Inclusive Media Initiative Creator Q&A: Joseph Harwood
December 18, 2024Pixability’s Inclusive Media Initiative is our mission to support diverse creators and communities on YouTube.
It’s Q4, and we all know what that means: wrapping up projects, holiday shopping, and planning those New Year’s resolutions! As you’re diving into holiday shopping, consider supporting diverse creators on YouTube with gifts that inspire. Meet Joseph Harwood, an early supporter of Pixability’s Inclusive Media Initiative and a talented artist, creator, and entrepreneur. I had the pleasure of learning about their new Mermaids x JH merch line, and I’m excited to share it with you. Remember: Don’t be mad, be a mermaid!
Theresa: What initially inspired you to adopt the mermaid image for this collaboration, and how has that image evolved over time?
Joseph: I started working as a model when I was 14 and my hair was cut in a dark red David Bowie mullet, which I really hated. I felt more in line with a feminine image so I started to play with a longer hair look and people just kept repeating how much it resembled a mermaid. We entered a photo into a makeup competition which was shared over 35,000 times on Facebook, and it was unbelievable. I think people wanted a theme as we saw that play out on tumblr the next year, but I had never seen that happen for someone like me before in a positive way. I was so inspired that I kept theming everything as a mermaid, 15 years later it’s become iconic. I think the mermaid imagery touches so many people because it’s a storybook visual, I’ve always been amazed seeing how people interpreted it.
Theresa: Why do you believe inclusive media representation is so essential, especially for young people exploring their identities?
Joseph: We definitely need to see things to be things, and representation is integral – but what we’ve been experiencing over the last decade is a false sense of progression. I started working at the end of 2004 and the trans people that I worked with when I started are never even acknowledged nor mentioned as pioneers in fashion or beauty. What should be happening, as happens in any type of career path, is you accumulate value the more experience and work you do, but in any kind of public facing work you need a team of people to support you. There’s been no access to this for many trans people and it’s the reason why the representation has been fleeting, people have been offered media opportunities that are designed to cause debate, not to profile or humanize, and it’s created a wildfire of misinformation.
What’s been unique within my career is I’ve run the business entirely without outside funding or management so I’ve been able to find a way around what the regular pathway is. I’ve been met with such discrimination with mainstream management and even PR companies, it’s been shocking so you just have to be smarter. It’s a whole cultural thing, even when I’ve been speaking to LGBT publications they have failed to profile multiple projects from trans people but they will award inclusivity, it’s just absolutely ridiculous and needs to change. There’s more going on than reality shows and there’s been such inaccurate journalism that having a direct to consumer channel is so much more effective. I didn’t have access to funding, no connections or anything when I started, I had no team, but I built a community who loved my work and that’s the secret. I think we need more of a collaborative focus to encourage young people to not only succeed, but to choose their own success that’s unique to their talents.
Theresa: What specific steps do you think media companies and content creators can take to ensure that their work authentically reflects and represents diverse communities?
Joseph: Media companies need to employ different intersections of people to get accurate information, feedback, and nuanced representation. Many years ago when I started online there was a chronological arrangement with a loose algorithm, so when I put out the same format of video as a cis creator I would be placed next to them. People would find you randomly and fall in love with you without any expectation. These days it’s designed around interaction and the data they accumulate from what you watch as an individual, groups you with things that are similar, you’re essentially stuck in a chain of activity. If you’ve never seen someone like me to look for me, how would you ever find me? That’s why people have been reliant on trend jacking and controversial topics to be seen, and to be paid.
This is what trans visibility campaigns are supposed to be countering but what’s happened instead, is people are being platformed to tick a box. We need to start seeing more trans people in leadership roles being celebrated because of the knowledge that they bring to the table. I travel all the time and I was so impressed by how they had a great arrangement in Finland, they had experts in media positions and they had activists doing the groundwork, it felt more organized and people who have been experiencing their transness for decades were sharing that experience to the young kids, who are experimenting with their gender and creating amazing protest. We’ve literally seen someone pretend to be trans racial to get into the media in this country and they’ve profiled this on morning TV, but there’s been nothing on the same shows to profile the amazing trans people who are TV writers, beauty experts, authors, journalists. If there was a trans person working there they’d have shared that it was a grossly offensive stunt. But despite this there are so many people thriving, so we can get to the audience but I think it’s been way harder than needed. I’ve always paid forward to the next generation so I built a platform called Perfect Androgyny which was an outlet of Five Awesome Trans, and collaboration and community is the way forward.
