Orlando, Desire Lines: In Search of a t4t Documentary Practice

I first became familiar with Paul Preciado’s work through Testo Junkie, a book that is part memoir of self-administering testosterone to affect gender change, and part history of the development and control of synthetic hormones within global pharmaceutical markets. It is a wild ride and not without its critics. A hybrid academic memoir performing the queer work of self-theorization, Preciado’s book (along with Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts) is often credited with the popularization of “autotheory”—both a genre of texts and a description of “the practices of artists, writers, and other art and culture workers who move between the worlds of contemporary art, literature, and academia, in spaces where practice and research, writing and studio art, self-reflection and philosophical study meet.”¹⁴ This is precisely Preciado’s milieu; he has a doctorate in architecture, has been a professor of the Political History of the Body, Gender Theory, and History of Performance, has curated feminist and queer art shows in Barcelona and Madrid, and was a provocative keynote speaker at the École de la Cause freudienne’s annual conference in Paris in 2019.¹⁵

Testo Junkie begins by asserting, “This book is not a memoir” but rather a “body-essay,” or “a somatopolitical fiction, a theory of the self, or self-theory.”¹⁶ Preciado brings this same aversion to memoir to the production of Orlando. When executives at ARTE, the European arts and culture platform, first approached him about producing a film about his life, Preciado was “horrified” because of the way “trans lives have been narrated, represented, within cinema.”¹⁷ Preciado notes that when binary filmmakers approach trans subjects, they bring with them “a particular gaze, a particular way of looking at the body, a particular way of using the camera as a kind of technology for producing the truth of the gender of the people that are being represented.”¹⁸ This frame misrepresents trans subjects because it does not produce a transgender way of looking, nor does it challenge the gendered ideology inherent in the cisgender look.

It’s therefore not surprising that Preciado’s first film would seek to defy the traditional boundaries of its genre—documentary filmmaking—or that it would be a pseudobiography, or that it would be meticulously constructed and theoretically provocative. Premiering in the Encounters section at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2023, Orlando, My Political Biography is a hybridized meditation on gender, transformation, medicine, community making, and the search for one’s transcestors as a path toward liberation. Preciado’s biography insistently refuses the singular subject, and in doing so paints the portrait of a larger trans and gender-nonconforming community that seeks gendered revolution rather than assimilation into binary cisgender frameworks. Through the use of a polyvocal trans chorus composed of actors, filmmakers, and Virginia Woolf, and through a refusal to hide the filmmaking process, Orlando, My Political Biography attempts to reform traditional sites of trans trauma in a cinematic form of t4t care.

Polyvocal to its core, Preciado’s film relies heavily on the eponymous Orlando, by Woolf, the text that serves as the film’s refrain. Many if not most of the twenty-one different trans and gender-nonconforming actors who play Orlando (signified by a sixteenth-century-style ruff they wear around the neck) read or recite a portion of the text out loud to the camera at one point or another. Sometimes there is no discernable differentiation or gap between the actor playing Orlando reciting from the novel and their discussion of their own personal relationship to gender, sexuality, and love. Only the shift in language from twenty-first-century terminology, slang, and tone to the archaic language of Woolf’s character Orlando, born during the reign of Elizabeth I, indicates whether the words are the actors’ or Woolf’s character’s. This uncertainty produces a productive confusion in the viewer, collapsing the temporal and spatial distance between the Orlando character and the trans actor. Each Orlando speaks for themselves, their own gender-dysphoric and -euphoric moments, but because each also speaks through Orlando the character, through Orlando the film, they are also speaking in tandem, speaking with one voice.

Early in the film, one of the many Orlandos stands in the middle of a lush forest, a kind of garden world in which the early interviews take place. This Orlando is Oscar Roza Miller, who, with his bleached-blond locks and sideways, secretive smile, is the film’s first version of Orlando to introduce themselves. Cinematographer Victor Zébo pushes in close and doesn’t flinch, allowing the camera to linger on Miller’s uninterrupted gaze for a nearly uncomfortable four seconds. Only then does Miller deliver their introduction, the same intro lines that each of the Orlandos use: “My name is [actor’s name], and in this film I’ll be Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.” Immediately, the film cuts to a wider shot of Miller in their oversize powder-blue suit jacket, and an audio tech scurries into the frame to fit a microphone to Miller, while Preciado’s voice-over resumes.

