miss america

Description

"I feel very boyish sometimes," Kim Ann discloses. "But I'm also feminine. It's just a natural balance of the two: I'm like a faggy boy that's also a girl." The "not-normal pretty girl," as Kim Ann refers to her high school self, redefines the deadening standards of Miss America in a Grace Jones buzz cut and colorful, 90s hip-hop duds. Kim Ann's mom is Philippine and her dad's an ex-hippie, Woodstock alum who drove her to school on his Harley. Growing up in Hawaii, the "haoles," or outsiders, were white people, and they were the ones who had to adapt (how refreshing!) It was Kim Ann's move to college in San Fran, though, that sent her on a trajectory that, today, finds her blissfully ensconced in the East Village with her longtime girlfriend Sylvia when she's not making dance music or DJing all over the world. It was not only the house music, raves, and their concomitant aesthetics, that the City by the Bay turned Kim onto, but also the reality that she was "really gay" (she dated guys and identified as a bisexual in high school.) Excited over her newly solidified identity, Kim did everything gay in 90s Frisco, including taking gay Spanish (which meant studying Spanish in the Gay Studies part of campus.) Perhaps it's Kim Ann in her airport outfit — baggy, brightly checked pants and a turquoise gift shop sweatshirt — that best sums up the new beautiful: someone who is unfazed in her sense of self when routinely mistaken for a boy in the airport bathroom. The inner glow and outer radiance of Kim Ann is about as far from a masses-directed, pasty-faced pageant queen as could be. xo Elisa & Lily