Named after his earlier monograph, the debut feature film by photographer Luke Gilford brings the rodeo stars of his book to the big screen
When Luke Gilford’s monograph, National Anthem, released in November 2020, his images presented a melioric vision for Americana during a year that threatened to be the nation’s death rattle. As one naked emperor was elected to succeed the other, as the pandemic tore through and tore asunder communities, as millions marched in protest of state-sanctioned racial violence, Gilford’s portraits of rodeo stars in drag and leather-clad butch cowboys offered a glimpse of possibility for national pride. Today, with a rematch election on the horizon and the merits of the American experiment under scrutiny, Gilford’s debut feature film—which shares a name with his 2020 monograph inspired by an original shoot Document commissioned from the photographer in 2018—emerges yet again as a cautiously patriotic project against a backdrop of national disenchantment.
That isn’t to say that National Anthem naïvely doubles down on its titular song’s stars-and-stripes effusion. Instead, Gilford has crafted a surprisingly sober coming-of-age story that explores the ambivalence of queer rural life. The film follows Dylan, a young laborer in New Mexico who finds work at a queer commune. At the House of Splendor—as the commune is called—Dylan discovers the exuberant allure of queer life, and he is soon forced to reckon with the chasm between the community he was raised by and the community he desires. The tensions between birth and chosen family parallel the competing catch-22s of rural and urban life: deciding to live affordably in a state that threatens to outlaw your existence or to go broke trying to live in a place that celebrates you. In one scene of the film, an older drag queen tells Dylan—our neophyte protagonist with pupils the size of dollar coins, played by Charlie Plummer—“You don’t go to the city to be a queen. You got to the city to be a yuppie.” Dylan probes: “Isn’t that where they make the big money?” The queen responds, finger wagging in the air, “And spend it on what, honey? A parking spot?” Which is to say: Why can’t we make our home here?
National Anthem is a natural continuation of Gilford’s work honoring the complex reality of queer people who live in predominantly conservative states. Where the photographer’s monograph compiled an archive that documents the rural queer experience, his film offers a more discursive interrogation of why and how these factions take shape in states with increasingly hostile legislation and vanishing community spaces.
Ahead of National Anthem’s wide release, Luke Gilford spoke with Document about working with the lexicon of the Western to tell a queer story, the possibility of salvaging the American flag from the right, and refusing to give into Hollywood’s “kill your gays” trope.
Olivia Treynor: Your 2020 monograph shares a name with this film. What’s the relationship between the two projects?
Luke Gilford: Making the book was such a social process, going to all these rodeos and doing research, so it was really hard to not be able to share the book [in person] with all the people that were part of it [because of COVID]. It’s been a very slow process since then, but I’ve had some meaningful moments. When we were making the movie, one person in particular—who isn’t, you know, ‘up to speed’ on all of the identity politics stuff, but would probably [identify as] trans if they lived in the city—came up to me and said that they have been hiding from me that they have cancer for the last four years that I’ve been working on [National Anthem]. For them to work, they have to dress as a man; they don’t feel comfortable living their truth as a woman. The rodeo is when that side of themselves comes out. To see themself reflected back and documented in their full authenticity in the book was just incredibly meaningful. They said, ‘I feel like I can die happy now that the world has seen me as my true self.’ It was such a meaningful moment. In the film, there’s a really beautiful shot of them.
Olivia: I felt like I recognized some faces in the movie! Were some of the cast members previous interlocutors from the photo project?
Luke: Yes. I’m really inspired by films that blend scripted with unscripted, and actors with non-actors. That was an intention from the beginning. I had been so immersed in this world for years. I knew I didn’t want to make a doc, I knew I wanted it to be scripted, but it also felt so important to include the real community. I mean, Dylan’s story is very much my own, in terms of going into this world and feeling that—I write in the foreword of the book—this ‘electric charge of belonging,’ which I had never really felt before. I’ve built so much trust and intimacy with these folks, and really wanted to celebrate them, and represent them in the movie.
I had lived on a queer ranch in Tennessee—and a few other places, too—and some of those folks came and were part of what we called the House of Splendor Family. It was a beautiful process for the actors to get to know all these folks. I think it was really helpful for [the actors] when getting into character, because they were spending time with people whose real lives are immersed in this culture.