Theresa: With collaborations with major brands like PUIG, Estee Lauder, L’Oreal, Dell, Google, and even the United Nations, what advice would you offer to aspiring artists and creators in the trans community who want to make their voices heard in the media world?
Joseph: I am so lucky to have worked so much in the beauty industry behind the scenes as well as in campaigns. I contributed to the DEI guidelines of most of the Western beauty world including opening Estee Lauders ERG with the president of the company, so I have been focusing on creating opportunities and support within my industry for the next generation. However, when you look back, I was the first trans person to do a campaign with L’Oreal a decade ago and I was put in that position because I went out and hunted for it. I heard about an opportunity called LOreal the Brush Contest and my community rallied behind me and I made history by doing their campaign. That’s what you have to do, you have to go and contact the head of Shiseido, you have to contact Dell, and you can get things done. I do not wait and sit for things to fall in my lap because what happened a couple of years after my work there, L’Oreal made a misstep with an inclusivity campaign where they were looking to fill a quota and it went utterly awry, so what we need to see is more tenacious and ambitious young people going out there because you actually have more control.
When I won Simon Cowell’s the You Generation Competition, again I was the first trans person to win a reality talent competition, my press was blocked and I was paid before the competition was even over and all the content is now gone. What happened to me was transphobic, they brought in outside judges to choose the winner and I earnt that spot but I didn’t fit what they wanted, and that’s the type of thing that happens all the time. It was a lesson, why would I wait for them to do the right thing, when I had recorded everything on my own cameras? I proudly used that to my advantage. You can take negatives and spin them into positives.
I try to be proactive every year and I set myself projects and brands to align with. I really have done so much awesome work that I can’t express my gratitude to all my clients and collaborators but it has been a lot of work haha! I really wanted to work outside of Beauty so when the UN approached me in 2016 to do a gender campaign, I asked to instead work on environmentalism. I’m trans, but being in any space is representation so I said to them, look I am passionate about this so can I do that focus? And they agreed. You need to be conscious of the choices you make because I do not want to be boxed in, I want to make pathways in new arenas and it’s hard, because sometimes it means that you have to turn down opportunities that may be great in the short term. You have to be really strategic and sometimes it’s like playing a waiting game.
Theresa: Has YouTube been a strong platform for boosting sales in your collaborations? Have you tried affiliate links or other strategies that could be helpful for other creators in the Inclusive Media Initiative?
Joseph: YouTube was a strong platform and it was a great way to bypass gatekeepers, but it became the same as the other online brands in the sense that they are not promoting your content for what the content is, they have a lack of awareness of how this impacts intersectional communities and it causes people to be herded into boxes so you only really see like minded things, or total opposition. It’s bizarre and when I met young Tiktokers hosting an event for Superdrug, I asked each of them why they wanted to work in beauty and not one of them expressed that they did, they said they wanted to have careers in other occupations but this is one way that you could be discovered. That’s totally bizarre, and we need to look at ways of collaboratively using platforms to get to where we individually wanna go without doing things that are not in line with that. It’s not gonna work in any creative capacity if we’re being taught that you have to trend jack to be seen.
We’ve gotta see collaborative support, sharing content as a community, we have to build our own platforms. I think the monetisation side of things is so important to do as well because there is an imbalance in equity access, we’re not just here for pride season there’s an entire year of bills to pay outside of that and building paywalls and affiliate links is great. I used merchandise to sustain my career when I started, and I sold out tours, I thought about things that would bring in revenue. I am a bit of an OCD freak when it comes to creatives online, I know who’s doing what and how to capture lightning in that moment so when I launched my recent Latest in Beauty Box, I selected a range of people that could leverage the sales. It was a genius LGBT kit for a bargain so presenting it to the right people drove it to be the fastest sell out they had and I mix strategy and timing. I think we have loads to our disposal now so combining everything is amazing.
Theresa: What message do you hope to share through your mermaid-themed collaboration and your broader work in diversity and inclusion?
Joseph: I really love using my creativity to combat negative experiences and again we are dealing with such a heightened and bizarre period of time, where trans people have been used as political fodder and dehumanized. Everyone is stressed about financial stuff anyway, and the cost of creating a photo today in a professional environment is loads for a brand. I shot that image with two ikea lamps against a curtain, it was just creative experimentation that cost nothing to do. I created something that I owned, that I can repurpose and that’s the core messaging. Visuals have been my way of bypassing financial gatekeepers so it is really an example of not only how to overcome those obstacles by owning your own materials, creating your own thing, but I really generated a business from the sales that’s going strong in 2024. That’s the magic of the mermaid!
Theresa: Where can fans purchase Mermaids merch?