Jaclyn Moore has a devastatingly charming way of disarming her audiences. Whether it’s with her groundbreaking work on Netflix’s Dear White People and the Peacock reboot of Queer As Folk, or her biting takes and fiery selfies on Twitter, Moore has a way of deliberately placing queerness — joyful, messy, and otherwise — at the center of the frame.
I recently got a chance to speak with Moore about everything from the expansiveness of gender, love, and sexual orientation to what it’s like to transition as a high-powered Hollywood creator. Read more of our conversation below.
Jennie Roberson: How did you come to identify as bi or queer?
JACLYN MOORE: For me, identifying as bisexual always was more a matter of process of elimination. For so long I was like, “Oh, I know I like women.” And then I started hooking up with boys too — I grew up as a boy before I transitioned. So I would hook up with a guy and then have this moment of crisis, being like, “I guess I'm gay. I must be gay.” And then you'd be talking to your gay friends and be like: “You know that thing where you love having sex with dudes, but like, you also really like eating pussy?”
And they'd be like: “No, we absolutely do not like that thing. We don't relate to this, uh, idea.” And then being like, “Oh, I guess I'm not gay. Huh.”
But bisexuality wasn't a thing that was talked about, especially for young men. I think eventually you ask [yourself] all these questions. “What does it mean that I like girls? What does it mean that I like boys? Does that make me straight? Does that make me gay?” And eventually, you realize that the answer to all of the questions is yes, and the answer to all of the questions is no, and the answer to all of the questions is, maybe you don't need to ask so many questions, and it's okay that you just like everybody.
And so to me, it feels like there was less a moment of clarity that comes with people who eventually realize they're gay, and more a moment of throwing up your arms and being like, “I don't think that there's ever gonna be an answer,” or “it's all the answer”, if that makes sense.
Oh, yeah. The period of discernment can be both fraught and hilarious at the same time.
JM: Yes. And then transitioning on top of that adds this other layer where suddenly ... this is always how it's felt, but now it makes more sense, it feels “gayer” to me. It's always felt gayer to me to be with women, even when I was identifying as a man, and being with men felt very, like ...
Heteronormative?
JM: Yeah! It felt heteronormative! Even though I was like a teen boy or in my twenties.
So there was an added layer of like, uh, identity to unearth to figure out why that was. And now, obviously, it makes much more sense ... It’s a mind-fuck to years later be like, “Oh, yes, it is very straight of me when I'm hooking up with boys.”
What has your experience been like being out as a bi artist? Have you found acceptance within your communities and workspaces?
JM: Yeah. What's interesting is I feel this is one of those things that transitioning has changed my feelings on slightly, which is: I think bisexual invalidation by straight people, and by gay people at times, is a problem across gender. But I will say that the problem is — having experienced both sides of it — significantly more pronounced for bi men than it is for bi women. The invalidation of bi women is certainly something I still experience, and people still doubt at times, but it is nothing, nothing compared to the way bisexuality among men is dismissed, because bisexuality among men is instantly dismissed as, “You are [just] gay.” And, of course, there's this thing that we, as a culture, just assume the primacy of the penis.
So if you are a bi man, everybody's like, “Yeah, you're gay.” And if you're bi woman, everybody's like, “Yeah, you're straight.” The part that's invalidated is always the other side of that.
But I think there is enough cultural space for bi women — though not ideal, by any stretch of the imagination. I feel like, as a bisexual woman now, people understand what that is and have more acceptance for it. There’s still dismissal, but it doesn’t feel as aggressive. It doesn't feel totally invalidating in the way that the dismissal [of] bi men [feels].
It’s the same way in which I think our society's relationship with trans women versus our relationship with trans men is very different. Both sides have problems, and there's invalidation that happens on both sides and transmasc invisibility is an absolute, real problem and it's not something to be ignored. But our society treats trans women with aggression and accusations, like, “You’re a predator,” and, “You need to be stamped out.”
When we talk about bathroom debates, when we talk about sports debates, we're talking about trans women. People are coming after trans women. Similarly, I think trans women and bisexual men undercut the dominant culture in a way that bi women and transmasc folks [do]. There's a disrespect to the fact that it's not treated with the same level of hostility. There's a condescending [tone], like, “Oh, isn't that cute?” “You're doing that for attention,” or, “Oh, it doesn't really matter as much. Doesn't really affect us.” And that's its own form of discrimination, and awfulness.
