Disclosure

Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen (2020), takes you on a journey like you’ve never seen before. A journey we all share but have yet to see through a transgender lens. While celebrating the strides of a community finally being recognized by mainstream culture, Disclosure also confronts the current political backlash against transgender people. Disclosure shows how the fabled stories of Hollywood have deeply influenced how Americans feel about transgender people, and how trans people have been taught to feel about themselves. Regardless of one’s gender, Disclosure speaks to an audience who have all learned from the media what the value and limits are of our gender expression. Hollywood film and TV have been constant companions for Laverne Cox, the Emmy-award winning producer and Orange Is the New Black actress. From her childhood in Mobile, Alabama, where bullying leads to a suicide attempt, to life in New York City pursuing her dreams of acting, Laverne has become the face of the trans movement. What she saw on the screen shaped her beliefs in herself, from work to love to survival. In telling Laverne’s story, Disclosure traces the history of film and TV. Woven into the framework provided by Laverne’s experiences are the intimate stories with other celebrated trans creatives and thinkers guiding us through decades of film and TV clips, including director Yance Ford (Strong Island), producer Zackary Drucker (Transparent), culture critic Tre’Vell Anderson (LA Times), and writer/director Lilly Wachowski (The Matrix and Sense8). Drawing on their reaction and resistance to the relentless depictions of gender subversion as deceptive, pathetic, psychotic, and slapstick, these charismatic subjects tell a very different story than we’ve seen before about some of Hollywood’s most beloved moments. Riding the ups and downs through the history of film and TV, Disclosure unveils the inextricable link between Hollywood storytelling and the rise of a community on the precipice of enormous change.