Samuel R. Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue is one of my favorite portraits of queer life: Part memoir, part history lesson of New York’s gay theaters and part analysis of what cruising contributes to a life. Like The Deuce, Delany’s decades watching porn in public documented wider urban gentrification alongside a social boxing-in—factors, driven by the rancid love affair between developers and politicians, that stole an entire way of socializing under the guise of cleaning up the neighborhood. These lives, Delany’s life, became less rich; they were more “respectable,” and therefore their connections restricted to the dehumanizing sphere of networking. What was taken was the ability to make truthful contact. We’ve come a long way since the ’90s, but the cycle of deviance, acceptance and monetization have continued to turn. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue makes an appearance in the background of Desire Lines, which is also where the movie stashes all its insight. Jules Rosskam’s hybrid film hides a trove of charming interviews with trans men, about their experiences making contact in a queer world still stacked against them, inside a grating drama.
This narrative element has the tenor and acting caliber of a porn set-up, with the money shots being intimate conversations with a variety of insightful and vulnerable real-life participants. Rosskam really makes us work to hear what these subjects have to say, powering through stilted conversations between archival worker Kieran (Theo Germaine) and visiting researcher Ahmad (Aden Hakimi). The two keep bumping into each other professionally, obviously eyeballing one another, while Ahmad’s research comes to life in dream-like sequences half-evoking the bathhouses and adult bookstores of Boystown. Nudity is ubiquitous, sure, but the aesthetic is just a pencil sketch of a vibrant ecosystem.
More effective are readings of correspondence and archival footage, which try to conjure up the liminal sense of the queer community that’s so apparent when poring over old magazine clippings or personal ads. The ambition to transport us between past and present, to highlight how the fringe-dwelling lives captured in these yellowed pieces of newsprint carried emotions still searingly relevant today, is a natural extension of research. When you’re enamored with history, you want everyone to understand how important it is that these lives can still touch you. Little will make you more evangelical than seeing yourself in the past.
Kieran and Ahmad never come right out and say that they’re digging through the materials at Chicago’s Leather Archives & Museum—and Desire Lines was clearly not shot there, opting instead for a drab, whitewashed office basement—but since they later visit sauna hotspot Steamworks (and since many of the subjects are familiar faces from Chicago’s queer scene), it seems like this is the intent. But Desire Lines has no sense of place, and barely has a sense of self.
As it frets inside the self-imposed limits of its fiction, Desire Lines finally relaxes when handing itself over to the confident voices of its interviewees. Desire Lines’ dramatic insecurity gives it the sense of an academic paper that’s sprawled beyond its confines—spilling over into a multimedia mess simply because it’s trendy to do so—but the actual sociological work done by the film can be thrilling. The trans men it talks to are open, hilarious and obviously used to discussing their experiences explicitly. Who else is going to stick up for them or their needs?
Commenting upon their identities, sexualities and the ways these factors cause friction—even danger—in their social lives, people from different generations and races speak eloquently about the problems of modern queer life. Being someone’s turn-off or, worse, being someone’s fetish. Being shunned from the cis gay club scene, while feeling guilty for an attraction to cis white gay men. Being denied access to proper healthcare, denying themselves as they feel like imposters. Some of the best scenes include two participants at once, with sparkling confrontation at their heart. It’s riveting, warm and feels like shooting the shit with your friends over a cocktail. All of them have more screen presence than the actors stalling for time between these moments.
When Rosskam returns us to his shoehorned meet-cute, inept at best and ridiculous at worst, it’s criminal. Not only is the pacing, editing and acting all so mistimed that scenes feel a bit like if a queer romance accidentally found its way into an HR-mandated training video, the story itself undermines the film’s thesis with badly handled tropes. Aside from the simply tedious topics (an HIV scare!), Ahmad’s identity as an Iranian American seemingly comes up only to be ogled by his white companion. No, Ahmad doesn’t really talk about how it informs his queerness; yes, Kieran does comment on his cooking like he’s never had anything but kale salads.
Maybe if Desire Lines didn’t go above and beyond in recruiting a stable of scene-stealing trans men as interview subjects, its ambitions to be something beyond a documentary wouldn’t seem so hopeless. This intent—formalized through an overreliance on slow tracking shots of empty halls, excruciating navigations through folders on a computer desktop, and that aforementioned relationship—tugs our attention away from nonfiction that already clearly makes the decades-spanning connections that the fiction struggles with. As these men talk, laugh, disagree and relate, honest queer life fills the air. The kindest thing to do is let us breathe it in.
Director: Jules Rosskam
Writer: Jules Rosskam, Nate Gualtieri
Starring: Theo Germaine, Aden Hakimi
Release Date: January 22, 2024 (Sundance)
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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