But having now been treated like a bi woman, it's really interesting to feel the difference between the anger people felt towards me as a bi man. A woman that I'd been on three dates with came out to me as bi on a date. And I was like, “Oh my God. You have to go for it. Don't die wondering; you absolutely owe this to yourself. That's super important. Trust me, I know, I've been there.” She said, “What do you mean, ‘you've been there?’” And this woman ended up freaking out and loudly calling me a f——t at a bar in Brooklyn. And that's from a bisexual woman!
Granted, that's internalized homophobia, but just the level of hostility to say, “If you're a man and you've been with a penis, you are gay, and also we have to engage with the dangers of homophobia in terms of like, you’re unsafe to have sex with, you are now suddenly [an] HIV risk, you are all these things that ignore science and ignore the existence of PrEP or safer sex.”
It's just treated with such hostility that, to be honest, I don't experience as much for my bisexuality now. I experience similar hostility for trans-ness now, but my queerness is no longer a subject of concern for anybody. [Laughs]
How do you see yourself as an artist, and how does being bi fold into that?
JM: I think, for me, I just know so many people that identify as bi or pan, and yet representation in media is super-rare. I feel a responsibility to depict them — especially to tell matter-of-fact stories about somebody who could potentially fall in love with any of the people they meet. There’s something really beautiful about the idea that bisexual and pansexual people are open to finding love anywhere; That we are open to any person having the potential to be somebody that's worthy of love.
Sometimes that gets conflated with being “easy”, and that you could fall in love with everybody. And I want to 1) make that distinction in [my] art, but 2) also capture that beautiful idea that love could be anywhere, [that] the person you’re looking for could be any of the people that you meet. I think there's a capital R Romance to that and an optimism about the world that I think is infectious I really want to capture.
I'm reminded of a story of a man who went to his rabbi realizing he might be bisexual, asking, “What does this mean?” And the rabbi said, “It means you have twice the power [of] love. And he said, "That's it?" He said, "That's it.”
JM: Yeah. I love that. I think that's so true.
My bisexuality is such a key part of who I am ... I've been openly bi for fifteen years at this point — maybe a little longer, 17 years — and it just feels so much more matter-of-fact now than it did for a long time. And I think obviously trans-ness plays a part in that
I wanna, like, be careful about how I say this ...
Sure.
JM: Bisexuality, I think, is boring. I don't mean that in a bad way; I just mean that in a “who cares” [way.] Of course, it's really important for bisexual people to identify and to see themselves and all that, but I mean, the idea that anyone would give a shit that somebody is bisexual is the most boring thing in the world. It feels so silly to even need to make a point of identifying. Of course, we do, because there are a million reasons why we have to. But it just feels so trite that anybody gives a fuck. It seems so silly to me that it's controversial in any way, shape, or form.
I've worked on TV shows where people have said things like, “bi men don't exist". And even that woman that screamed at me at the bar when I was like, “But you just said—" [and] she’s like, “It's different for girls, you know, that.” And I think our society does treat it [bisexuality] as different for women than it does for men. I think there's this idea that there's more space for exploration in femininity than masculinity. But even that is such a reductive view of both of those concepts. I've been in so many situations where people are like, “Well, everybody knows that if a guy's with a guy that just means they're gay.” And that, to me, just seems so silly.
For a long time, when I identified as a boy, I used to say that I was the only bisexual man that I knew, but I fucked a lot of straight guys.
But I think bisexuality is far closer to the norm than people make it out to be. People put themselves in boxes all the time. Even within queer communities we do this; we categorize ourselves in ways like, “I'm a top, I'm a bottom,” when the truth is I know very few people who are exclusively anything. And in practice, everybody is much more open to the world.
Is there anything about yourself you would like people to know that maybe isn't a part of your public persona? Is there something surprising about you that people wouldn't expect?
JM: I am an open book about so much of this stuff, but I feel like once transitioning enters into the equation, your view of gender fundamentally changes. And I think once your view of gender fundamentally changes, it makes even a discussion of bisexuality feel like a retrograde discussion. Which isn't to say that bisexuality isn’t important; it's to say that it's like it's the most normal thing. It’s, in some ways, the simplest thing.
I identified as a man, and I was into both men and women and everyone in between, so I identified as bi because the bi versus pan thing is just, I think, logistical arguments of how people wanna identify. But that fundamentally changes when you say, “Well, I identified as a man, but I wasn't a man; I was a woman. But I'm a woman that has a penis.”
