Michele StuevenWhen actor/DJ/recording artist and activist Shaun Ross came out to his mother in 2005 at the age of 15, she bought him a pair of $875 combat boots from the Dior rastafarian collection as a coming out gift. “If you’re going to be gay, you’re going to be the fabbest gay,” she told him.
It was that encouragement and support that helped him make a name for himself in the fashion industry and beyond as the first male model with albinism to achieve widespread success. He has fronted campaigns for Alexander McQueen and Fendi, and appeared in magazines like Vogue and GQ. He has made appearances in music videos for Beyoncé, Katy Perry, and Lana Del Rey and had a role in American Horror Story.
Ross moved to Los Angeles from his native Bronx in 2014, a time he says was the beginning of the end of the New York party scene. He found himself on Hollywood Blvd. with the Roosevelt Hotel towering above him, with a mission to bring back the It Factor.
Shaun Ross (Courtesy Angel Rivera)
“LA was booming when I first moved here,” Ross told LA Weekly recently while spinning at an off-the-radar party in Beverly Hills at Mr. Chow’s for his good friend Vanessa Chow. “I knew how to get into Chateau Marmont. I’d go up in a black car and knew all the paparazzi would be there. I’d smooze them and the receptionist at the front desk. It was the era where you would eat in the courtyard and end up on the 6th floor in somebody’s room, and end up partying in a way that you really shouldn’t have until 8 am. That was real LA, where you would go to parties in the hills with Justin Bieber and The Weeknd chilling next to Sylvester Stallone.”
But the pandemic erased all that, according to Ross, who says the local gay community has gotten more generic and watered down with too much whitewashed music since he came to LA.
“When I was coming up, what I loved about New York was that people didn’t give a fuck who you were,” he says. “We all existed as one – you could be gay, you could be trans, Black, white. Nobody gave a fuck who you were fucking or how much money you didn’t have. If you had It, you were in the room. And most of the people who had It did not have the money. They had the pizazz of the It Factor. A lot of kids today don’t have that. Everyone is afraid to be It. There’s a lot of hesitation today, and people are afraid of what others think. Everything that you are afraid of is what made you. I used to walk around in pumps and some weird shit to be as gay as possible. And yes, people would look at me and think it was too gay. Birds can only talk to birds – only we can talk to each other because we’re kin.. Everybody wants to be It, but you have to have a lot of tenacity and be comfortable with being a fool and failing.”
Underground is where it’s at now for Ross, who has his own revolving party at Catch One called Stardust.
“I feel good in the LA underground scene right now,” says the six-foot former model. “Back in the Studio 54 days, disco was the era, and I feel that’s slowly coming back to LA. Nile Rodgers told me back then that people went to gay clubs because you didn’t have to posture yourself. They knew girls would be there who loved the safety of gay men. And you’d have straight guys who were curious about gay men. I think that essence is starting to come back in LA, and that’s what Vanessa is trying to create. It’s that moment when you’re at a party and the unorthodox is happening in front of you, and it’s understood.”
“I don’t need anyone’s approval,” says Ross, who was bullied as a kid in the Bronx and called Wite-Out and Casper by his peers. “ I came into this world alone, and I’ll die alone. People have to become more comfortable with that. And when you become more comfortable with that, you can do whatever you want because it’s all for your satisfaction and no one else’s.”
Stardust (Courtesy Shaun Ross)