Layla Taylor Is Done Playing It Small

Layla Taylor can’t make it a day in New York without getting recognized. We’re at Cafe Chelsea, downstairs from the famed historic hotel, when a woman rolling a suitcase does a double take and taps Taylor on the shoulder. “We love The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives! Counting down the days until the new season,” she gushes. Taylor smiles graciously. “Thank you, me too!” she says in response, then gives me a surreptitious look.

She is, in fact, counting down to Sept. 10, when Season 5 of the Hulu series drops — just probably not for the same reasons. Taylor landed at 2 a.m. on the 6th, flies out the next day, and is spending the hours in between on fittings, press, and a mandatory slice of Joe’s. “If it’s viral on TikTok, I’m there,” she says, ordering an omelet with cheese and a side salad.

The 25-year-old has a bigger reason to be here. Today, hours after we finish lunch, she walks in her first New York Fashion Week show. “I’ve walked shows before for swim week, but I feel like New York Fashion Week is the step up,” she says. “I’m not getting booked as a social influencer campaign situation. This is me getting booked through my modeling agency. So I feel like it’s more pressure to show up and really show out.”

It’s also a rebuttal. Season 4 viewers watched Taylor get turned down by a prominent modeling agency on camera, at a point when she was already having a hard time personally. “People get nos in private, and they get to grieve that no on their own and keep it hush-hush. But mine was on national TV,” she says. “It was very hard on my self-confidence. At that point too, I was really struggling with my body image already. So hearing a no on top of that was very hard for me mentally for a while.” There was more to it than the edit showed. She’d had a portfolio; she’d been told not to bring it. “There’s a lot of behind the scenes that people didn’t see and a lot of assumptions that were made.”

She signed with a different agency, one she says is careful with her history of disordered eating. She’s also decided the flaws are the point. “Stretch marks, all the things,” she says. “I think it’s so important to help other women or men that do struggle with that, and just show that I have those flaws as well. And I’m still trying to go after my dream of modeling, and you can do that too, regardless of what you think might be an insecurity.”

Then there’s the matter of her age, which in modeling years is apparently ancient. “There’s a lot of models that start at 16 years old, and they always said that I might be losing that chance because I’m older already,” she says. “I honestly just want to prove the people wrong that said that I couldn’t do it.”

“I always felt like there was a part of me that was missing, a part of me that wasn’t fully Layla. Obviously I knew what it was, but the world didn’t.”

Compared with that, a season premiere barely registers. Taylor used to get “very anxious” in the days before a drop. Five seasons later, she now has a system. “I’m going to do a little post and ghost. I do it every time we drop a season,” she says, then “put my phone down for a couple days because it’s not even worth it to read through.” This time, she doesn’t even have much to post. “I didn’t get any pictures from Season 5, honestly, because the majority of them I actually deleted,” she says. “It was when I was dating my ex-boyfriend.”

Mostly she wants to let the reaction happen without being part of the narrative. “Let people have their thoughts and their feelings. Even the love, too,” she says. “I think both can be overwhelming sometimes.”

That’s partly because the biggest thing that happened to Taylor this year didn’t happen on the show at all. In June, she came out as bisexual on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast, sharing that she was in a relationship with a woman. She tells me that while her new romance gave her an extra incentive to announce her sexuality publicly, she was already planning to share her queer identity with the world. “I had made so much progress stepping into being a Black woman and owning that confidently, and I was moving in such a good direction of taking control of who I wanted to be,” she recalls. “But I always felt like there was a part of me that was missing, and a part of me that wasn’t fully Layla. Obviously I knew what it was, but the world didn’t.”

Taylor knew from an early age that she was attracted to women but suppressed her feelings because of the religious and social norms around her and the isolation she already felt from being a Black woman in a predominantly white community. “I was told my whole entire life it wasn’t okay to be gay. And because I was attracted to men as well, I always just felt like, ‘Oh well, it’s fine. At least I’m dating.’” She dated around, partially as a distraction. “If I ever let my mind be alone, then I would think about girls more. But I was always just like, “Well, I’m talking to this guy, so it’s fine. We’ll address this later.”

After her most recent breakup, which plays out in Season 5, Taylor decided to make a change. “I was just like, ‘You can’t keep pushing this under. If people judge you, then it’s OK. But you’ve been hiding this your whole life, and you have every right to finally choose to be yourself,’” she says.

Her original plan was to simply show up somewhere with a woman and let people do the math. She thought better of it. “I didn’t want that to be almost like a gotcha moment for the press to see that and be like, ‘Ooh, caught her,’” she says. She also didn’t want the label decided for her. “I just wanted to be like, ‘I’m bi,’ and have it come from my own mouth so there’s not any speculation of what my sexuality is.” As for the people who found the podcast format precious: “I know some people online were like, ‘Sitting down for a podcast to do that is so cringey.’ I was like, ‘To you, maybe, but to other people, no.’”

