[Portrait to be found in the winter issue of têtu· magazine, available at your newsstands or delivered to you by subscription.] Always eager to explore the links that free us, the author and filmmaker Amandine Gay has twice distinguished herself in 2025 by signing the essay Live, Free and the documentary series Ballroom, Dancing to Exist.
Photography: Laurence Revol for têtu·
Caught between two stools… that is a feeling Amandine Gay knows well. Born in 1984 under secrecy, she was adopted at five months old by white parents. “It’s a singular experience to be Black in a family and a community that are not Black, she notes. Earlier, when I started getting closer to Black and Maghrebi people by playing basketball, I was called a ‘bounty’ because I had the social and cultural codes of the White world.” This obviously does not prevent her from experiencing racism from childhood. This liminality—the fact of living at the border between several identities—she also experiences because of her bisexuality in a heterosexual and monosexist world. “I think there’s a parallel to be drawn between being a transracially adopted person and being bi,” she says. You don’t have a place anywhere.”
Her place, the young woman will claim it by theorizing her lived experience, as well as by giving voice to people who share it. She first earns a Master’s degree in political science in 2007, then a Master’s in sociology in 2018. When she finally tries to become an actress, at the beginning of the 2010s, she is confronted with the impasse of stereotyped roles. “When I proposed a character of a Black lesbian sommelier, I was told that it was too Anglo-Saxon, that such girls did not exist in France, she reports. But that character, it was a version of me! I was a wine-bar manager, it’s me who writes this role.” Faced with the finding of a lacuna in the representation of powerful Black women, she writes and directs the documentary Open the Voice, released in 2017, in which twenty-four Afro-descendant women with diverse paths testify and which notably addresses the weight of stereotypes. “Black people suffer from projections that lead us to be presented as a homogeneous whole, she explains. The thread running through my work is to bring to light, through life stories, political themes that are dear to me and to try to go beyond taboos, unspoken assumptions or ready-made thinking.”
Giving Voice to the Adopted
This same “desire to turn the mirror around, to make people see things differently” pushes her, in 2021, to create A Story of One’s Own, which gives voice to transracially adopted people. A reclaiming of voice at a time when, “for a very long time, the point of view had been focused on the whole constellation of adoption: the prospective adopters, the adoptive parents, social workers, psychologists, adoption agencies, but not on the adopted people”. The same year, she publishes A Chocolate Doll, her first autobiographical essay, devoted to her experience as a Black woman adopted by white parents. A work of exploration and politicization of the intimate that she continues this year with Live, Free – Existence at the Heart of White Supremacy, in which she invites a consciousness of racial oppression and provides the keys to active anti-racism, while continuing her parallels between transracial adoption, bisexuality and queer identity. “Being adopted has, I think, prepared me to be bi“, she theorizes at 41.
“‘Making a family’ is a topic that obsesses me
Another transversal thread in Amandine Gay’s work: “making a family” outside the nuclear framework and the sole ties of blood. On this subject, from A Chocolate Doll, she cites a key figure of the ballroom, Hector Xtravaganza: “Blood does not make the family.” She is thus quite logically involved in co-writing and directing Ballroom, Dancing to Exist, broadcast this summer on France TV. The multi-episode documentary follows members of the House Of Revlon, an iconic house of the Paris ballroom scene: the iconic Vinii Revlon (Public Representation Award at the têtu· Ceremony 2025) and Keiona, respectively “Father” and “Mother” of the house, their “Godmother” Giselle Palmer, as well as several of their “children.” A voguing version of the chosen family, in short. “I am indeed trying to ensure that my works respond to one another, she says. This ‘making a family’ is one of the topics that obsesses me; it has so many different faces! There are many chosen families, whether in the ballroom scene, in sports, in groups of friends… The ‘one dad, one mom,’ dear to La Manif pour tous, is a relatively recent social construct!”
Living Together
Again, Amandine Gay rejects the idea of uniform trajectories and the prejudices that go with it: “I’m interested in showing society in its diversity and I wanted to find the right balance by avoiding perpetuating the idea that there would be more homophobia or transphobia among Black people.” The liminality, still, is illustrated in this scene, at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, where one sees that Vinii Revlon indeed has two families, the biological one that supports him and the ballroom one. “It’s a great victory that this series exists on public service broadcasting, whose role is to contribute to living together and to creating social bonds”, rejoices the director. Proof, if proof were needed, that from the margins one can broadly unite an audience who, in one way or another, also lives in this world in a plural way, far from clichés.