Even in these opening moments, Preciado is making a distinctly trans film. It is a film that discards the binary gaze; it refuses to locate gendered truth in visual representations of the body and demonstrates that trans genders are not a product, but an embodied process. Each of the Orlandos introduce themselves while steadily holding the gaze of the camera, letting the silence build in the empty seconds preceding their first words. Add the basic, identifying lines that structure the introductions, and the iterative accumulation of these moments over the course of the film, and the introductions begin to feel more like audition tapes than they do portions of a finished film; perhaps the blank space surrounding the performer’s introduction was meant to end up on the cutting-room floor. The abrupt intrusion of the audio tech in Miller’s introduction reminds the audience that the film is a work in process, a corpus crafted over time. Preciado refuses to hide the technologies and labor that construct the film, just as his subjects refuse to adhere to gender norms that would render their gendered construction invisible.

The continual interruption of the film with its own process is a tactic to purposely reject a stealth mode of filmmaking. In trans circles, stealth is a term for the “nondisclosure of transgender status,” or, in other words: “Those living stealth are unknown as transgender to almost everyone in their lives.”¹⁹ The ability to live a stealth trans life, one in which the trans person disappears into cisnormative gender roles and assumptions, relies heavily on one’s ability to pass as cisgender, and is therefore deeply contingent upon one’s proximity to other markers of privilege, chiefly whiteness and affluence. Stealth trans lives rarely disrupt those institutions of gender recognition that structure contemporary life, and when they do, they represent a temporary aberration as the trans person moves from one binary gender to another. Stealth lives are premised on the fact that once the trans person’s medical transition is “complete,” cis people’s inability to tell they were assigned another sex at birth provides a ticket to a cis-approximating existence. In this theoretical formulation, visuality and gender truth are conflated; the idea that one’s gender can be defined purely by one’s bodily presentation is confirmed. If one can pass, one can be stealth. Disguising the machinations of one’s gender performance—from biomedical interventions like hormones and surgery to makeup, styles of dress, and affectations—is necessary to make gender seem “natural” to the sexed body. In other words, it is necessary to perform gender as if it is not a performance at all.

This isn’t to say that Preciado’s technique of incorporating reflexive styles of documentary into a hybridized piece is unprecedented. After all, documentary itself has very often been both subject and object of nonfiction filmmakers. The participation of the filmmaker, the intrusion of lighting, casting, staging, and so on, is used by a variety of directors toward different ends for different audiences. Even in the subfield of trans documentaries there are examples where the film’s creation becomes at least one of the primary guiding timelines of the work. Recently, Framing Agnes (Chase Joynt, 2022) used this technique to great effect when seeking to tell the stories of trans research subjects found in the archives of a 1960s gender health clinic at UCLA. Joynt wove together reenactment, interview, and reflexivity to both convey the experience of Agnes, a pseudonym for the pioneering transgender woman who participated in the clinic’s research, and at the same time resist exposing her.

It is important that Preciado’s film uses this technique to refuse stealth modes of looking at the openly trans or even nonbinary body; instead of allowing the conditions of its filming to fade into the background, Orlando refuses to present the viewer with a traditionally whole, and self-contained cinematic experience. This is cinema that actively resists the dreamy captured viewer of Jean-Louis Baudry’s cinematic theory, instead preferring the Brechtian move of disrupting identification with the image and its associated [gender] ideology through revealing the image’s artifice.²⁰ Preciado tells us in his voice-over that “[t]o be trans is to discover the backstage of gender and sexual difference.” To be trans is to be aware of and able to manipulate the means by which gender is produced. To be openly trans is to refuse to hide those tools.

