Wildly misdirected focus with moments of interest.
The blurby bit
A journey through the archives addresses the long-standing phenomenon of trans men developing a gay identity after transition.
Frustrated with suppressing his desires, Ahmad decides to consult history: are there documents relating to trans men in gay subcultural spaces? Can they help him untangle the knot of his desire? In doing so, he meets young researcher and activist Kieran, and through this budding relationship begins to question the binary narratives that stifle true self-knowledge and imprison love.
From the BFI Flare listing
Introduction
The audience, as you’d expect, were mainly trans-identified females (TIFs), a number of whom were actually in the film. I was sat between two, who kept themselves well away from me (which is the way I like it, I do not share arm rests, thank you). Director Jules Rosskam was in attendance and the BFI programmer told us that it was their favourite film of this year’s Flare Festival. I counted about 13 trans-themed films in this year’s festival, it was about the same last year. The BFI has shown four of Rosskam’s five films, with the last one Paternal Rites (a film about her family) being screened five years ago. Rosskam has also made a documentary about trans-identified mothers –transparent – watch the trailer and weep. This feature/documentary film, Desire Lines, had just premiered at Sundance.
Before we watched the film, Rosskam wanted to contextualise where things were right now for trans people, in the US there were ‘522 anti-trans bills’ and the UK had just banned puberty blockers for children. These were dangerous times. There was also ‘genocide’ in Gaza and we were watching governments ‘essentially decide who gets to be human and who gets to live’. Although the two issues may not seem related, they were, it was to do with the way governments ‘restricted bodies’.
The film, Desire Lines
Structure – a documentary inside a story
It opens with the fictional element, our hero, late middle-age Ahmad is visiting the archives (groan), researching the history of gay bathhouses (eye roll) and there meets young compatriot, Kieran, who works there. Kieran is played by Theo Germaine, apparently quite famous, having been featured in Vogue and identifies as non-binary. Cue ‘sensuous’ scenes inside a very clean, orderly, non-threatening gay sauna. Chemistry between the two actors is stilted and neither appears to be able to say the most simplest lines without sounding utterly self-conscious. To be fair though, some of the lines aren’t that simple:
Archive fever? Derrida had long seen in Freudian psychoanalysis a desire to recover moments of inception.
- Kieran, the archivist, speaking to the seeker
It wasn’t a bad idea though, to place a documentary inside a story.
Ahmad is on a journey of self-discovery and during that discovery the story of Lou Sullivan is unearthed. Sullivan was a female-to-male transvestite/transsexual (as she described herself at the time). In particular, clips from the interviews between herself and her shrink are utilised and some of her personal correspondence with fellow FTM-ers.
[Lou Sullivan] lobbied the hidebound medical profession to recognize the existence of gay trans men and to remove sexual orientation from the criteria of gender-identity disorder.
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/lou-sullivans-diaries-are-a-radical-testament-to-trans-happiness, September 2019
Rosskam has made an error in picking Lou Sullivan as savant though, since Sullivan appears to have always been attracted to men with no history of same sex relations, whereas the topic of the documentary is purportedly to look at the phenomenon of same-sex attracted women suddenly becoming interested in men. Doh!
The interviews
The extent to which it achieves the latter, is really hit and miss. Clearly testosterone is a driving factor, and is mentioned, but not nearly enough. In particular, there is no attempt to quantify this. There appeared to be about a dozen talking heads, invited to reflect on their own personal experience but there is no real desire to get to the bottom of the query: Why do women who have previously found male bodies unattractive suddenly switch? There is no structure to the line of questioning and it is particularly noticeable -at least in the clips presented- that family histories and potential trauma points are avoided. It therefore never gets to grip with this fascinating phenomenon but that’s not to say there aren’t revealing admissions along the way.
Colour-by-numbers
Like most creative works these days, Rosskam presumably worked to a quota system, ensuring that every identity group got a ‘voice’ and equalish screen time. Indeed, according to these categories, Rosskam has ensured there is a requisite number of non-white ethnic minorities, a non-binary, a sex worker, someone who is HIV-infected, a prep taker and an elder thrown in for good measure. No voices outside of the cult are allowed, so no ‘normies’ and no ‘detransitioners’ (who aren’t even mentioned). Instead it’s a chorus. But even a chorus has a story to tell.
