Gentleman Jacq
It’s December 2019, and I’m at the Rio Cinema in east London for a screening of The L Word: Generation Q. We’ve been waiting a decade for this moment, and the atmosphere in the auditorium is electric as we wait for the projector to come to life. Two minutes into episode one, a tousled blonde cycles through Silver Lake, LA, and straight into my heart, stealing every scene she’s in with an irresistible, soft butch charm. I didn’t believe in love at first sight until I saw Sarah Finley. I think it might have been her armpits that did it…
Jacqueline Toboni laughs warmly as I tell her this over Zoom, a week after our cover shoot. She laughs even harder when I tell her they were probably my favourite character from season one. “Left or right?” she teases. Oh god, don’t make me choose. My slightly odd fetish aside, it felt powerful in that first episode – and throughout the season – to see body hair celebrated on screen alongside queer sex in all its (bloody) glory, bodies of different shapes and sizes, trans characters played by trans actors and disabled characters, too. Jacq nods. “The body hair has been such a parallel journey to my sexuality. The first time I did it, I was playing Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was cross-dressing, and I grew out my armpit hair and did a bunch of push-ups.” Is it just me, or is it getting hot in here? Ahem. Anyway. Sorry Jacq, what were you saying? “I got rid of it and then did it again for Easy. It was like the universe, through roles, was telling me, ‘Embrace yourself, embrace yourself, embrace yourself’. After that, before I got The L Word job, I started to really love it and I’ve had it ever since.”
It must feel pretty special to come on to a job, and not have to change who you are or how you look to play the part.