Considering the process of making the film is therefore a fundamental part of the documentary’s experience; it wants the audience to see its becoming, just as Orlando’s Orlandos refuse to cover over their own trans histories to embrace the ability to live stealth. For example, in one key scene, Orlando Ruben Rizza sits on a metal stool reading from Woolf’s novel. He’s reading the scene in which Orlando first sees and falls in love with Sasha—a romantic winter wonderland of a passage. As Rizza continues, members of the crew begin to construct the set around him, wheeling in and adjusting to proper height a hanging backdrop of frozen woods, placing several fake evergreen trees, bringing in cool-white lighting. When the scene finally looks as if it is ready to be filmed, Zébo’s camera moves in on Rizza, who finishes reading to look up just in time for the scene to end abruptly. The audience is left with the sense that they didn’t witness the finished version of this moment; it is as if Preciado filmed the rehearsal rather than the performance.

Orlando’s endless becoming challenges the accumulated traumatic meanings of physical spaces like the psychiatrist’s waiting room. For much of trans history, accessing hormones and other gender-affirming treatments in the United States has traditionally required the sign-off of a psychologist or psychiatrist. Many of these saw transgender people who did not desire a binary gender or who experienced homosexual attraction as not properly “transsexual” but deviant in a number of ways not reducible to sex/gender alone. To access medical transition, many trans people painted the picture of a desire for a normative masculinity or femininity, assuring doctors and other gatekeepers that what they desired was a correction to their gender abnormality so that they could live a “normal” life. In fact, they often categorized gender transition as a path away from lesbianism or gay attraction, since those desires would be heterosexual in the context of their new gender. Trans people shared best practices for the types of life narratives that were most likely to get results, as a form of community care.

As the Orlandos wait to be called into the psychiatrist’s office to be prescribed hormone treatments, they share knowledge with one another about how best to obtain the treatments they need. “Be careful what you say to him,” Orlando Koriangelis Brawn tells Orlando Vanasay Khamphommala. “If you tell him you’re nonbinary, he’ll send you home with a kick in the ass.” So rather than wait for the authorization of the medical professionals (here represented by a psychiatrist whose interview with Orlando Liz Christin includes asking invasive questions about her genitals), the Orlandos in the waiting room decide to take the means of gender production into their own hands and start gleefully sharing testosterone and estrogen as the waiting room turns into a club scene full of lights, movement, and free-flowing pharmaceuticals. Dancing to a song that proudly proclaims, “You’re not the doctor’s bitch,” the Orlandos turn a space of tense and often painful reliance on outside recognition by medical professionals into an affirming, joyful scene of shared trans community knowledge, shared material resources, and political solidarity. They recognize one another. This is a t4t revolution of the waiting room.

Jules Rosskam’s hybrid documentary Desire Lines also provides examples of t4t trans care in filmic form, this time focusing specifically on transmasculine men and their roles within cisgender gay male spaces. To do so, it weaves together three interrelated narrative threads. The first is a relatively straightforward talking-head segment in which various transmasculine people and trans men speak candidly about their sexual desires for cisgender men, the kinds of sex they have, and the kinds of reactions they receive from trans and cis people alike. The second thread is a fictional narrative in which a nearly sixty-year old Iranian-American trans male researcher named Ahmad Arastoo (Aden Hakimi) finds himself unwillingly relying on a younger trans archivist named Kieran (Theo Germaine, of Work in Progress fame) to help him navigate his attraction to men. Lastly, Rosskam makes use of archival interview footage shot of Lou Sullivan, a prominent gay trans male activist who died of AIDS in 1989 and who was instrumental in organizing the transmasc community. These three threads circle one another, expanding on interconnected themes of valuing and uncovering history, which Hil Malatino has explicitly claimed as a kind of trans care: “a common feature of trans arts of cultivating resilience has to do with turning to the historical record for proof of life, for evidence that trans lives are livable because they’ve been lived.”²¹ In shedding light on an untold history of gay transmasculine men, Rosskam is providing a path to resilience for gay trans men to come.