Testosterone
It has been known for a long time that lesbians who have taken testosterone have a sudden reversal in sexual orientation. Interviewees reflect that it was a personally kept secret. However, a number of them also report that they had had previous sexual relations with men prior to taking testosterone. You can either take this as Rosskam choosing her subjects poorly, that bisexuals often hide or that most lesbians do try heterosexuality at first. Sadly, no attempt at disambiguation is made.
A serious attempt to answer the question would have been to look at only the experiences of confirmed lesbians and to ask them to what extent they felt testosterone had led to a switch. That would have gotten Rosskam a cogent documentary, rather than an all-over-the-place mess.
Troubling uncontested statements
Regardless of the histories of the chosen interviewees, there is no running away from profoundly dimwitted statements, like: ‘Having sex with men, as a man, made me realise – oh, I’m definitely not a woman-‘.
During the testimony of a particularly lascivious young woman, barely even identifiable as gender non-conforming (bar a voice possibly affected by testosterone), we learn that she loves her ‘super wet pussy’ and that she was chided by her ‘trans mum’ for being ‘transphobic’. The ‘transphobic’ thing was she thought she couldn’t be trans if she lacked body dysmorphia.
One relates that she had given up trying to be a ‘top’ and found her place within ‘a gay male fisting community’ instead, having found appreciation for her small hands, which had lessened the shame she felt about her female body. My guess is, if you’re into fisting, being worried about hand size is slightly redundant, so one can only wonder what is going on here.
Another recalls how ‘sweet’ and ‘considerate’ the men were at her first sauna night, having been penetrated by seven men in a row. She told the first man she was only prepared for vaginal penetration and that a condom had to be used. He stood by her side to ensure that the next six men obeyed the rules. The audience giggled at this sordid anecdote.
And because gender identity adherents do not accept a pathology, ever, none of these troubling statements are seen as such, or probed further. Which naturally leads one to wonder; why even bother making a film, if tough questions aren’t going to be asked?
Hankering after gay men
We live in an age where certain kinds of cultural appropriation are social suicide but it’s game on if you’re a TIF and you want to go after gay male spaces and stories. The AIDS crisis is their story! They know all about tops and bottoms! I suspect Rosskam has watched Derek Jarman’s Blue one too many times, as Desire Lines‘ soundscape heavily leans into it.
There are several sections in the film in which gay men are fetishised, against the backdrop of the sauna. A man sidles up to Ahmad, clearly unaware that Ahmad is a TIF, and starts masturbating himself. Of course, Ahmad can’t return the compliment, unless she outs herself. There is no reflection on the ethical quagmire or potential dangers that sex by deception poses, either in the fictitious cases or the actual cases as per the talking heads, and Lou Sullivan herself.
Funnily enough, a real sauna chain is mentioned and on eyeballing its website it does not appear to positively welcome TIFs at all, although there is a regular session accepting of ‘all gender expressions’. It clearly hasn’t occurred to Rosskam & Co., that only women would stand around ruminating what a visit to a gay sauna is like and come up with the idea that the places aren’t seedy, dirty or dangerous. It is admitted by the interviewees that they mainly only go when it is a trans night.
There is a whole section where the women voice concerns about contracting HIV, condom use, or lack thereof, mostly though they seem glad that the risk affirms their identities.
In the late nineteen-eighties, as he was dying of aids, Sullivan jotted this entry in a gay bar in the Castro:
I’ve come all this way, gone thru this whole change, crossdressing 14 years, hormone shots for 8 yrs. Finally got all the surgery, or all I’m ever going to get. And now what? Now I sit here the same way I sat before hormones, before surgery. Now what? My future compressed into a shortened time slot. Most dead in 2 yrs. Some live for 5. [. . .] Yet it’s been worth all these years just to be in this bar, here, now, with aids, + to be a man among men.
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/lou-sullivans-diaries-are-a-radical-testament-to-trans-happiness, September 2019
Smoke and mirrors
At some point, you do find yourself wondering whether some of these women are really attracted to men after all. Some say they feel more comfortable having sex with other TIFs, so possibly their attraction to males is merely performative? This contradiction is not explored for obvious reasons. Even the one TIF I thought was a full on het, complains that men aren’t psychologically dominating enough in the way they ‘top’, the inference being – I think – that she preferred this from other TIFs.
The final scene in the film takes place in the sauna, and includes all the talking heads who appear in the film, plus the fictional characters. Therefore, it is just trans-identified females in the orgy scene, which makes for an ironic climax.
