The Patron Saint of Trans Film; Jason Barker and St Pelagius the Penitent

WORDS: Edie Barnabas

In his final year of film school in 1996, Jason Barker through a desire to document his friend's gender expression created what would become an early example of the defining aesthetics of contemporary trans cinema. 

‘It was [filmed] in a shed, in a dyke house in Stanford Hill and we actually didn't have access to the back garden, that was the downstairs neighbours. I don't remember asking for permission but I do remember that everyone who was in it had to climb out of the kitchen window onto a flat roof and then down a ladder into his garden’

St Pelagius the Penitent depicts transmasculine individuals speaking candidly about their experiences of transitioning interwoven with sequences reminiscent of the work of Derek Jarman depicting the death of St. Pelagius. St. Pelagius was a hermit saint living in the fourth or fifth century. The death of this esteemed monk caused a stir among church leadership when it was discovered that they were ‘assigned female at birth’.

By combining contemporary and historical queer experience, the film achieves a sense of transcendental time, where all these trans experiences appear to be happening at once. By doing this, we as an audience see the strong link between historical trans experience and its contemporary counterparts, which serves to create a historical narrative around trans people which can carry us forward into the future. Though myself and Barker are unconnected to each other, and armed with these same minimal historical sources, we have still reached a similar conclusion.

This is because queerness is not a vertical lineage; it isn’t inherited from parents. Instead it is a horizontal lineage, one that is learned from the people standing beside us. This notion has its strength in its intention seeking out of history, but also has its weakness, as it can easily feel ‘illegitimate’ in comparison to established cishet culture/history. 

I came across mentions of this film in niche subreddits though I couldn’t find any viewable screeners online. In the research phase of a short film block I showed at GoShorts in The Netherlands, I finally had the opportunity to reach out to the filmmaker. After several dead ends I eventually found Jason Barker on Linkedin.

Barker tells me that upon its release his film, St Pelagius the Penitent, received mixed reviews. Although it won an award in Finland, it was also seen as too unserious by other festivals. The head juror of Berlin Film Festival, where Barker’s short play before The Brandon Teena Story, described the film as ‘a walk on thin ice.’ As much as this is a great pull quote for marketing, it is also a comment on the way that experimenting with testosterone is shown playfully, and that the atmosphere of the short has a levity which at the time, trans films were not allowed.

‘At one festival some guy said ‘I've seen short films about war and about children dying and you dare bring this.’ So, I think it probably wasn't very highly regarded.’

A description of the aesthetics of the work can be found in Jay Prosser and St. Pelagius the Penitent at the Transgender Film Festival, or What Happened to Trans British Art? by Evelyn Whorrall-Campbell. ‘Each of the five featured friends, Simo, Levi, Del, Svar, and Hans, enacts a different part of Pelagius’s journey to sanctity, with each short tableau-like scene paired with a biographical section featuring verité-style footage of the performer and an asynchronous voiceover in which they discuss an aspect of their own gender transition. St. Pelagius ends with the saint’s ascension, with the five friends, now adorned with angel wings affixed by BDSM harnesses, shooting into the heavens over a soft pink sky sparkling with hand-drawn stars, as the British post-rock supergroup Snowpony’s “Come and Sit on Your Daddy’s Knee” plays the film to a close.’

Though 30 years ahead of its time, there are several aspects of this work that I would describe as hallmarks of contemporary trans cinema in the west; a combination of personal testimony, bodily self-representation, and queer religious imagery. Even in the granular detail of the film, for example, the pop culture pick of the Snowpony song to end, feels to me to be very camp; very drag; very trans.

There is a recurring desire in filmmakers to attach transness to a preestablished grand-narrative, whether religious or pop culture, which can cement their experience as legitimate. At the time St Palagius was misunderstood, though to a contemporary audience it appears as a recognisable way of expressing transness on film. 

There are few examples of trans people in the directing chair, so in the 90s/early 2000s, when filmmaking tech became more readily available to prosumers, there was a wave of trans people representing themselves for the first time. A coherent list of these endeavors can be found in the writings of Viviane Namaste and Laura Horak, but it's fair to say a lot of this work was focused on transition diaries, and the kind of self mythmaking that became prominent on tumblr in the 2010s, with young trans people (me) connecting their lives to that of St Sebastian or whatever TV character they’d taken a shine to. Barker was in the very early days of this, where the urge to document transition and to establish it through a connection to bigger themes exist but without the online audience to pick it up.

Having personally connected with this film, it was encouraging to hear Barker's list of influences as it was what I would have guessed myself. The main one being of course, Derek Jarman, particularly his 1978 film Jubilee. It is obvious that the foundations of trans cinema, which started to form its own characteristics in the 90s, has its beginnings in the gay/lesbian cinema of the decades prior. Rather than appearing from nowhere, trans cinema shares the same urges as gay/lesbian cinema of the 20th century, to seek legitimacy in preestablished historical and cultural imagery.

We’re beginning to see major studios back trans filmmakers, Jane Schoenbum is a prominent example of this, whose films attracted audiences both within and outside of their trans niche. Her latest two, I Saw The TV Glow and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma both attract trans/queer experiences to pieces of media, which the protagonists recognise symbols of their queerness in. Though perhaps not as understandably historical as St Pelagius, these films still relate their experiences to a preexisting media archive. Like Barker, Schoenbrum relates collective queer readings of media, through established academic scholarship, to the experience of queer people living ‘in the real world’. For example, the show The Pink Opaque in I Saw the TV Glow, or the Camp Miasma film series, establish a queer reading of source material, which cements the characters experience in something outside of themselves.

‘ I, at the time, was trying to find some history… the idea that this is nothing new, that this is an ancient thing and not new would, have been exactly what I was trying to say. I wanted to express that I've always known this was part of my, you know,  the story that you tell yourself that obviously has changed over the 30 years but at the time I was very very invested in this idea that I always knew I was a boy’ 

Moreover, the characters in Camp Miasma are aware of this process themselves, and comment on the ‘queering’ of established concepts, as a process of legitimising queerness. A process that though critical of, I still enact, as is evident in the title of my GoShort programme Queering Time. The aesthetic lineage of trans work is as horizontal as the historical lineage, due to lack of legitimacy of trans work. By borrowing from preexisting aesthetic traditions, both Barker, using religious imagery, and Schoenbrum, using pop cultural iconography, are using other established visual languages as scaffolds around their ideas. 

‘I suppose I was very influenced by that DIY quality, super hands on and very handmade and very tactile... There's something about queer films that are always from the community from people who knew and had a homemade quality.’

Though some of the constraints of DIY filmmaking have been thrown off for queer practitioners, the basic form of the work remains the same because it is born from the material condition of trans people's lives. The process of making St Pelagius the Penitent, the film itself as well as its legacy can only exist within the material condition of trans people's lives. This desire for historical representation, or for finding preexisting ‘evidence’ of trans people within different archives will exist as long as trans people feel their position in society is not legitimised, because of this delegitimisation, and under/false representation within the media.

If Barker's film anticipates contemporary trans cinema, it also reveals its central contradiction; we cannot rely on preestablished imagery, whether religious or pop culture, with their foundations in the very hierarchical system diminishing queer liberation, to sustain it. There's a difference between stealing and being given something as charity. Interpreting history on institutions' terms allows them the power to take away our access to the archive.