Rosskam takes on a relatively taboo subject in transmasculine circles, a fact that the documentary explicitly addresses. While transmasculine folks often told doctors and psychiatrists they had no desire for cisgender men and would, if given access to treatment, become straight men, the truth was somewhat more complicated. Trans men often find their attractions shifting as they access hormonal treatments. While there’s unsurprisingly very little scientific data on this phenomenon, most trans men see this not as a direct biological fact of testosterone, but as an impact of their increased confidence in their body and desires. As one of Rosskam’s interviewees puts it, “Did the T make me gay? . . . What I know is that it was just like completely undesirable to me to have sex with men when I was a woman. And it wasn’t until I thought about the idea that I could have sex with gay men, and that I would be gay, that suddenly it was like way more open.”

Desire Lines serves as a kind of t4t erotic inquiry, asking how trans gay men might start to come out of the shadows of heteronormative life narratives imposed upon them by the medical establishment and start to embrace their place within the gay male community without shame. Rosskam’s documentary is a step toward that future and breaks the transmasculine taboo surrounding gay sex in order to address some of the very real and particular needs that trans men might have in gay erotic spaces—from considerations around pregnancy, HPV, and HIV to how to disclose your trans status when cruising, and navigating transphobia in the gay community. As such, Rosskam’s film collects and disseminates intracommunity knowledge and becomes a transmasculine resource, a cinematic archive in its own right.

Scenes of t4t intimacy on-screen are still a rare feature in either documentary or fiction film, but Desire Lines relies upon them. Since Rosskam’s film is ostensibly about the sexual attractions between trans and cisgender men, it might seem strange to claim that the most important scenes of intimacy in the film are actually those between trans men; some of them sexually or romantically intimate, others intimate in platonic, familial, and supportive forms. Rosskam does not interview a single cisgender man in the entire film. Instead, he focuses on how members of the transmasc community process their changing sexual desires. Therefore, while discussions of sexual intimacy in the film feature lengthy exchanges about cisgender men, no cis men actually speak for themselves. Rather, intimate moments center a t4t ethics of emotional care. Perhaps the most obvious t4t exchange is to be found in the relationship that unfolds between Kieran and Ahmad over the course of the fictional thread of the documentary, one in which sexual desire and the desire for transgender history are interdependent.

Kieran serves as the documentary’s guide from the film’s opening scenes in a steamy, 1980s-era gay bathhouse. The camera follows the light wood-paneled walls past a window with a handwritten sign advertising poppers (five dollars a bottle) and continues down the hallway, stealing glances of mustachioed men in various states of undress as it peeks coyly into each doorway, even slowing to look back appreciatively at one young man who seems to have lost his towel. The camera is cruising. But then a final doorway reveals a surprisingly sterile office interior flooded with fluorescent light and a queer masc person bent over an institutional desk reading diligently. A shirtless Kieran walks out of the room and addresses the camera directly: “First time here, right? Let me show you the room.”

Then Kieran leads Ahmad down a linoleum-floored hallway where the roof leaks gently into a bucket and the audience finds themselves no longer in the warm bathhouse, but in an underfunded archive (“The board had big plans for renovation”). The film never explains exactly what Ahmad is researching, except that the magazines and pamphlets Kieran pulls for him all seem to feature headlines like “Chicago Beefcake” and he is particularly interested in bathhouses and porn theaters, the spaces of anonymous queer public encounters related in Samuel R. Delany’s Time Square Red, Time Square Blue. Ahmad is quiet about his research, reserved even, but Hakimi skillfully allows glimpses of Ahmad’s confused curiosity to occasionally burst through the character’s cool façade.

Kieran illuminates the archive, at one point quite literally handing Ahmad a light bulb when the researcher’s desk lamp goes out. And part of this comfort with the archive is also their comfort with their own sexual desires. Kieran is decidedly open about both their gender and their sexuality: before the film’s five-minute mark, Kieran’s phone has already blinked from where they placed it on Ahmad’s desk, revealing an explicit message from a hookup app that openly mentions Kieran’s trans anatomy. They wear queer and trans pins to work and speak openly to Ahmad about “guys like us.” Kieran’s comfort with their desires stands in stark contrast to Ahmad, who has come to the archive for a “personal project” he doesn’t elaborate on.

