Sundance 2024 Film Review: Desire Lines ★★★1/2

Writer-director-editor Jules Rosskam’s Desire Lines, which received its world premiere in the NEXT section at the 40th Sundance Film Festival and won the NEXT Special Jury Award, boldly forges its own hybrid form to explore intimate stories of transmasculine sexuality from the past and present.

In the narrative fiction strand of the film (written by Nate Gualtieri), an unassuming Persian-American trans man in his early 60s, Ahmad (Aden Hakimi), is warmly welcomed to an LGBTQ+ archive in Chicago by a confident and flirty younger transmasc person, Kieran (Theo Germaine). We later learn that it is early in 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic on the horizon.

The focus of Ahmad’s research is bathhouses; the way they dealt with the onset of HIV/AIDS; their forced closures in some cities during the height of the crisis in the US; and the accounts of queer trans men who have sex with cis men, which often involve descriptions of encounters at bathhouses. Ahmad has never been to a bathhouse, and his research fires his imagination, drawing him into vividly evoked fantasies of what it would have been like to have donned a towel and cruised the hallways of a bustling bathhouse during the post-Stonewall queer sexual liberation of the late 70s (to the strains of Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”); during the fear of the 80s (with an obituary-filled community notice board); as well as what it would be like today. At times, as he reads accounts from the past, Ahmad imagines himself in the same scenario that is being described and, rather like the double casting in The Wizard of Oz, his fantasies are sometimes populated by fellow researchers from the reading room he is in.

Through Ahmad’s research, we are privy to a series of contemporary videos of transmasc folks sharing their sexual experiences with cis gay men. These are personal, frank, unscripted to-camera interviews, that cover a diverse array of transmasc identities. With pacy editing that flows well, there is generally no music accompanying these videos, which are not sensationalized in any way, but allow the subjects’ words to speak for themselves. Frequently unapologetically explicit, the interviewees share a spectrum of experiences including kink, BDSM, and sex work; what they like to vocalize during sex; and their relationship with their own bodies. There are also clips from a lively group discussion between transmasculine folks that add a different dynamic to this element of the film. While in another scenario, setup like an acting audition, pairs of transmasculine folks and cis men read dialogue from dating app conversations to one another, sparking discussions about how trans men are often perceived and treated by cis gay men, the intersection of race with gender identity and sexuality, and the differences between online and real life interactions.

The pressure, both internal and external, to have condomless sex with gay men in a time of U=U and PrEP, and present day failures of healthcare providers when it comes to their approach to trans men who have sex with men, is a topic that comes up both in the contemporary interviews and in the narrative fiction strand of the film. In fact, all of the various elements of Desire Lines are in fascinating conversation with each other, in a film that continually invites our engagement and active participation as viewers rather than guiding us towards what to think.

Through archive footage, Kieran introduces Ahmad to one of his trancestor heroes, author and activist Lou Sullivan. When he learnt that he was HIV-positive, Lou wanted to go on record in a series of filmed interviews with his psychiatrist to discuss his life as a gay trans man, partly so that future gay transmasc folks (like Ahmad, and Kieran) would not feel so alone. Ahmad also delves into Lou’s written correspondence with Ben Power, an activist and community historian who had thought he was the only gay trans man in existence until he discovered Lou through his 1990 booklet, Information for the Female to Male Cross Dresser and Transsexual. As Ahmad encounters first person documents from the past and engages with the contemporary videos, the evolution of language and the expansion of ideas around gender and what transmasculinity can encompass is highlighted, along with a sense of empowerment in knowing that trans men like him have always existed, although they might have used different words to describe themselves.

In excavating transmasc histories and placing them alongside contemporary conversations, Rosskam has created a vital new document that is likely to spark some lively discussions and inspire viewers to do their own research on Lou Sullivan and other groundbreaking transcestors. Desire Lines packs a lot into its 83-minute running time, and the result is a refreshingly sex positive, layered, and stimulating work that deserves its place alongside films that blend trans history and the present, such as Chase Joynt’s Framing Agnes and No Ordinary Man, co-directed with Aisling Chin-Yee and co-written by Amos Mac, who was a consulting editor on Rosskam’s film. In a time when trans lives continue to be threatened by harmful rhetoric and legislation by regressive lawmakers, such impactful authentic representation of trans people is urgently needed. For all its specificity, this is essentially a film about the pleasure and complexities of human connection, which the joyous final sequence of the film revels in.

By James Kleinmann

Desire Lines received its world premiere in the NEXT section at the 40th Sundance Film Festival on the opening day and screens again in person on January 22nd, 23rd, 25th, and 26th and is also available on demand online January 25th – 28th, 2024 at Festival.Sundance.org. Discover more LGBTQ+ highlights at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.