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TA few days before she spoke to me, Laverne Cox was on the set of the new Animal Farm, in which she voices Snowball. The film is highly controversial, due to its non-Orwellian tone, childish, happy ending, but Cox had bigger things on his mind than film criticism.
“If we don’t wake up and understand, too many people will be destroyed,” he said that day in April. “People’s rights are being taken away, people are losing their jobs, people are being taken away from health care, people are being taken away from prison, gender-affirming care is under attack, not just for children but for adults. It’s never been about protecting women – it’s always been about creating a license to help refugees, taking away human rights, taking away human rights, taking away human rights.”
This wasn’t the kind of language you’d expect on the red carpet, from the actress, talk show host and TV personality who had a hit on Orange Is the New Black.
Cox, however, has no time to do good. Growing up in Mobile, Alabama, in the 70s (he’s 54), he’s had to deal with violent and childish racism in some form since he was a child. He was physically abused as a child, abused by his mother throughout his childhood, puberty, sexually assaulted as a teenager, clearly faced with constant poverty when he went to study at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, and then, in the 90s, living on the streets of black and change. he has survived the most difficult times. There is no need for him to be quiet now.
Transcendent is his first book, a memoir. He was raised, along with his twin, the novelist, controversial artist M Lamar, by a single mother. Gloria Cox was a member of the conservative African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, with many demons of her own to contend with, including an abusive father. However, you cannot move his mother’s abuse, both verbal and physical; more general, splenetic homophobia; more domestic violence. At one point in the book, after Lamar accidentally puts a rock through the balcony door, Gloria rides the train which ends up with the twins in the orphanage. But the little things are easy to read, like every time Cox shows menace or joy or excitement, he shoots. “I suspect I’m not the only one who had childhood parents who probably didn’t understand their character or being an artist,” he tells me, cautiously, over video phone from his home in New York.
“But I love my mother,” says Cox, “and even my brother loves and respects her. She is a wonderful woman; she raised two children, who were wonderful in many ways, on her own. She put herself through graduate school, bought her own house, without the help of a husband. She is a wonderful woman, but there is a lot of pain there.
“Part of talking about my grandfather and his abuse,” he explains, “is thinking about how that abuse came from the remnants of chattel slavery (he grew up on a farm), just trying to imagine my mother’s situation.” Cox also subscribes to Dr Joy DeGruy’s theory of “post-traumatic slave syndrome, a list of behaviors that are passed down. The best example I can think of is when black parents say: ‘Oh my son is lazy – he doesn’t work hard enough.’ “It was all to keep your son from selling you.”
In 1983, Cox was 11 years old, “every night I go to bed praying that I wake up different”. He tried to kill himself before he turned 12. “It was a real pain in my body, writing this, trying to dig,” he says now. It was very painful. It was like vomiting the pain of that time. Having lived like this, she decided to start wearing shoes, gradually starting to dress as she wanted, experimentally, in a feminine way – all from charity shops. He calls it his “Armani Salvation” period.
This isn’t a sad memoir: it doesn’t feel like it has a narrative or revenge. “It helps me not to be ashamed of the hidden things that make me think, ‘If people find out about this, I won’t be a likable person.’ ‘There are some things you shouldn’t tell people’ is what my mother always said. And I lived with it. But that doesn’t work.”
I don’t have an innate talent, and I think of it as a fun hit, but it’s amazing how Cox and his twins were, in different ways. Both, as teenagers, received tuition fees at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, “the school of Fame, as I thought” – she for writing and dancing, he for painting. It was a tough time for Lamar, but that’s his story to tell. Cox went on to get a degree in dance from Marymount Manhattan College in New York, and “when you study classical dance, you understand how hard it is to be good at something, the amount of training you have to teach and learn, discipline, great dedication, great dedication”. He never had the right body, he says, and “there were a lot of people who were better than me”.