Looking at a scene between Ahmad and Kieran, both interpretations of trans desire—for knowledge and for male bodies—manifest themselves simultaneously in a room in the archive. Ahmad is sorting through uncatalogued materials while a large screen on the opposite wall plays one of Lou Sullivan’s interviews. At one point in the scene, Kieran drops materials and both men lean down to retrieve them in a move calling to mind every romantic comedy ever written. Ahmad maintains a long moment of eye contact with Kieran, the camera cutting back and forth between them before zooming out to show Lou Sullivan frozen midinterview, looming large between the two characters. Ahmad turns from Kieran to look at Sullivan, desire passing over his face yet again. In this moment, the film suggests that what Ahmad longs for might be the openness with which Kieran and Sullivan both embrace their gay desires, rather than either man per se. It is knowledge—both self- and community knowledge, as well as perhaps the courage to act on that knowledge—that Ahmad desires. The audience also looks with Ahmad. The camera is positioned across from Sullivan, Kieran across from Ahmad. And so the film creates a transmasculine geography, in which each trans look is reciprocated. The film assumes a transmasc audience, and Desire Lines thus invites the audience into community with the fictional trans characters, and with the real, historical Sullivan.

Rosskam’s interest in the archive even spills over into the more straightforward interview portions of the film as he intermingles them with these t4t fictional scenes. Just as Orlando foregrounds filmic process in an attempt to refuse a final visual form for the trans body or the trans film, Desire Lines participates in the explicit cataloging and categorization of artifacts of trans history as a form of community support. It does the work of constructing a trans archive, such that the film provides much the same kind of t4t care support for its trans audience that Kieran provides for Ahmad.

For example, during one of the interview portions of the film, a room full of nonbinary and transmasculine people talk about coming to grips with being trans, with one participant, Juju MinXXX, stressing that they thought they couldn’t be trans because they didn’t have dysphoric feelings surrounding their genitals. The story reaches its logical conclusion, with the interview subject rehearsing their moment of realization that they are indeed trans, and then something strange happens: the image pauses, and a digital video player interface appears over the frozen interview subject, complete with Pause and Fast-Forward buttons. During my first viewing (on my laptop), I even found myself wanting to press Play during the few seconds of confusion, before the video window shrank and I got a view of the computer on which the video was presumably playing.

The user (Rosskam?) opens the information panel about the interview with MinXXX, revealing a number of tags that have been applied to it to make it findable, including “trans” “nonbinary” “Black” “Chinese” and “Chicago.” The user deletes these tags and replaces them using language from the interview with MinXXX, which generates tags like “dominant bottom” and “gender euphoria.” Much as the rehearsal-style scenes in Preciado’s Orlando place the audience at a distance in order to highlight the film’s construction, Desire Lines reminds its audience that the documentary is itself a kind of archive. The first set of tags is a normative list of identity categories that might be applied to MinXXX: categories of gender, race, nationality, and geographic location. But the revised tags allow the video to be found in other contexts, contexts in which the user might search by sexual role or power dynamics, or might be searching for trans-particular instances of euphoria. In the video’s retagging, Rosskam prioritizes both the trans researcher and the trans subject; tagging queer and trans-community-specific search terms that would be most accessible to trans researchers means that the interview is more likely to be found by researchers not looking to impose a binary framework on to MinXXX. It also means that Rosskam is choosing to organize and categorize his own archive based on the way that his subjects describe themselves, rather than by applying any sort of outside categorization that might misrepresent their understandings of their own identities.

Desire Lines may be a hybridized film, but it has strong commitments to documentary that surface in these moments. The sorting, cataloguing, and framing of interviews, personal histories, and subject matter represent archival work, but also filmmaking work. In Desire Lines Rosskam’s treatment of his subjects is made transparent; the process of crafting the cinematic image, like the process of crafting a livable gender, generates its own meaning. By modeling these ethical archival and filmmaking practices‚ Desire Lines provides a kind of model of ethical trans knowledge. Making this t4t care labor visible is a way of preserving subjects’ truths for future researchers and modeling that preservation within the documentary archive itself. It is not enough that Desire Lines provides t4t care during filmmaking and as a key component in the narrative; it wants to foreground that care as constitutive of the hybridized film itself.

