‘Kokomo City’ Sees Its Subjects for Who They Are

A new documentary offers a complex portrait of Black transgender sex workers, with the snappy production values of a Quentin Tarantino or Spike Lee film.

Kokomo City, a new documentary about Black trans sex workers by the filmmaker D. Smith, begins with a story that could’ve been a Pulp Fiction vignette. One of the film’s main subjects, a woman named Liyah who lives in Georgia, describes a standard encounter that takes a sharp turn when she spots her would-be client’s pistol. “The way that I saw it was, it’s either his life or mine,” Liyah says, before recounting the ensuing skirmish: She grabbed the gun and attempted to shoot the man. When the gun failed to go off, he tried to wrestle it away from her, and the pair tumbled down a flight of stairs. The man raced off afterward, the kind of exit that would normally signal the end of a harrowing ordeal. But that’s not how this saga concluded, she explains, coyly raking her acrylic nails through the end of her long ponytail as she describes the text exchange that followed—and the carnal do-over it prompted.

Shot entirely in high-contrast monochrome, Kokomo City brings an artful eye and a playful sound design to material that often gets more melodramatic visual treatment. For Smith, a Grammy-nominated music producer and trans woman who says she was shunned by the industry after transitioning, directing the film presented an opportunity to channel a wide array of influences into a different creative form. Her inspiration didn’t come from documentary or journalism, she told me in a recent interview, but from provocative filmmakers and artists like the Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí. “I thought, If Spike Lee and [Quentin] Tarantino were to team up and do a documentary about trans women, what would that look like?” she said.

Smith’s film, which opened on July 28, joins another new documentary by trans women filmmakers. HBO’s The Stroll, directed by Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker, charts the experiences of trans sex workers in New York City’s meatpacking district, and Kokomo City follows women in both New York and Georgia. Both films seem to benefit tremendously from the trust that their subjects appear to have in the filmmakers. Smith conducted the interviews for Kokomo City, and it’s clear—even when watching the women speak about difficult experiences—that they’d established a comfortable rapport ahead of time. There’s little euphemizing and plenty of laughter.

But whereas The Stroll is a glossy production that pulls in archival footage and visual mapping to render the changing neighborhood where its subjects worked over several decades, Kokomo City draws its panache largely from the electric personalities of Smith’s interviewees: Liyah, Daniella, Koko Da Doll, and Dominique. The women reflect on transitioning as well as on sex work, which all of them have done to make a living. Their accounts share some overlapping themes that are common experiences for people within the community: They were kicked out of their homes or abandoned by family after coming out, turned to sex work because economic prospects for trans women are slim even now, and risk violence every time they interact with a potential client. By keeping Kokomo City so attuned to the film’s subjects, Smith forces viewers to listen intently to what they’re saying. Unlike its most obvious predecessor, Paris Is Burning, or the more recent scripted series Pose, Smith’s documentary doesn’t allow the viewer to be soothed by spectacle—there are no decked-out ballrooms, no elaborate costumes. Instead, as in Sara Jordenö and Twiggy Pucci Garcon’s 2016 feature, Kiki, and Elegance Bratton’s 2021 documentary, Pier Kids, Smith’s film foregrounds the complicated stories of its subjects’ lives. We meet the women in intimate settings, most often inside their own homes. The film jumps from Liyah speaking on her bed to Daniella washing her face in her New York City bathroom and extolling the virtues of an electric face shaver, which she keeps in her purse to help avoid the ramifications that might result from the wrong person perceiving her as trans.

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Some of the most affecting moments in Kokomo City are those in which the women speak candidly and forcefully about social and familial dynamics, specifically within Black communities. I was particularly struck, for example, by Daniella’s lengthy, nuanced meditation on the difficulty for Black mothers, when their child transitions, to feel that they are losing a son in a world where they may not feel protected by other Black men. Dominique is among the women who reflect on how they have been perceived by other Black people, and she offers keen analysis that points to the role white supremacy has played in shaping our conceptions of gender since the antebellum era. The concept of “ideal womanhood,” arising out of social hierarchies driven by slavery, by nature excluded Black cisgender women, who were deemed brutish even as they were forced to reproduce—and to nurture white children.

Scholars such as bell hooks and Sarah Olutola have studied the ways this exclusion still manifests in Black cis women’s lives. And writers like Fopé Ajanaku have observed how, because of “historical amnesia” or a desire to perform acceptable femininity, some Black cis women have sought to distance themselves from the plight of Black trans women. In such a climate, the film suggests, these attempts are both divisive and futile, and Kokomo City weaves in several perspectives that underscore the senselessness of these chasms—a through line that was crucial for Smith. “There is a huge disconnect between transgender people, queer people, and the [broader] Black community,” Smith told me. “I wanted to create a film or project that could maybe warm us up to a different conversation.”

The documentary’s sharp focus is partly a function of Smith’s unorthodox journey to filmmaking. When she set out to produce the documentary, Smith said, she wasn’t aiming for Sundance (where the film premiered earlier this year and racked up multiple awards) or a theatrical release. Nor did she have the kind of budget that would permit her to tackle every facet of Black transgender life. The film was the beginning of a new professional chapter for Smith, who had worked with artists including Lil Wayne, Keri Hilson, and Ciara before she transitioned in 2014 and lost her status in the music industry. Smith said that labels were suddenly reluctant to negotiate new deals with her or release songs that she’d already worked on. The distancing thrust her into a period of financial (and emotional) turmoil: She lived at times in her car, on other people’s couches, or in hotel rooms. “All I had,” she said, “was my camera, my backpack, and my hormone pills.”

Smith found some of her subjects by poking around the comment sections on Instagram, where she’d see other trans women responding to posts by popular figures. The women were eager to talk, and Smith told me that her transparency about resources helped encourage her subjects’ candor. “Listen, there’s no glam; we don’t have a makeup team. There’s no fancy lighting person; everything you see is me. I’m here with my backpack and my one little LED light here,” she remembered saying. “I think it was really refreshing for them … But I also was very respectful in their personal homes. I didn’t wanna come across like I was entitled to any of the intimacy that they were giving me.”

Kokomo City includes interviews with men who speak about their attraction to trans women and about the rigid constraints of Black masculinity. Their reflections paint a portrait of masculinity in crisis, deepening the film’s study of how harmful restrictive gender expectations can be. Sitting in mundane places—cars, couches, bars, fishing docks—these men speak candidly of their earliest lessons about what it meant to fail by being too soft, too feminine. In another film, these kinds of statements might feel incomplete—memories shared without necessary context. Here, though, they register as impassioned recollections from men who are earnestly grappling with manhood and being seen as a man who is attracted to trans women. The trust between filmmaker and subject is palpable in these interviews too, and Smith noted that the men featured in Kokomo City are friends of hers, most of whom she met while working in the music industry.

The men’s stories are all the more wrenching considering the growing number of hate crimes against trans people, in particular Black trans women. The risk of violence is especially high for sex workers, who are most often killed by intimate partners—the number of such deaths has been climbing in recent years. Kokomo City’s subjects speak about the constant threat of violence from men, whether lovers or strangers, and the fear that others will justify their death because of how they lived. And less than three months after the Sundance premiere, Koko Da Doll—one of the film’s most charismatic figures—was fatally shot, a tragedy that Smith considers the most devastating part of working on the film.

To Smith, Koko’s death wasn’t just a personal tragedy. “My main reason to do this film was to show another side of our reality—we’re fun, we’re fun to talk to, we’re really warm people,” she said. “Koko’s passing really just brought it all the way back home. The most important thing is that trans women need to be protected, and Black men need the opportunity to heal.”