And besides, this was 1993. “Madonna was going to the Sound Factory and found people for her Vogue video there. Everyone had a party together; there was a time in New York where you needed club kids and drag queens and transsexuals at your party, or it wouldn’t be a fun party.”
Cox did well in this country, perhaps because there were both highs and lows. “I swore to myself when I was a child that I would never use drugs, and I didn’t, and that’s good, because I would probably be dead.”
“A couple of guys I dated thought they could force me, and I say: ‘Beloved!’ I don’t know if I’m proud; I think I am, like. But I don’t think drugs are bad – some people can use drugs and that’s good. I have no judgment on any of that.”
The club changed a few years later with the spread of the “bottle” – shorthand for an incredibly rich man buying beer by the bottle for 1,000%, because he can. Sex and the City had a bottle service vibe: “One of my favorite shows of all time, but I think it changed the culture of New York. It was capitalism bringing more conservative people. Everything was commercialized – there was no place for artists who are broke, who bring this great energy. They can’t afford to live anymore and they can’t get into the same circles.”
Cox began to change in 1998. He was doing a lot outside of Broadway theater, making independent films, reality TV, wondering how to make money in a cool culture, while using every platform he had to try to “change the conversation about trans people”. Then came Orange Is the New Black, “with an amazingly good budget and this great script. The world was so alive.”
Based on the true story of Piper Kerman, a female Waspiest who we can imagine, who was imprisoned for money laundering, this was a bold, funny, courageous story about racial transformation, homosexuality, brutality and institutionalized thinking in a US prison for women, in which Cox played Sophia, a hairdresser to lags. “What annoys me, especially in Britain, is that all they talk about is how transgender women should not be in prison with other women.” “Orange Is the New Black is based on a story from the 90s. He was imprisoned with another woman.” Cox’s is the longest side character on the list. In one memorable scene, his pre-transformation is played by Lamar.
It began airing in 2013, when Cox was 41. It made streaming seem like a real thing, and put Netflix on the map. “I didn’t think anyone would do it; my hope was that casting directors would see it and I could get more work. How can I make this another opportunity? Then it became successful. After a few months, it became crazy to walk on the street, so my life changed a lot.
Cox had four Emmy nominations during this time, and two Screen Actors Guild awards. However, there are not many roles for the actor, and he always has another job – as a public speaker in colleges and businesses, as a brand ambassador – which did not fly until 2018, when he started doing a lot of red carpet hosting at award ceremonies and more. In the last two years, he lost 90% of his income. Hosting contracts have expired and have not been renewed. The company’s negotiations are over.
He is clear about his accusers. “The administration has threatened to defund any colleges and universities that promote gender equality, DEI (Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion).” He doesn’t even get a teaching job, because “even if I were to teach a graduate class, it might seem like promoting the trans mentality. This is real. I’m not complaining – I’m very blessed. I think the most important thing is that if Laverne Cox’s income is so low, what about all the other transaged people who are not blessed because of the things I had? And save.”
This is not all that surprising about the rise of Trumpism, says Cox. It all made perfect sense Project 2025the right-wing plan made by the Heritage Foundation before Maga’s victory: “All these words had to be removed from every law, policy, government document: gender, gender identity, gender identity, LGBTQ, DEI, abortion, birth control.”
Cox’s acting career was ignited by studying under Susan Batson, who has been working since the 60s, and told him: “The work is at its highest level when the unfulfilled need of a character is inserted into each song. That was Cox’s hope to act, that it will challenge the imagination and develop empathy. And of course in Orange Is the New Black that turned out to be true.
They are still approached by trans people whose parents watched the show and reconciled with them. But his identity has been difficult for the politicians around him. Maybe you can have a project that follows a Christian culture without defeating LGBTQI+ people. But Cox said that when the Nazis started burning books in 1933. Research by Magnus Hirschfeld trans and gay people were among the first to light the fire. For him, “we are in the same period as Germany at that time”.
Passage: Remembrance published by Merky Books (£20) on 25 June
