Tracey Norman

Tracey "Africa" Norman, aka Tracey Africa, is an American fashion model, and the first African-American trans woman model to achieve prominence in the fashion industry.

Originally from Newark, New Jersey, Norman has modeled and been photographed for such publications as Essence, Vogue Italia and Harper's Bazaar India.

Norman also had a magazine cover and life story spread in New York Magazine.

Tracey Norman was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1952.

Norman identified as a woman from a young age, but didn't have any queer role models to look up to as a child, stating that "I always felt inside, since far back as I can remember, that I was female."

As a child, she studied women in her life, such as her teachers and her female family members, in order to learn feminine traits.

She was a shy and quiet child, and was the first person in her family to graduate high school.

At a very young age, Norman experience sexual molestation by one of her older neighbors, and for the first time experienced being called a fag.

Later, in middle school she stated that she was sexually active with two male neighbors who lived in her building.

In middle school, she and her family survived the 1967 Newark Riots, and remembers seeing army tanks coming down the street where her and her family lived, which was in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Weequahic.

She attended Clinton Place Junior High.

Norman mostly lived with her mother growing up, but for a few years in middle school she lived with her father, which she didn't life.

After middle school, she moved back in with her mother and did not have contact with her father until later in her life.

When she was in junior high school, her art teacher, who she idolized, introduced her to theater, and she got to meet the actress Pearl Bailey.

Her mother and father were both professional bowlers, and her parents met a bowling alley in Newark.

They would take her and her sister bowling when they were children.

Her parents worked a variety of jobs when Norman was growing up, and her mother eventually got a job in the County Food Stamp Department, where she worked for 25 years.

In the summer, Norman would visit her family in North Carolina.

In high school, she attended North Tech, and learned how to work on cars, but this was a segregated learning experience.

Her interest in cars had developed earlier in childhood, when she would drive her grandfather's car.

In the early 1970's, two years after graduating high school, Norman ran into an old friend who suggested that she become a model, and she started modeling in the local Newark area, working with Al Grundy, who was a makeup artist, and Grundy's brother, who was a fashion designer.

She and other young women would practice walking up and down the hallway of Grundy's home to learn how to walk on the runway.

For a few years, Norman worked as a model in the Newark and New York area, and she got to attend fashion shows of famous brands, learning a lot about modeling in that time.

She had to practice her runway walk a lot because she is mildly bowlegged, but she quickly learned.

In order to get into the fashion shows, she would tell people she was a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.

On the day of her high school graduation in 1972, she came out to mother as a woman, and her mother was very supportive, showing her "unconditional love."

This was a very important moment in Norman's early life.

In 1975, Norman was discovered after going into a photo shoot with fashion photographer Irving Penn, who photographed her for Italian Vogue.

She was not invited to that photoshoot, but got swept up in the crowd of models and found herself being interviewed by the famous photographer Irving Penn.

Soon after, she got her first job, which was very prestigious, as she worked with Italian Vogue, earning 1,500 dollars a day.

She quickly became a very popular model, and had jobs all over the country.

Around this time, she also worked in fashion shows in Newark Symphony Hall.

Norman also worked for Irving Penn, who promoted her modeling career, and she was billed as the "young Beverly Johnson," which made her very popular in the industry.

Norman at this time had a very successful modeling career, working in places such as Chicago, New York, Las Vegas, and Miami; this involved hair commercials and catalogue modeling.

She moved to New York to continue her career, and two years later, she appeared on the box of Clairol’s "Born Beautiful" hair color No. 512, Dark Auburn.

She is transgender but kept that under wraps, and landed an exclusive contract with Avon, for a skin care line.

Around this time, as she grew more and more famous, she began to worry that her birth gender would be revealed.

She mostly preferred to work with white brands, and did not initially want to work for Essence, but she did because she wanted to get her first magazine cover.

In 1980, while on a photo-shoot with Essence magazine, where she was modeling as Cleopatra, the assistant to her hairdresser, André Douglas, found out about her birth gender and told the editor, Susan Taylor, who was also on the set.

She said that she felt a negative vibe at the moment when the assistant revealed her gender, but immediately afterwards Susan told her everything was ok.