“I could have sworn that to be a model I’d have to be all girly and cutesy and here you guys are doing me up like a boy. Who would have thought?” says Amanda Moore in a 1999 models.com photo spread.
And who would have thought that the openly gay Florida high school basketball star – who broke her nose twice and never entertained dreams of modeling – would someday find herself adorning the cover of Italian Vogue and taking to the catwalk for Gucci?
“Girly” and “cutesy” aren’t the best descriptors for this tomboy’s version of feminine beauty.
But with lanky limbs, chiseled features and striking good looks, Moore looks like she was destined for supermodel stature. Perhaps destiny is how she managed to live out the clichéd girlhood fantasy of being “discovered” without even trying.
When she was 17, Moore took a friend to an open call at a local modeling agency and caught the eye of the staff. She found herself in the spotlight unexpectedly, and they insisted she go to Orlando for a scouting event. She hadn’t planned on going, but then an injured leg sidelined her in time to ditch the basketball court and suit up for a different sort of competition.
Every fairy tale has its minor setback, and Moore’s carriage broke down on the way to the ball when her pickup truck got a flat tire. She decided to get herself to the convention and worry about her truck later, figuring she’d sleep in the truck if she couldn’t drive it back to the family home later that night.
But once the trolling agents spied her, they were tripping over their own feet as they scrambled to sign her. They put her up in style that night, and she slept in the comfort of a hotel bed instead of cramming herself into the cab of her pickup.Before she even left Orlando, Moore had already settled on a contract with New York modeling agency Next. Soon thereafter found herself being “done up like a boy” for the models.com spread, one of her first shoots.
More specifically, like an army boy.
The spread features Moore in military drag, with her dark brown hair slicked back and tucked into a camouflage cap. In the opening shot she sports dog tags, fatigues and police-chic oversized shades. Her sultry mouth is open and one of her hands looks like it’s about to grab her tongue. It’s not entirely clear what the other hand is about to do, with the thumb tucked under her waistband and the other four fingers resting on her crotch as she leans back in a chair.
Ever versatile, Moore can pull off a macho look – combat boots and masculine stances, a lit cigarette pursed between her lips – as fluently as she hits a note of retro glamour, with her hair swept upwards and pinned back ’40s-style.
Her jaw is square, her chin slightly cleft, eyebrows thick and nose possibly chiseled by the same sculptor responsible for Joaquin Phoenix’s. Her deep-set dark brown eyes convey a confident elegance. You’d never guess she is one to goof off and shadow-box the cameraman for a news crew during downtime on the set.
It was a real punch that Moore reportedly threw at a romantic rival in a Union Square bar a few years later, knocking him to the ground.
In August 2003 the New York Post ran a story on Moore with the sensationalist headline “Lesbian Beauty Strikes Back” and the opener “Sexy lesbian Vogue cover girl Amanda Moore punched out a man who’s been making time with her girlfriend the other night.” The girlfriend in question was Kate Young, a former staff member at Vogue. Just four days before the Post story, Moore and then-girlfriend Young were featured in the New York Metro magazine cover story “Sexiest New York Couples,” and the two had done a photo shoot together for veteran fashion magazine iD.
As the New York Post article illustrates, Moore’s rapid rise to fame hasn’t always been smooth.
“I’m really struggling to be myself and to remember that [modeling] is just a job,” she told The Fashion Wire in a 2001 interview. “There were times when I forgot to be grateful for what I have, and luckily I’ve been reminded of that. When I leave this world I want to be remembered as a person who had a good job and was good to people.”
That included buying her family a new pickup truck, one of the first things she had intended to do with the money from her modeling career.
She didn’t have to wait long: within three years of the Orlando trip, Moore had landed in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, French Vogue, Allure, and Pop, in spreads shot by the hottest photographers in the fashion industry. She also landed prestigious campaigns for the likes of DKNY, D&G, Hilfiger and Armani.
In 2004 she attained the ultimate hallmark of supermodel status: appearing in the Pirelli calendar.
Lesbians haven’t always been associated with style, let alone high fashion, but Amanda Moore isn’t the first supermodel to publicly identify as a lesbian.
Supermodel Gia Carangi was a Philly native known for her tough-girl antics as well as her Sapphic leanings. She is also known for her struggles with heroin addiction and her AIDS-related death in 1986 at age 26, as portrayed in the HBO film Gia by a knife-wielding Angelina Jolie.
More recently, model and actor Jenny Shimizu has been open about being a lesbian. It’s hard not to be, when you’re in a profession that requires you to show some skin and you sport a tattoo of a woman straddling a wrench.
In 1993 Shimizu was discovered while leaning against her motorcycle outside an L.A. club with her girlfriend at the time, and was later the object of Jolie’s affections after the two co-starred in Foxfire together.
Carangi and Shimizu, like Moore, never hid their sexual orientation from the public, but most other top models over the years rumored to be queer have remained closeted.
Cindy Crawford – nicknamed Baby Gia early in her career after her resemblance to Carangi – played barber to a shaving-cream-lathered k.d. lang on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1993, delighting fans who were hoping the longstanding rumors were true. But Crawford and then-hubbie Richard Gere took out a $30,000 ad in the London Times trumpeting their heterosexuality and commitment to a monogamous relationship. Six months later they separated, but both still insist they’re heterosexual.
Amanda Moore has always been open about being queer, and it doesn’t appear to have been an obstacle in her career.
Although she doesn’t do the New York club scene as much as she used to -“You get surrounded by the wrong people,” she told The Fashion Wire – she says that scene is as glamorous as the L.A. club scene depicted on The L Word, which has been widely criticized as inauthentic. “There isn’t anyone on the show who I can’t compare to a woman I know,” she recently told the New York Observer in an article about Showtime’s lesbian series.
She praised The L Word for spotlighting a marginalized population, but worries about its appeal to “sapphosexuals” (bi-curious straight women): “It scares me that, in bringing out people’s curiosity, there’s going to be a lot of day trippers. And I don’t want to be someone’s experiment.”
But Moore needn’t worry – she’s far more likely to inspire U-Haul renting than experimental day-tripping. Let’s hope her career success inspires other lesbian models to come out, as well.
