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Two Fly-on-the-Wall Documentaries Chronicle Trans Life in the Shadows

By Caden Mark Gardner

Features—

Oct 22, 2021

Two Fly-on-the-Wall Documentaries Chronicle Trans Life in the Shadows
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People of color have often been erased from the history of queer life, but against the odds they have managed to leave behind important documents of their communities’ survival, including underappreciated films that remain to be discovered by a wider audience. Much of the conversation around queer POC subjects on-screen has been dominated by Paris Is Burning, deservedly recognized for its snapshot of New York City’s ballroom culture at a time when its language and dance moves were entering the mainstream. Some of the subjects in that film did ride the wave of its acclaim and went on to enjoy personal successes. But tragedy looms over a number of the people whose lives Livingston documented: the trans sex worker Venus Xtravaganza was murdered two years before the film’s release, and the AIDS crisis would lead to the deaths of a significant portion of the cast in subsequent years. Paris Is Burning was not the only movie from this period to tackle these tough subjects. The Salt Mines, made by Susana Aikin and Carlos Aparicio in 1990, operates in a similar terrain and deserves broader recognition. Along with its follow-up, The Transformation (1995), this unflinching but incredibly empathetic portrait of homeless Latinx trans sex workers depicts the ways in which society discards, looks away from, and ultimately fails the most vulnerable. At the same time it shows how the forms of intervention or help offered these subjects often come at a disturbing price.

Aikin met the subjects of the film by chance in the late 1980s. She first ran into a man named Bobby on his daily routine of getting water from a fire hydrant. He told her there were “girls living in trucks” in an area called the Salt Mines, a Lower West Side enclosure near the piers where the New York City Sanitation Department stored winter rock salt. Bobby considered these girls his friends and was bringing the water back to them. Aikin followed him and immediately felt the urgency to film what she saw. After her day job teaching a video workshop ended, she and her partner, Carlos Aparacio, made a daily routine of shooting in the Salt Mines. Aikin came from a background of working in television news, while Aparicio was a freelance cameraman who primarily made documentary featurettes for news organizations. Since her last film in 2004, Aikin has become an author of historical fiction.

In her self-published book Digging Up the Salt Mines: A Film Memoir, Aikin recalls how the first thing she heard when Bobby took her down to the Salt Mines was Spanish. Aikin worked for a Spanish news media company and was fluent in the language, which enabled her to develop an easy rapport with her three central subjects—Sara, Gigi, and Giovanna—who, while competent in English, primarily speak in their native tongue in the film. These women hail from different parts of Latin America: Sara came from Cuba on the Mariel boatlift during the Carter administration; Gigi came from Puerto Rico, and due to her lover being jailed in Rikers Island, had been left with no housing; and Giovanna, who refers to herself as “just a girl down on her luck,” came from the Dominican Republic and was raised in the Bronx. They dubbed themselves a “family of Latin queens,” and many other people came in and out of their graffiti-covered trucks to crash after a night turning tricks or a drug binge. The individual testimonials of these women present the adversity they face in coming to terms with their gender identity and dealing with rejection by their families. Gigi, for instance, was kicked out of her home as a teen, and despite having no secure housing, managed to graduate from school. She takes pride in that and is easily the most self-assured of the three when it comes to her gender identity, even as she still struggles to find a stable place to live.

The Salt Mines moves between the community’s days at the Mines and its nights spent in the underbelly in the Meatpacking District, where they engage in sex work. As it unfolds, the film becomes less conversational and reliant on testimony, and much more voyeuristic, though it maintains some discretion, often showing the sex workers from a distance, walking on the streets with only their backs visible. These scenes were shot from a van, and Aikin has said that she felt this created the effect of looking at the women from a client’s point of view, without interfering in the participants’ transactions. This method of observation extends to a scene in which the group share under-the-counter hormones from an uptown pharmacy, provided to them by an anonymous old woman who, as the trio acknowledge, took a great risk on their behalf.

Top of page: The Salt Mines; above: The Transformation

Aikin began noticing other outsiders coming to the Salt Mines as visitors, including members of the evangelical Texas-based Covenant Church, led by a pastor who went by the name of Terry. The filmmaker later learns from the women that the church’s offerings of food and permanent shelter have a catch: in order to receive these benefits, the women must join the ministry, which purports to “specialize” in detransitioning trans people and guiding them to a “straight” life. Gigi and Giovanna rejected these terms, but Sara ended up moving to Texas after being hit with the news of her mother’s death and testing positive for HIV.

The person viewers come to know as Sara in The Salt Mines reverted to living as a man, the churchgoing Ricardo, and became the focus of The Transformation. Sporting a dark brown bouffant rather than long, bleached blonde hair, and married to a female church parishioner, Ricardo has rebuked all of his queerness, claiming it to have been a choice. An active member of the church’s mission, he serves as living proof of its “transformational” impact. At this time, Gigi and Giovanna are still living as women in New York, and they are still being sought out as candidates for the church’s program, despite their explicit refusals. After several years apart, Ricardo is sent to convince them to change and be just like him.

Like The Salt Mines, The Transformation maintains a fly-on-the-wall style mixed with conversational testimonies. But it is Terry who emerges as a major figure of the film. His upbeat demeanor and persistence cannot mask the evil evident in his harassment and years-long obsession with wanting these women to forsake their identities. Ricardo felt he had no choice but to succumb to the pastor’s coercion. The Reagan era saw the slashing of social programs, effectively putting people on the streets. And while there were programs led by gay people to combat HIV/AIDS in New York, Ricardo never felt he or any trans sex worker was taken seriously by “the Americano gays.” Even as Ricardo’s decision went against all of Aikin’s beliefs as a liberal ally who saw right through the church’s intentions, the filmmaker does express sympathy for her subject, even in his reactionary moments, when he refers to the very people with whom he used to share food and shelter as “sinners.” Before Ricardo’s death from AIDS, Aikin filmed him one last time for a scene that closes the film. Wheelchair-bound, in poor health, but reflective, Ricardo tells Aikin that, even with his marriage, he still wishes he lived as a woman. He could not deny it any longer.

The Salt Mines is not prescriptive or programmatic in its approach to these realities of being trans, homeless, and a sex worker. It exposes how people can exploit and leverage their charity against those they purport to help, especially in an environment where nobody stands up to their manipulation while a broader culture allows those most in need to remain ostracized and underserved. Today there are more trans-focused charities, mutual aid networks, and other programs to combat food and housing insecurity among the LGBTQ community. But even with that progress, it is heartrending to recall how many more trans people could still be here had these services existed years ago. The Salt Mines is a painful and poignant reminder of that, as well as a tribute to those who lived and persisted by any means necessary as the world mostly looked away. In the field of queer and trans history, we often only honor and affirm the brave individuals who took risks in stepping out as themselves posthumously and retrospectively, rather than while they are alive. But The Salt Mines is an example of a filmmaker giving voice to a community on issues that remain ongoing realities, such as housing insecurity, the stigmatization of HIV, trans access to healthcare, and the criminalization of sex work, making it an enduring and contemporary representation of trans lives.
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Caden Mark Gardner is a freelance trans film critic and researcher based in upstate New York. He focuses on queer cinema and the history of the trans film image.

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