents overdiscipline their children, especially when they’re queer, their intention isn’t to hurt them. 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.”
15: “I knew I had a chance to teach the world something that would help more people be safe.”
16: “Toddlerhood, I just knew I was the farthest thing from a man. I’ve known that my whole life.”
17: “The only time I’ve ever felt like I needed to measure my activity and involvement in holding people accountable for being violent on social media is when I think about the things that I might lose for saying something. That’s the only time I end up thinking about it.”
18: “I think people with varying experiences need to be creating.”
19: “Very often, the world of fashion depends on having the right look at the right time.”
20: “I want to see designers capitalize on a beauty that is not only white. I need them to stop acting like beautiful black and brown women do not exist.”