Olivia: The Western has long been a genre self-conscious of its relationship to masculinity, colonialism, and desire. How does this film negotiate the Western as an archetype and aesthetic?
Luke: I like to say that National Anthem is a Western for the new world. In [classic] Westerns, we have the archetype of the cowboy symbolizing virility and domination through violence; we’re told that it’s dangerous and feminine to express our emotions. I wanted to show the beauty of a cowboy who is brave enough to get on a bull as well as brave enough to try drag. Charlie [Plummer], who plays Dylan, was way more scared to try drag than he was to get on a bull. And both of those things are beautiful! These boxes and labels cannot contain who we are. Realizing that is a spiritual journey.
What I love about the cowboy archetype, and what I love about some Westerns, is that sense of a spiritual journey. For example, Paris, Texas, is left of center in terms of a Western, but it takes the genre’s aesthetics and creates a spiritual journey for the protagonist. That’s what I’m inspired by. Nature in general is inspiring to me. I love that wide open spaces have no literal markers of who or what to be. I think that that is a beautiful metaphor for this community of people who are saying, You can’t tell me who or what to be. That’s the American dream, you know? The toughness, as well as tenderness, are aspects of the Western that I really wanted to capture.
I was talking about this the other day with our producer, Zackary Drucker, who is phenomenal, about how wild it is that the right has completely taken the symbol of the American flag for their own purposes. Something we were trying to do in National Anthem is to show how brave and how beautiful it is for queer and trans people—people who are constantly excluded from this narrative—to actually take that power back and say, ‘This is my country too. This is my flag, too.’ And this isn’t fiction, this is happening at the rodeos. We put it together in a more cinematic way [in the film], but it’s real.
It’s sort of like the scene in Walmart. When I lived on a queer ranch in Tennessee, we would literally get drunk, dress up, and go to Walmart. It was like going to the club. [Laughs] There’s actually an amazing picture of me naked hula-hooping down an aisle at a Walmart. That was a big going out experience for us. And, you know, we survived—and that was in one of the most conservative parts of Tennessee. This is not to say that, every single day, queer and trans people are not subjected to brutal, dehumanizing violence. This film does not take away from that fact. It simply represents a beacon of hope, a reminder that safe spaces do exist, that trans people have been around since the dawn of time, that we will continue to exist, and to find and create safe spaces for ourselves.
Olivia: Your discussion of the symbolism of the American flag is so interesting. It seems serendipitous that your monograph came out in such a tense election year and a moment of mainstreamed discourse about all of the ugly legacies this country needs to contend with. Four years later, your film is coming out in yet another election year and a moment of similarly heightened debate over whether Americanness is worth salvaging. Is National Anthem a patriotic film to you? Or, at least, is it optimistic?
Luke: The ending [of National Anthem] is, in a lot of ways, my thesis on that question. For Dylan’s mother, who is at first resistant, a proximity to queerness opens up new possibilities. Through my own life experience, that [openness] has often been the case. I saw a need for a film that touches on that, because so often the narrative in queer stories is ‘leave your toxic biological family behind and find your chosen family,’ or it’s just overly sentimental. I wanted to make something with more restraint, something more realistic, that is about building a bridge.
A lot of us feel like the promise of America is a myth. Working with this community has restored, for me, some of that promise. The possibility of being a queer cowboy is the promise of America. I really feel that America was never one thing. Its greatness and its promise and its idealism have always been proportionate to its diversity. There’s no straight and narrow throughline.
Some people have been sort of surprised—they’re waiting for the tragedy. We’ve been conditioned to expect tragedy when it comes to queer stories, especially rural queer stories: Brokeback Mountain, Matthew Shepard, Boys Don’t Cry. I was actually really pressured to put those clichés in, because that’s what people are used to seeing, and therefore that’s what you need to tell a story like this. I didn’t want to be irresponsible and ignore reality, but, like, that struggle is our reality. In film we need to have some hope and some joy. It was a huge goal to make something that could hold both beauty and struggle simultaneously, without sacrificing one or the other just for entertainment value.