In a move of t4t solidarity, Kieran provides Ahmad with a path to archival knowledge, leading Ahmad through both archive and bathhouse. In the film’s final scene, Kieran literally walks Ahmad out of the fluorescent light of the archive, down the hallway they entered at the beginning of the film, and into an opulent, Middle Eastern–style bathhouse with gleaming tile floors and dusty light beams filtering in through moucharaby window screens. There the camera slowly cruises again, assuming Ahmad’s point of view as he takes in the range of bodies and genders on display; the men in this bathhouse are of every size, shape, and color. Some of the men sport top surgery scars, some have breasts, some have beards and body hair, others long hair and tattoos. All these bodies are welcome. Instead of the anonymous, appraising looks the camera receives in the opening bathhouse scene, this time the patrons smile as the camera moves by, sometimes offering unheard greetings and acknowledgments. This is a transmasculine community unburdened by the secret of its homosexual desires, free not only to imagine sex with cisgender men as empowering and masculinizing, but also to see a wide range of masculinities as deserving of gay desire. Here, Ahmad receives, perhaps for the first time, recognition of his desires, widespread acceptance and understanding, and access to a vibrant network of gay transmasculine desire rather than the frozen past of the archive. Here, Ahmad can feel at home.

Desire Lines ends with Ahmad and Kieran sharing a knowing look. Separated on opposite sides of the bathhouse and in the arms of other men, their intimacy is one of shared understanding and care—a t4t intimacy that validates the multiplicity of desires experienced by trans subjects. Through dignifying and exploring these desires, the film also constructs a much-needed archive and models how archival techniques can serve as a form of community care.

In an increasingly precarious political and social environment for transgender people in the United States and around the world, trans cinema can be a place of recognition and relief. At the time of this writing, twenty-seven antitrans bills have already passed in the United States in 2024 alone—prohibiting states from providing hormone-replacement therapy to incarcerated trans people; abolishing offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion in public schools and universities; and banning teacher-training programs that teach “identity politics” or “theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States.”²² Hate cannot be fully measured by the number of phobic pieces of legislation or the uptick in antitrans violence, but such measurements do provide statistical validation for what trans people can feel: it’s tough out there.

In Orlando, Rizza speaks directly to his own desire to be openly trans, rather than to live a stealth existence, by highlighting a focus on process: “Today I define myself as a trans boy,” he tells the camera, “and not just as a boy . . . when I present myself as a boy, I erase all that I lived as a trans person and it deletes part of my history.” Rizza’s gender is not about an approximation of cisgender norms, nor is it an attempt to disappear the constructedness of his gender. Rather, Rizza celebrates an endless becoming, a gender that is and will always be about movement and change. As trans cinema multiplies, filmmakers can move beyond desires for representation to begin to experiment with techniques for community care in cinematic form by similarly focusing on process over product. This means refusing to simplify the complexity of lived gender into the narrow lens of “representation” and instead searching for techniques of visibility that can hold and support a trans audience in their own becoming.

Orlando does not seek the stability of a stealth image, one that hides the labor of its crafting. Instead, Orlando celebrates an endless process, a movement through, around, and between genders that sees the technologies of gender as a poetic medium through which to express our innermost selves. Orlando’s exuberance is generated through sharing those technologies, that poetry, with its trans viewers. Desire Lines, too, invites viewers into the back stages of gender through its careful emphasis on trans men teaching, desiring, and leading other trans men. What point, Desire Lines asks, is there in forging a livable gender and sexuality if one does not become a guide for the trans person behind them? In addressing gay desire in the transmasc community, Rosskam destigmatizes the topic. By turning to the archive, Rosskam demonstrates that the histories and ephemera we save, treasure, and even desire behold and care for us even as we behold and care for them. Preciado’s Orlando and Rosskam’s Desire Lines are documentaries that hold space for trans audiences in the very techniques of their making, and in refusing to let those techniques disappear into the cinematic spectacle. By prioritizing and visualizing process in their films, Preciado and Rosskam prove that they understand transition as an eternal becoming, a daily practice that doesn’t end when one reaches a gendered destination.