The First Black Trans Model Had Her Face On A Box of Clairol

No one knew her secret. Until they did.

- Jada Yuan, photos by Peter Hapak

Tracey “Africa” Norman always knew that the question wasn’t whether she’d be found out, but how long she could go undetected. ¶ To be black and from Newark in the late 1970s and get plucked from a model-casting call for Italian Vogue by Irving Penn—it was the kind of success story that was unheard of, especially for someone like her. She was signed by a top agency, photographed multiple times for the pages of Essence magazine. She landed an exclusive contract for Avon skin care, and another for Clairol’s Born Beautiful hair-color boxes: No. 512, Dark Auburn, please. She went to Paris and became a house model in the Balenciaga showroom, wearing couture and walking the runway twice a day. Norman was never as big as Iman, Beverly Johnson, Pat Cleveland, or the other models who broke the color barrier on international runways or on the covers of Vogue. But she was riding that wave. It was more than she could have ever hoped for when she was a kid growing up in New Jersey. Back when she was a boy who knew that, inside, he was a girl. 

Today, trans models like Lea T. and Andreja Pejic are the faces of Redken and Make Up Forever, and Caitlyn Jenner has been celebrated on the cover of Vanity Fair. Trans acceptance makes it easy to lose sight of how dangerous it was 40 years ago—and still can be now—for women like Norman just to walk down the street. Fear of harassment from both civilians and police was constant. To live one’s life openly as a trans person, let alone as a black trans woman, simply wasn’t done. The only option, really, was to “pass” in straight society.