There are several moments in National Anthem—filmmaker and photographer Luke Gilford’s directorial debut—about a 21-year-old day laborer named Dylan, played by Charlie Plummer, who falls in love on a queer ranch, when the camera lingers on trans bodies in the New Mexico desert. In one montage, Sky, played by Eve Lindley, first catches Dylan’s eye while he builds fences and moves bales of hay by posing suggestively on her horse in a sparkly backless tank with the stars and stripes emblazoned on the front. It might seem a little on the nose. It’s certainly not subtle. But this is a movie with things to say about America, and when you’re talking about a country like ours, it’s probably best to go big.
This a place ostensibly built on monolithic ideals of freedom, fractured by the violence not just of its own founding but of our strained attempts at building a pluralistic society. It’s no secret that National Anthem arrives at a moment of rising anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment in the United States, with laws targeting not just the existence of trans people and same-sex love, but the art form of drag, a tradition deeply embedded in our national history. There are certainly gestures toward that broader sociopolitical context in National Anthem, but Gilford’s film is not an anti-reactionary term paper. Rather, he understands that queer lives hold their own inherent gravity, wherever they are planted.
Loosely based on the filmmaker’s own experiences living on queer ranches and documenting gay rodeo subculture in a photobook of the same name, National Anthem does not have much plot architecture to speak of: Dylan falls in love with Sky, who is in an—at least in theory—open relationship with her boyfriend Pepe, played by Rene Rosado. Some light jealousy ensues. In the film’s most emotional moment, Dylan’s alcoholic mother Fiona, played by Robyn Lively, makes a scene when she discovers that he has taken his younger brother Cassidy, played by Joey DeLeon, to a queer rodeo. But to the movie’s credit, it stops short of the shouting matches and tear-jerking teardowns of homophobia that other films rely on to generate drama. The story here is set dressing for the quiet, powerfully unremarkable fact of queer American life.
Like Gilford, I found queer community against backdrops that are underrepresented in national media about LGBTQ+ people, in states like Georgia, Utah, Indiana, and East Tennessee. In 2017, I traveled the country writing a book called Real Queer America about those people and my personal experiences, and criss-crossed the country again two years later when I toured for its release. Both before and since, I have watched a multitude of projects that seek to catalog the lives of queer people living in “flyover country” or “middle America.” Too often, the gaze of those projects feels anthropological, focused more on presenting their surprising findings back to a coastal audience than on capturing queer lives in situ. Millions of queer people live outside of New York and Los Angeles, and yet people continue to be surprised to “discover” them.