Meet Iris Telfar

At Milk Makeup, we’re proud to support the LGBTQIA+ community and the immense creative cultures within it. That’s why for Pride Month 2023, we’re celebrating ballroom culture. Ballroom has long been the site of creativity. But even as the spotlight on ballroom and its community gets brighter, the story of the people behind it, particularly the Black trans femmes who have an outsize influence on ballroom culture, don’t always get the recognition they deserve. We’re here to give them their flowers. 

Last up: Our final installment of stories celebrating four Black trans femmes from the Haus of Telfar and their thoughts on ballroom, beauty, and beyond.

They call Iris Telfar the “auntie of the bag.” That’s just her energy, her essence: she’s the person in the family who seems a little older and wiser, who has the life experience and financial stability to help you out if you’re in need. That’s Iris.

“House meetings are here, if someone needs a place to stay, they stay at my house,” she says of her apartment. A Brooklyn-based visual artist who was an artist in residence at the Eureka! Art Center in 2021, Iris is one of the original members of the Haus of Telfar.

“It really just started out as me supporting my best friend like, Yeah girl, let’s do it because I’m tired too,” she says. The friend was Founding Mother, Myles Telfar. The two were in the House of Marciano before. “Now it’s turned into this huge creative thing and we’re working on really big things together as a house,” says Iris. “It’s about building a sanctuary.”

Read on for more about how Iris helps to create supportive spaces, how their relationship has changed with beauty over the years, and what chosen family means to her.

What role does beauty play in your life in ballroom and beyond? It’s one of certainty. You have to be sure of who you are or if not, be willing to learn. Having both of those traits simultaneously while walking into those chaotic spaces can be hard. When it comes to my beauty standard and when I go out in ballroom nowadays, it’s like Girl, I am it. When I’m anywhere else in my life besides a ball, I am that girl. I’m an amazing artist, I do this in my life, I do that in my life. There’s things that I know that I get validation from with my identity so that when I walk into ballroom spaces, no matter who’s checking me, I know who I am. I know I got it. It took me time to learn that.  When it comes to my beauty, makeup, my expression, I just have to be certain. Whatever I do, wherever I go, whatever I’m putting on, this is what I decided to put on myself. No one has made me do something, no one has told me to put it on.  What’s your earliest memory with makeup? My earliest memory of makeup was with my mom. She was a costume designer. When she was getting ready to go to work or to go out, she would be in the mirror. I was around 10 or 11 looking at her in the mirror, rushing with all of her eyeshadows and mascaras. She actually later started selling Mary Kay. That was in middle school. Around the time, I started liking boys and I thought “I’m going to start wearing mascara,” so I started wearing the makeup that she would sell. She got mad at me a lot because I was wasting her product. So I learned about capitalism and makeup.

Has your relationship to makeup and beauty evolved over time?

It has evolved over time in regards to my transition because my face has changed, as has how I present myself. I used to wear wild makeup because I was a wild punk rock kid at one point. I wore super bright flowy makeup in college because I was a hippie. Those were different selves—now all of these personas I’ve had growing up are encompassed in this one woman who has to walk in her everyday life being comfortable in who she is. 

Sometimes that calls for having on a whole high-glam “I’m going to a Met Gala afterparty” beat, or I’m going to Essex and Delancey with smoky eyeliner, or no makeup on because I’m going to get my hormone shot. How my makeup has changed is how my versatility in self has changed. I’m still all of these people within my makeup and I still hold all of these ideas and techniques that I’ve acquired over time, but I use them at different moments when it calls for it. 

Do you have any old-school tips or tricks you swear by? If I’m going out, one of the old makeup tips I live by is I still burn my black eyeliner a little bit. I got that from my mom. Burn it a little bit, blow it, and then put it on. I love that smudged look. That’s really it. Everything else I sort of created over time. Another memory I have is I loved watching my mother put on her lip liner on the train or a bus. How precise she would get her lip liner—any time I’m on a train or on a bus putting on my lip liner I feel like I’m chewing [nailing] it. Is there a makeup trend you’ll never let go of? The bleached brow! Honestly, the bleached brow has had me in a chokehold for years. It’s been seven years now. If I miss a therapy appointment, I’m going to bleach my brows. I had locs but during the pandemic, I got really bored because I couldn’t dye them. I knew they would be really damaged if I did. So I started bleaching my body hair: dying my armpits and my pubes and my facial hair. That was really liberating. But I realized every time I washed my face, the dye in my eyebrows would come right off. So now I just keep them bleached which gives me liberty to change the color all the time. There’s so much freedom in having a blank canvas with an eyebrow.

What’s a category that you always wanted to walk but never have?

Bizarre. I’ve always wanted to walk Bizarre. It’s a category that calls for avant garde looks, so avant garde creations on the body. You have to sell whatever it’s calling for. You can look up Latex Ball’s 2019 Bizarre category, it was insane. Some lady came out as a Virgin Mary, ripped off her outfit and became an alien. Gave birth to a baby alien and then the baby started moving on stage. It was crazy. I want to walk it because I’m a sculptor and I like to make and manifest new things with my hands. 

Can you tell me a little bit about your gay father — which is generally a close member of the community who serves somewhat as a mentor? I’m not that close with my gay father anymore but being young, queer, 13, not knowing anything, and having somebody who was 19 at the time, who really didn’t know anything either but knew more than I did, was important. Having him guide me and support me really helped. We became friends from going to The Center and one summer we went to school together. I became so close to his biological family. If you go to their house, I’m in holiday pictures. My mom died my junior year of high school, so life got really rocky around that time and he was really there for me. I was homeless for a while and I lived at his place. He bought me Christmas gifts, taught me about boys—still to this day, if I’m on a date and they pick up their phone, yuck. He taught me that.  Having somebody who was older who gave me that support and guidance which gave me the framework to do the same.  What does chosen family mean to you? My chosen family means strength to me. My mother passed away when I was 17, junior year of high school and my father passed away at the end of the pandemic but not from COVID. My parents were always supportive of me, my gender, my sexuality, everything, and an extension of that was my friends. My father knew that any time he didn’t have me after my mom died, my friends had me. Whenever he saw them, he showed them love, compassion, respect, and kindness. He also knew a lot of my friends didn’t have fathers so he was very welcoming for that.

When he died, the night I found out, I was coming back from a residency in upstate New York. I told my roommate and packed a bag and went to Staten Island. I didn’t speak to my chosen family for like two or three days. When I got to the funeral, they were all there. They didn’t talk to me about coordinating things or what to wear or what time. They had worked that all out with my sister and my aunt because my families were so intertwined. They were there at the funeral and the repast. I have this beautiful video of walking through my aunt’s house and all of my family, so many types of bodies and shapes and colors and identities of people. My chosen family is really my strength. There are days where I really can’t get out of my bed and they are like girl, get up. And vice versa.

Has anyone in the house helped change the way you see or present yourself?

All of them. All of the kids. A lot of the founding members, we weren’t new to ballroom. We wanted to give kids that were new to ballroom a space that was nurturing and supportive. Making those two components come together made me realize, Oh, if we’re going to be doing this work for others, I can do this work for myself, too. It’s just super inspiring seeing these young kids. Like with Arie: seeing this young, beautiful trans woman out here with two internships and thinking about going back to school, and she’s 20 years old. That was me but it also wasn’t fully me. But seeing her do that at such a young age, of course I’m going to be myself because she’s out here being herself. If people are honoring themselves in the spaces that I’m giving them, why can’t I honor myself?