Out of the margins
‘Saturday Church’ strives for authenticity by casting trans actors
If Hollywood’s 2017 revealed anything, it’s that queer cinema is on the rise. From the historic Academy Award win for “Moonlight” early in the year to the releases of “Battle of the Sexes” and “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women” from major studios — not to mention this year’s Oscar contenders “Call Me by Your Name, “A Fantastic Woman” and “The Wound’ — films by and about LGBTQ people are receiving more attention and delivering more complex story lines.
The trend looks to continue in 2018, and the upcoming Ryan Murphy-created series “Pose” on FX could take things even farther on television with a historic LGBTQ-laden ensemble in a portrait of “ball culture” in ‘80s New York.
But despite these obvious steps forward for increased representation across all screens, narratives around transgender people are often still limited in their scope.
“We continue to see productions that are focusing on the death of the experience of what it is to be a trans woman,” said trans actress Indya Moore. “But we have lives and experiences that aren’t just about the struggles of being trans and on the margins. Where are [the stories] where our transness is not [the major plot point]?”
Moore is part of the “Pose” cast and also stars in “Saturday Church,” a film opening Friday in Los Angeles and on digital platforms, which attempts to help lead such a charge.
From first-time writer-director Damon Cardasis, “Saturday Church” is the story of 14-yearold Ulysses (fresh face Luka Kain), a shy and effeminate kid grappling with questions about gender identity. Their journey to self-discovery takes a turn after meeting a group of trans and gay folk who take Ulysses to “Saturday church,” a program for LGBTQ youth held in the basement of a local place of worship. There, the teen discovers a passion for, and family in, New York’s ballroom scene.
Margot Bingham plays Ulysses’ single mother and Regina Taylor is the devoutly conservative aunt opposite Marquis Rodriguez and trans actresses Moore, Mj Rodriguez (also in “Pose”), Alexia Garcia and Kate Bornstein.
Ballroom, as seen in docs “Paris Is Burning” and “Kiki,” is portrayed as a place of acceptance for participants who find themselves otherwise marginalized. Most are black or Latinx, and they
belong to cliques known as “houses.”
Led by a mother or father figure, houses serve as families for their members, some of whom have cut ties with their biological kin. Those houses are named after fashion designers such as Chanel or Balenciaga or carry the name of a legend in the community, like Willi Ninja or Pepper LaBeija. Voguing, the now almost mainstream dance form, hails from this community.
Cardasis was influenced to pen “Saturday Church” by an actual LGBTQ outreach program in New York held at the West Village’s episcopal church St. Luke in the Fields. He learned of the program, called Art & Acceptance, through his mother, an Episcopal priest in the Bronx, and volunteered with the group for a number of months.
“After meeting the kids in the program, I was inspired by their narratives and their strength and creativity and their sense of empowerment when they performed,” he said. “[The film] took shape from there.”
While his intention was to just “tell a very human story, to show the challenges this character was going through,” Cardasis knew that for the film, which includes song and dance numbers, to feel authentic to the world he had volunteered in, people from that very program and the ballroom scene needed to be involved.
“There was no question in my mind that the characters needed to be played by people within the community,” he said. “It was harder to put together a movie casting ‘unknown’ or first-time actors, [but] there was no other way of doing it.”
The result is a supporting cast of primarily trans women with varying degrees of acting experience but who all intimately know the experiences of the characters they play. Many of the extras are either from the church’s program or members of the ballroom scene.
Garcia, who is a member of the House of Xtrava-