Kayla
Portrait with Heidi Gutman
Description: A young woman confidently holds a golden sword. She sits against a colorful flower adorned wall, wearing a bright pink tutu and a crown with golden flowers and spikes.
Portrait with Zachary Maxwell Stertz
“I’m an Instagram influencer. My profile is @bbfacekay. Bbfacekay likes everything pink, girly and hyper feminine. Kayla, I keep for myself and the people I interact with in my real life. Bbfacekay has 75,000 followers. Kayla has five solid friends.
I grew up in New Jersey. From a very early age, I was treated like I was different. I was excluded all the time, and people would make nasty comments about the way I look and the features that I have. I had to find self-confidence within myself to overcome that. Being in a Dominican-Puerto Rican family, there is colorism and I happen to be the darkest person in my family. I have the most coarse hair of everybody in my family. I would see everybody else and I'd be like, “My cousin is so pretty. She has long straight hair, and she has light skin.”
I went to Catholic school and was bullied there. I was gay. I had short hair and wore dark clothing, goth colors. It wasn’t until middle school that everything sort of came to the surface. And that is when I found art. I started drawing when I was in the seventh grade and by the eighth grade, I was so good at it. I was doing master studies of like Caravaggio, Bouguereau, all of these things. I was into Hyper Realism. My school commissioned me. I did the Last Supper on a huge wall. I got accepted into an art program, full scholarship. I was the poster kid for their art program. They had me there in this auction with like 3,000 people. Everyone was like a millionaire, and I was there. Once again, this girl in a dress who looked like a little boy. I did a speech and everybody was clapping and I was like, “I may be on to something.”
I was always looking up to Britney Spears, Beyonce, Shakira, like they're the whole package. I love Cher. I'm just trying to recreate myself. I want to bring that to girls like me. And I want to be in a position where I can completely take care of all my family members. They've done so much for me throughout my life and they've made so many sacrifices for me. My goal is to end the generational suffering that my family has to experience. I just want to be the savior.
Now I make a lot of music. I write, I produce. I want to be a performer. I want to go on stage and sing. I came into music through rapping. Today’s female rappers, they’re all talking about the same thing. That's what I was talking about when I first started rapping. I was thinking about that and realized that if you want to be special, you have to be special. You have to talk about things that these other women aren't talking about. I want people to know who I am along with my art. Because I'm not just making this all up. This is my life. This is what I've experienced. And you need to know this because if you're going to listen to me, you're going to listen to all of me.”
New York, 2020