Meet the Young Photographer Challenging Stereotypes with Glitter

Glitter has a hold on Quil Lemons. Sitting on a bench outside a downtown barbershop in Manhattan last week, the 20-year-old photographer wore a constellation of stray sparkles on his face, remnants of a shoot earlier that day. Not that he minded. Lemons, a South Philadelphia native studying at the New School, has taken to wearing high-wattage stripes of glitter across his cheeks lately. “No one bats an eye in New York. Everyone’s like, ‘I love your highlight!’” he said with a laugh. The city isn’t merely tolerant; it's practically insistent when it comes to self-expression. “I love that culture. Even if we’re just meeting in Soho, I’ve got to give a look—because if I’m going to be seen, I’m going to be seen.”

There is no better time and place to be seen than New York’s annual Pride Parade, a fantasia of floats, rainbow body paint, and political esprit. For Lemons, attending for the first time, Sunday meant a chance to dial up the glitter—a two-tone block of sapphire and silver along the cheekbones, paired with twin red crystals—as captured in his photo diary for Vogue. (His crew for the day also included his three sisters visiting from Philadelphia: two 8-year-olds, one 3. Their reaction to seeing him in sparkles: “You look so pretty! We want some.”)

Lemons’s interest in shifting the cultural norms for young men of color has given rise to an ongoing portrait series, called Glitterboy, featuring a collection of friends spackled in different iterations of glitter: a pink cascade under the eyes, a blue swoosh down the side of the face. (He plans to shoot Moonlight’s Ashton Sanders this summer.) “I wanted to stir the pot. Society always fixates on this one image of what it means to be a black man,” Lemons explained, citing the default stereotypes of the gangster and the thug. “We should be able to celebrate being feminine and just multifaceted creatures.”

That the project reads like a hat tip to Frank Ocean (who created the Snapchat handle ARealGlitterBoy) is intentional. When Lemons slid into a makeup chair for the first time at a Milk Makeup party last year, his direction was simple: “Do it like Frank.” The video for Ocean’s “Nikes” had just dropped—featuring footage of the glitter-dusted musician intercut with images of Trayvon Martin—and Lemons wanted to pay homage. “I remember looking at him and being like, ‘Wow, there’s someone like me that gets this—that I don’t really have to be attached to any sexuality. I can like boys; I can like girls. I can do whatever I want to do as a black man.’”

This anything-goes approach is one way Lemons’s generation is shifting the conversation. Take the model-of-the-moment Slick Woods, whom he photographed earlier this year. “I don’t think she fits any mold of what a gay woman is,” he said. “She does a whole juggling of masculinity and femininity, and I think that’s where we kind of all are at.”

For Lemons, that juggling in terms of fashion plays out in sneakers (the Air Jordan 1 Retro High OG Royals on his feet—Ocean’s favorite, he pointed out) and a high-shine palette of makeup. Recently he’s been layering on Milk’s limited-edition Pride stick, topped off with NYX loose glitter—best viewed through the sparkle-enhancing kirakira+ app. “It makes anything pop,” he said, testing it out on a sidewalk garbage bag, which magically took on a Disney-like twinkle. As for low-key days, his makeup artist friend Sage White recently took him to Glossier for a tutorial in “extreme highlighting.” She dabbed Universal Skin Salve along the cheekbones, the tip of the chin, and the cupid’s bow, “like a glossy contour,” Lemons said. “I looked like a full-on glazed donut!”