Jessica Clark just recently launched her AfterEllen.com video blog Lesbian Love with girlfriend Lacey Stone, but she’s also keeping busy with what she does best: Modeling. The gorgeous mixed-race (lesbian!) model is featured in this month’s Allure magazine, specifically in a feature about how the face of modeling is changing to be more inclusive of women of color. Lacey wrote about the feature on the girls’ joint blog, SweatCity, and transcribed Jessica’s comments from the magazine:
“My mother always told me that the world was a big-melting pot, and everyone eventually would look like me,” says Jessica Clark, whose grandparents are English, Irish, Indian, and Nigerian, and who says that people usually guess that she gets her looks from whichever ethnicity they themselves belong to. “She told me I should be flattered to be one of the first.” The day will never come when every American is a Jessica Clark look-alike. (We should all be so lucky.) But perhaps a time will arrive when faces such as hers are seen not so much as beautifully extraordinary, but simply as extraordinarily beautiful.”Since the focus of the article was on models who are bringing some color into the modeling industry, they didn’t feel the need to make mention of Jessica’s sexuality. However, Jessica tells me that they were aware of her being a lesbian, and found it very cool.
“They all knew I was gay,” Jessica wrote to me in an e-mail. “The photographer Marilyn Minter is a phenomenally talented artist who paints from her photographs and she loved that I was a lesbian because of the whole additional dimension it gave things – how different the faces of the future were, etc.” Indeed. As for Lacey, she’s incredibly proud, of course, writing:
Thank YOU Allure Magazine for writing a story about this. When I read it about my fiancee, a tear rolled down my face. She’s worked sooo hard to be the best she can be in a profession that does not cater to women who look like her. It’s high time that every ethnicity is given a chance to shine. That is what this country needs to be about: “BEAUTIFUL is BEAUTIFUL.”Check out the new issue of Allure, on stands now.
What do you think of their including Jessica and other women of color in a feature about the changing face of modeling?