Eulogising Lou Sullivan
We learn that the series of interviews held between Lou Sullivan and the sex change specialist shrink Ira Pauly, were sought by Sullivan herself. She had asked Pauly because he had a special interest in female-to-male transsexuals but that he had never met one whose sexual orientation was heterosexual (again, this clearly argues against the premise of the film). The first interview was 1988 and continued over the course of the next few years during her illness with AIDS. She died in 1991.
We also have letters that Sullivan wrote to fellow TIFs read out and her responses to them. Significantly transvestism was seen as the stepping off point for transsexualism, with one correspondent asking whether it was possible to be a real transsexual on the inside without the need for any surgery or hormones. The ideology of transvestism/transsexualism was just beginning its new iteration; transgenderism and the transgenderist.
Towards the end of the film, Ahmad finds a photo of herself, stood alongside Sullivan. A moment of inception, no less. The reality though, tells a different story; I suspect that Sullivan was a voracious correspondent simply because it fed her own fantasy life and enjoyed grooming others into joining her.
Lies says something nice
Rosskam knows how to hold a silence, I’ll give her that, but I have to knock off a few points for communicating ideas in some of those silences via text animations that were so small only the front rows knew about it. Might have just been better to leave them as silences. Okay, I tried.
Question and Answer session
Rosskam talked a bit more about what had inspired her to make the film. She had noticed this shift in desire amongst fellow TIFs for more than 20 years, yet had not seen it with trans-identified males. It had been on her mind a long time to make a film about it.
How did you find your leads?
Rosskam had known Aden Hakimi from the scene for about 20 years and they had worked together on film projects as crew members. Hakimi also ticked the muslim/Iranian box and her past experience formed part of the back story for the character of Ahmad. Hakimi is a 40-something but was playing a 60-something (I think the pair were supposed to have the daddy/twink dynamic, common in gay males but almost unknown between lesbians). Theo Germaine is well known in the States and Rosskam wrote the role with her in mind.
Do we know anything more about the letter writers to Lou Sullivan? The communications are so profound.
As research, Rosskam claims to have read all the available letters that were sent to Sullivan and that she wrote back, currently held in archive in San Francisco. However, many of them are also available online on the Transgender Digital Archive. Most of the letters featured in the film to Sullivan were from Ben Powers (aka Bet Powers) who had started the Sexual Minorities Archive and had recently accrued Leslie Feinberg’s estate. The other letter writer was Rupert Raj.
Rosskam wanted to draw a parallel between archives and bathhouses – they were both places which held history (groan), which people went to because they desired something (eye roll). Both were major cruising spaces.
(As an aside, Rupert Raj was an early trans activist but latterly involved in trans therapy, particularly of youths – see here for an example letter from Raj to Sullivan. In the digital archive it is clear that Ben Powers was very much interested in women, whereas I believe the documentary tries to insinuate otherwise. These were very much people waiting for the internet to happen.)
Will you be archiving the material which didn’t make it into the film?
Yes. Rosskam planned to do something with the material, possibly an installation. Covid had forced her to do an extra year of research, as she had started the project in 2019. She had interviewed 25 people for the documentary but had only used about ten interviews. Each person was interviewed for two hours. Research was an art practice in and of itself.
Thoughts on Lou Sullivan
In a way, I don't even feel bad about having AIDS. I feel it is almost a poetic justice that I spend my whole life trying to be a gay man and ran into a lot of opposition and being told I couldn't do this, it was impossible. I feel like, in a way, this AIDS diagnosis, because AIDS is still seen, at this point, as a gay man's disease, that it proves that I did do it and I was successful.
- Lou Sullivan on her AIDS diagnosis from interview segment included in Desire Lines
On the above statement, I’m torn between disgust and pity for Sullivan. I feel she must have been far more mentally disturbed than she lets on in her controlled interviews (available on YouTube) and the letters available to us (see the Digital Transgender Archive) to have come to such a desperately strange, not to mention illogical, conclusion.
Interestingly, Viriginia Prince, publisher of Transvestia magazine, who Sullivan approached through correspondence, had no compunction about punching a hole in her story:
The only females who would seem to qualify [as transvestites] are the butch or diesel dyke lesbians who qualify by their cross dressing but don’t qualify since they aren’t heterosexual. Now you come along, claim to be heterosexual and still pass as a male (man) and that makes you an interesting exception.
You do however confuse me a little because the first line of your note says you are hetero and then at the end it says you want to make contact with other women with “gay male identities”. I’m not quite sure what that would encompass, want to enlighten me?
https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/kh04dp745
Perhaps Sullivan was just a woman in search of another woman after all?
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The Lies They Tell 
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