Laura Merrell

I have been watching America’s Next Top Model (ANTM) since its first cycle with winner Adrienne Curry, but the latest season left me with some lingering concerns. The twentieth cycle just wrapped up with the finale this past weekend and it was the first one to feature male contestants. Each week I found myself thinking there was something off about the episode. After watching the first part of the final episode, it hit me. For a show that is based on Tyra Banks’s acceptance of people’s  differences, including ethnicity and socioeconomic background, it did a horrible job of accepting their sexual orientation and gender performance.

Cory Hindorff, a gay contestant and finalist for this season, was simultaneously applauded for his androgynous looks and told never to change while also being chastised for not being masculine enough in his photos. For a show that prides itself on celebrating differences, why would Tyra and the rest of the judges, especially male supermodel Rob Evans, try so hard to force Hindorff into a heterosexual mold? This is not to say that ANTM has not been slightly better about their treatment of people who aren’t heterosexual in previous cycles. There have been out and proud lesbian contestants such as Kim Stolz and Kayla Ferrel who weren’t forced to behave or pose in a certain gendered way. Yet, that past record does not excuse this current season.

It pained me to watch Hindorff’s photoshoots during the finale. He lamented that while the other two finalists, both heterosexuals, merely got to be themselves in photo shoots, he had to pretend to be something he wasn’t. Although he expressed in private interviews throughout the season that he was finally proud of who he was and his androgynous looks, the judge’s panel sent a different message. Week after week, Evans put him down for not being enough of a macho male model, even though the fashion world (at least in Europe) has already accepted models that don’t clearly conform to one gender or the other.

There are many famous and successful models working right now for major fashion houses and strutting their stuff on prominent runways around the world who aren’t strictly male or female models. I could name many examples, but some that come to mind are Agyness Deyn, Andrej Pejic and Harmony Boucher. Pejic has completely changed the rules of runway as he has walked for both men’s and women’s shows. At Paris Fashion Week in 2011, he walked for both genders at the Jean Paul Gaultier show and participated in the men’s show for Marc Jacobs. The members of this season’s ANTM panel that insist that a male model has to be manly to be marketable are simply dead wrong. While ANTM cycles in the past have been supportive of people’s different lifestyles and backgrounds, this season showed that there’s clearly room for improvement. The fashion world is beginning to embrace androgyny in a serious way and it’s time for ANTM to catch up.