Rosser Goodman's Gay Agenda

Photo credit: Oneita Parker

Out filmmaker Rosser Goodman didn't always know she was going to be a director, but she had a very keen sense early on that she was going to work in a visual field.

"Growing up, I thought I wanted to be a doctor, like an ophthalmologist," she said in an interview with AfterEllen.com. "I guess even in the medical field I was thinking of, you know, eyes and visuals. Maybe there was a slight foreshadowing there." She paused, then recalled with a laugh, "My mom said, 'No, that's silly, you should be a filmmaker.'"

Fortunately, she took it all to heart. As the director of the award-winning film Holding Trevor, about a gay man, and two upcoming lesbian feature films (as well as many award-winning shorts), it would seem that Goodman chose her profession quite wisely.

She got her start as an assistant on the short lived science fiction series Earth 2 in 1994 and soon began making lesbian short films in her scant spare time, running on a combination of adrenaline and passion. "It was super intense," Goodman said of those days, "but it was just like how theater actors talk about being bitten by the stage bug — it was totally similar to that. Just being used to 15-, 16-hour days on the walkie-talkie running around calling rolls and cuts. [I was] just thinking up stories of my own, thinking, 'If NBC can do this, I can do this.'"

She roped Earth 2 crewmembers and the local lesbian community alike into her first short film, Top of the World. A number of other shorts followed and screened at some of the most distinguished film festivals in the world, including the comedy Life's a Butch! (2001) and documentaries Daddy-O (2002) and Pain (2004).

Daddy-O "was my first short to screen in the Castro Theatre," she said, referencing the famous San Francisco venue. "So that was a huge, exciting thing. Then I did another documentary short the next year on my mom's cancer survival from the 1970s that was called Pain. That screened at the Castro as well, like a year or two later, and my parents came, and that was just so extremely special to me."

The director has always been very focused on telling queer stories: "Basically, it was just like, [I had] stories to tell, and at the time it didn't make sense to do anything other than queer content or lesbian content. Because, you know, you can earn a living working on all kinds of straight projects, but if I was going to put my heart and soul … into something, it should be something that furthers us politically — at least visually, and gets us out there."

After her time in the proverbial trenches on the short films, she set her sights on doing a feature: a small, character-driven project called Holding Trevor.

The film is about a 20-something gay man named Trevor (Brent Gorski, who also wrote the screenplay) caught between his junkie ex-lover Darrell (Christopher Wyllie) and a sexy, stable doctor, Ephram (Eli Kranski), along with a cadre of close-knit friends and a dead-end job complicating his life. The piece was shot on a shoestring budget with a nearly insane 14-day shooting schedule — far below the norm for a feature-length film — and it turned out to be one of the greatest success stories of last year's festival circuit.

Holding Trevor garnered heaps of critical praise and the ultimate signal of queer commercial success: a distribution deal and an actual theatrical run. "When I discovered that audiences were loving the film, I was just … my heart was warmed by that," said Goodman.