Lena Waithe's cover in Vanity Fair is breaking the internet with gushing praise for the star's front-page spread, shot by celebrity photographer Annie Liebovitz.
The of the Emmy award-winning writer represents a fresh departure from the standard glossy celebrity profiles the magazine is famous for and plants a territorial flag mast for Vanity Fair's new editor Radhika Jones.
Jones, a former editor at the New York Times Book Review took over from Conde Nast veteran editor Graydon Carter in 2017 amid wide speculation on what direction she would take the pop culture bible.
The magazine came under fire for a cringeworthy 2016 profile on in the twilight of Carter's 25-year reign, fuelling critique the magazine was dated and out of touch with contemporary culture.
The Waithe cover has been widely praised as a return to cutting edge form, with fellow editors as well as director Ava DuVernay chiming in.
In the piece, "" the writer and Master of None actress opens up to fellow African American queer creative Jacqueline Woodson about the challenges of breaking into Hollywood, her first job as Duvernay's assistant in Hollywood and her artistic inspirations from the Harlem Renaissance to Time's Up.
I didn’t realise I was born to stand out as much as I do.
“I am tired of white folks telling my stories. We gotta tell our shit. Can’t no one tell a black story, particularly a queer story, the way I can, because I see the God in us. James Baldwin saw the God in us. Zora saw the God in us. When I’m looking for myself, I find myself in the pages of Baldwin,” she says.
“I didn’t realise I was born to stand out as much as I do. But I’m grateful. Because the other black or brown queer kids are like, ‘Oh, we the shit.’ "
Waithe also shares her childhood experiences growing up in the 1990s under the care of her single mother and grandmother, her work creating a space for fellow artists of colour in a white-dominated cultural landscape and her thoughts on the Aziz Ansari consent controversy.
“At the end of the day,” Waithe says, “what I would hope comes out of this is that we as a society . . . educate ourselves about what consent is—what it looks like, what it feels like, what it sounds like. I think there are both men and women who are still trying to figure it out. We need to be more attuned to each other, pay more attention to each other, in every scenario, and really make sure that, whatever it is we’re doing with someone else, they’re comfortable doing whatever that thing is, and that we’re doing it together. That’s just human kindness and decency.”
Waithe was the first black woman to win an Emmy for comedy writing, picking up the gong last year for her work on the 'Thanksgiving' episode in Ansari's Netflix series Master of None, based on her own experience coming out as a lesbian.
She also launched an autobiographical Showtime series, The Chi about growing up in Chicago and appears in Steven Spielberg’s new film, Ready Player One.
