Miss Benny has been waiting for this moment her whole life. The actress, singer, and YouTube star is currently starring as the main character in Netflix’s comedy series Glamorous. The emerging star, who recently came out as a trans woman in an open letter published by Time, isn’t intimidated by the hypervisibility — she wants to be seen and heard, primarily by other queer and trans people looking for representation in a United States that is increasingly hostile to LGBTQ people just living their lives.
“When I was growing up in Texas, it was really challenging to feel hopeful about the idea of whether or not I even could be happy one day,” the Mexican-American actress tells me, her warmth radiating from her apartment in Los Angeles through my laptop screen in Rio de Janeiro as we chat over a video call. “And the only thing that made me feel like that was possible was any queer representation I could find online; it was the fact that queer people before me were expressing themselves and how happy their lives were, how silly their lives were, how normal their lives were that made me feel hopeful.”
This is the essence Miss Benny brings to Glamorous and her whole vibe more generally: She wants queer people to believe they can thrive. And now that she is experiencing her life as a trans woman, she hopes to be the role model she needed when she was just a child growing up in Texas, trying to come to terms with her queerness in an environment where that wasn’t accepted.
“I’m in my 20s. I’m out as a trans woman, and I’m living very boldly and loudly. I feel like I would have really admired myself when I was a kid,” she says. “And I think that’s very healing for me. I hope that if there’s anyone out there that particularly needs to see that in the same way I did, that I can provide that, because that made all the difference back then.”
“I’m in my 20s. I’m out as a trans woman, and I’m living very boldly and loudly. I feel like I would have really admired myself when I was a kid.”
miss bennyIt sounds a bit cliché to say it gets better, but Miss Benny is the embodiment of that phrase as she does something she once thought was impossible: She is living a normal, healthy life as a trans person. “I think the main thing that I want to stress to people is that I’m just so happy,” she says. “I didn’t think that I would be able to be happy if I were to be myself. I’m just taking it all in, and I’m hoping that it somehow impacts people in a positive way.”
This is a message she hopes viewers take away from Glamorous, too: Queer people are just living their lives, dealing with regular adult problems, and queerness itself is never a plot twist or a person’s sole defining feature.
In the series, Miss Benny plays gender nonconforming Latine makeup influencer Marco Mejia, a fierce and femme character. Luxury makeup brand owner and ex-model Madolyn Addison (Kim Cattrall) plucks Marco from YouTube to work as her second assistant. Originally, the show’s creator Jordon Nardino wrote Marco as a cisgender gay man. However, a switch of production companies from The CW to Netflix delayed production, allowing the team, with Miss Benny’s guidance, to rethink Marco’s gender identity.
As she waited for production, Miss Benny started transitioning. So when she got the call that Glamorous was finally back on track, she had to have a conversation about her transition with Nardino. Alongside Nardino, she carefully coordinated a character arc that would make sense with her own transition. In her Time essay, Miss Benny reveals what went through her mind when sharing the news to Nardino at a bar in Silver Lake: “I knew this was different from the original plan, but I felt we could include this journey in the show by having Marco transition alongside my transition in real life. I braced myself for the worst, but instead we bonded over our love for [the TV series] Veneno and expressed how we both wanted to make something with that kind of importance. He scheduled a dinner with executive producer Kameron Tarlow, and the three of us made a plan to present the idea to Netflix.”
“I didn’t think that I would be able to be happy if I were to be myself. I’m just taking it all in, and I’m hoping that it somehow impacts people in a positive way.”
miss bennyIt worked: Netflix greenlit the idea, and Marco became a gender nonconforming person rather than a gay man. With this change in the show, Miss Benny was able to bring her own experiences into the character.
But this isn’t the only way Glamorous portrays queerness from a fresh lens; the series also tackles issues rarely seen on TV: femmephobia within the queer community, for example, affects Marco. The ambiguity between queer friends — will it become romantic or sexual eventually? — is another situation Marco finds themself in when it comes to their coworker Ben (Michael Hsu Rosen). Most of the characters in the show are queer, which allows for multifaceted queer stories to play out instead of those that make them the comic relief or revolve around homophobia, a lack of familial acceptance, or another form of trauma.
“It was this idea that none of us were going to face homophobia or transphobia within the show from anybody except for ourselves,” Miss Benny says. “And that was really special because I feel like when we see a show about queer people, it’s usually one queer person in a group of straight people, and they’re usually having to either give funny one-liners or go through something really tragic.”
For Miss Benny and the rest of the cast, it was important to show that just like with any other group, life can be mundane for queer people. “[The show] drops you right in the middle of all of our queer lives,” she says. “It’s not about us coming out. It’s not about us later in life. It’s right in the thick of things, and I feel like that’s pretty true to what it feels like to be a queer adult: You’re surrounded by other queer people, and you’re navigating all of the things you have to do [as an adult].”