[It] starts to feel like training wheels on a bigger conversation about gender. Gender is so expansive, and love is so expansive. For instance, a straight guy who wants to date me now, is that guy straight? That's a question in the trans community all the time. Yes. In some ways. But if that straight guy likes to give me oral sex, that straight guy is now putting a penis in his mouth. Does that make him queer? Does that make him bi? Does that make him straight?
So when I say that bisexuality becomes, in some ways, the most boring thing about me, or the simplest version, it's not to be reductive to bisexual people and say, “You’re boring.” It's the opposite! I think it's [more accurate] to say, “Bisexual people have the most evolved, normal view of gender roles in the world. Which is [that] none of it matters. You just like the people you date.” Yeah. And to have to define [bisexuality] in opposition, we are defining ourselves in opposition to a system ... That feels fundamentally dumb and reductive. My existence proves how reductive that system is. Because [then if] a girl dates me, is that girl straight? A boy who dates me, is that boy straight? I don't even fucking know how to begin to address that.
I wanna be clear: I don't wanna seem like I'm dismissing bisexuality because I actually feel the exact opposite. Bisexuality feels, to me, in so many ways, the default way we move through the world.
I really do think dating as a trans person has just totally changed how I feel about all this. Cuz it's like, I go on Grindr, and gay dudes are interested in me, and I go on Her, and lesbians are interested in me, and I go on Tinder, and straight dudes and straight women are interested in me. And all of these people identify in these pretty hardcore ways. Yet I cross all of those things in their mind — which itself shows people are bisexual even when they aren't using those labels. Being a trans person feels like a skeleton key to sexuality discourse, because what: do I only date bisexual people?
It feels like all of these labels are just stories we use. They're stories we tell ourselves to make our lives easier to lead and make the world easier to process for us. But at the end of the day, they don't even matter beyond that. Do you fall in love with who you fall in love with, date who you wanna date?
When I say I wanna tell stories about bisexual people, I don't even know if I mean I wanna tell stories about people who identify as bisexual. I want to tell stories about people who see the world in this expansive way. Because the people I come across, the people I meet, see the world in this expansive way. I think more people see it this way than don’t, and I think a lot of people I meet now, as a trans person, are forced to start to reckon with seeing it that way by how they see me and the ways in which I am bits of both gender. I identify purely as a woman; I don't identify as binary — I am a woman. But I am a woman that has a penis, and for a lot of people that is seen as maleness. I have big tits and a dick. I wear makeup and I'm 6’3”. There are all these things that are somehow a little of both, and how I'm processed.
So where did you get your love of writing start?
JM: From the time I was really little, I just loved telling stories. When I was in second or third grade, I started writing stories ... I didn't just write a book report, I wrote a news story about the book, that kinda shit. And I fell in love with movies and books and plays and all of these things, so I just was always replicating that. I was always trying to tell my own.
There's that moment where you start to realize the presence of the author. “Oh, this isn't just a book. It's a Stephen King book.” Or in high school, I fell in love with Billy Wilder as a writer and director. And so it's like, "Oh, this is a Billy Wilder movie. I know what his movies sound like.” [Or] Aaron Sorkin in TV shows. “This is what this character sounds like. This is what these authors sound like.” That idea of falling in love with an authorial voice made me want to have my own.
You used to write about politics for GQ. How did you make the jump from writing to writing for television?
JM: Those things kind of happened simultaneously. I had made the jump to TV before I worked for GQ. I started writing for GQ basically in my off-seasons when I wasn't working on a show because an editor there had liked my writing and liked me on Twitter and my work on TV and stuff. And so it sort of happened the other way around.
I had worked in media previously; I worked at Buzzfeed where I wrote about sports and politics. But I loved it. I love writing that kind of stuff sometimes.
With your work on Dear White People, how did you go from writer to show-runner, and how is working as a show-runner different from writing for it?
JM: Justin Simein, who had created Dear White People and served as one of the show-runners of that show for all four seasons and had written and directed the movie, hired me to write for season one of that show. We didn't know each other. He just read a script of mine and liked it. And then we had a really good meeting, and the two of us just got along really well.
So the first three seasons of that show, I just worked as a writer and a producer. Justin and I had very similar sensibilities, so he gave me more and more responsibility as the seasons went on. At the end of season three, he approached me and said, “If we come back for season four, I'd love you to run the show with me if you'd like.” And I very much did. And I'm so grateful, I'll always be grateful for that opportunity.