In May, she hit “like” on a TikTok post by her now girlfriend Kelsie Chesser, who then slid into her DMs with the eyes emoji. They’ve been together ever since. “Kelsie wasn’t the reason why I came out, but she definitely was a motivation to want to come out sooner because I just wanted to be happy,” Taylor says.

For about a month, they dated in a kind of soft stealth mode. “Anytime we’d be in public, I’m like, ‘Hey, just act like friends. Just act chill,’” Taylor says. One woman DMed her to say she thought she’d spotted them, then added: “I don’t know if you guys are serious, but if you’re not, I would love to take you on a date.”

Her previous partner, Taylor says, was impatient about being hard launched. Chesser went the other direction, locking down her social accounts the moment people started identifying her. “She’s like, ‘I don’t know if I want this,’” Taylor says. “‘I want you to be happy and I’ll support you regardless. But I don’t know what comes with this.’” Taylor found that clarifying. “I have felt so jaded in the past by people that say that they didn’t love the advantages of dating me, but their actions proved otherwise. And with Kelsie, I’ve never once questioned that that was why she was here. Truly, she’s here for me and me only.”

“I want to just give that little Layla a hug ... This is terrifying to come into, especially at such a young age.”

Her coming-out took MomTok by surprise. “Everyone was definitely like, ‘Oh my gosh. I didn’t see that coming,’ which I’m not shocked by,” Taylor says. “I feel like a lot of people hiding their sexuality know how to do a good job hiding it.” The internet was less impressed. “There were also a lot of people online who were like, ‘Oh, the closet was so glass, babe.’ And I was like, ‘Honestly, fair.’” The cast’s response, she says, was straightforward: “It was just supportive. They’re great girls.”

For the most part, Taylor has been blown away by the positive reaction to her sharing her sexuality. “I’ve had some people walk up to me and say, ‘Hey, I’ve actually never watched the show before, but since you came out, I’m going to watch it now because of you.” She’s also had people tell her they came out because of her example. “I just think that representation still matters so much, regardless of some people online being like, ‘No one cares,’” Taylor says. “There are so many people out there that do care and feel safer being out and proud because people in public positions are openly out as well. So I’ll never stop posting about it.”

That’s not to say she doesn’t get hate. Taylor tells me her DMs are often full of vitriol alongside all the heartwarming messages. “I get hated all the time for being a woman of color, and I get hated now all the time for being bisexual,” she says. “You don’t understand what it’s like to be a woman of color in a predominantly white space or to be queer in a very religious area until you are.” She still holds grace for the people who spew ignorance. “I feel bad for somebody that can’t just let people love who they want to love, because at the end of the day, it really doesn’t bother you. And if it does, then that’s a personal thing, because it shouldn’t,” she says. “I think the best thing is to teach my kids and hopefully help the next generation to not carry on those mindsets anymore.”

In general, time and experience have given her the perspective to take negative comments less seriously — a skill that comes in handy when the online discourse about MomTok gets extremely loud and messy. “I used to be very heavily in my comments sections, defending myself and providing context. But chasing after always being in control of the narrative is such an exhausting game to play,” Taylor says. (She quickly adds, “I’m not going to say that I’m above making a petty video here and there.”) She looks back at her Season 1 self with compassion, even when she cringes at things like her “never had an orgasm” plot line. “I want to just give that little Layla a hug that was so scared of this whole entire world. This is terrifying to come into, especially at such a young age.”

Taylor is hoping that in the future, the show can focus more on the different facets of her and her castmates’ lives, and not just the sensationalist headlines that viewers are all too familiar with at this point. “There’s one relationship on the show that is very followed, which is not a bad thing. We know that Taylor [Frankie Paul]’s our star. She’s a big reason why we got our show. But I think for me, there are so many other stories that also deserve to be shown too.”

There’s more coming that has nothing to do with anyone’s drama. She’s writing a book. She’s working on a nonprofit for single moms. Chesser will appear in Season 6, which is filming now. “We don’t have that representation already on the show of a queer relationship,” she says. “It was honestly so important for me to show how it’s been navigating our relationship.” Chesser is adjusting to nine cameras and a crew, but she’s coming around. “She’s like, ‘They’re my friends now.’”

Three years since Season 1 premiered, and this current version of Taylor is daring people to cross her. “The best thing that you can do when you’re hated for certain things, or people have a certain perception of you, is to prove them wrong,” she says. She’s too busy being her happiest self to be bothered.