In terms of the difference, it was very similar in some ways. The job of the show-runner is to help direct the voice of the show; you have a little bit more of that authorial voice. In that case, Justin was the authorial voice, but I helped facilitate that vision, which was always my goal, but suddenly it became having more responsibility for that job.
You were public about your transition during the pandemic, during the tail end of your time with one show and starting to work on another, leading to the rarefied vantage point of a trans Hollywood creator working on the high ends of production.
What differences in treatment from others in the business did you note during this time or in their perceptions of you or your work? How would you like those treatments to change for others who will follow in your footsteps?
JM: There have certainly been people I've worked with, both before and after I transitioned, whose treatment of me changed drastically, and not for the better, who were more dismissive of my ideas, more dismissive of the idea that I knew what I was doing. I feel like there were things that, when I was identifying as a boy, I would fake it till I made it and everybody believed that I knew what I was doing.
And then, once I transitioned, I actually knew what I was doing; I had now been doing it [writing and producing] for about eight years professionally, really knew what I was doing. And suddenly the same people who totally bought that young, fake-it-til-you-make-it, Jack knew what he was doing, suddenly had doubts that Jaclyn who actually did know what she was doing, did.
And that, I think, is very frustrating. I think in some ways that's about transness [and] in some ways, it’s about being a woman and seeing misogyny from both sides now. It's the worst kind of gender euphoria: the gender euphoria where someone's being misogynistic to me. “Aw, they see me as a woman, that's what I want. [Beat] Oh, they treat women like this. That fucking sucks."
So I would love for people not to treat women like that. I think that's a big part of it.
I'm gonna do a little bit of word association with some of my remaining questions:
Queer As Folk. Roxane Gay. Ruthie.
Tell me what you think about when you hear these words.
JM: Ooh, okay. Tough.
I'm gonna start with Roxane Gay is a delight. I loved working with her. She's so brilliant, such a great writer. We were so lucky to have her be part of that show. Stephen Dunn, who created that version of Queer As Folk, I know both of us loved working with Roxane.
I'm so proud of Queer As Folk. I am so sad that it only lasted one season. We got pretty good reviews overall, I think we didn't get enough people watching the show, and that's a bummer. I hope people discover it in time, particularly because I am so, so proud of the stories we told on that show in general. Stories about tragedy and trauma and joy coming out of tragedy and the kind of un-defeat-able quality that is queer joy that survives in the face of really dark stories that we all face as a community.
In particular, I put so much of myself into the character Ruthie. Getting to create that character with Jesse James Keitel and Stephen Dunn, getting to flesh that character out and tell a trans story that was complicated and messy and allow a trans woman to be not perfect but still worthy of narrative. To be worthy of the center of the frame, despite the fact that she messed up and cheated on her partner and didn't always handle things the best way. I'm so proud of that and getting to tell complicated, queer trans stories is so important to me.
And Jesse James Keitel is such a brilliant actress. I'm so lucky that she is one of my best friends now and I hope I get to tell more stories with her one day. Cuz she is brilliant.
So what's next for you? Are there any new projects in the hopper you can talk about? Anything you're looking forward to in the next couple of years, or are they all under NDA [Non-Disclosure Agreements?]
JM: I worked on the second season of Nine Perfect Strangers for Hulu that's coming probably sometime in the future. I don't think that's under NDA, but we haven't shot that yet. And that's with Rachel Shukert, who's a brilliant writer. She’s fantastic.
Other than that, everything is early stages. There’s stuff going on, but I can't really get into it.
Do you have any advice for those who are newly identifying as bi or queer, and/or any advice you wish you could give to your younger self before you came out?
JM: If you feel like you are bi or queer, it is not as big of a deal as you are scared it is. That feeling of, before you come out - and this is true of all things, I certainly had an experience coming out - it feels like the biggest thing in the world. And the truth is the more you live as yourself, the less big it will feel. Obviously, there's dangers of coming out at times, and you have to make sure you're safe. And I would never encourage someone to come out if they weren't in a safe environment. But it feels like a mountain that's too steep to climb, but the truth is you can do it.
And if you are scared of losing people by coming out, your life will be better without those people in it. I think that is almost always true. Like, if somebody is not going to be there for you living your true life, then that's not somebody you should prioritize in your life.
*** This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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