Kokomo City, the debut feature by musician-turned-film-maker D Smith, sits in a clear lineage of classic documentaries about the LGBTQ+ community. Consisting of unadorned, verite-style interviews with four Black trans sex workers in Atlanta and New York – as well as a handful of trans-attracted men – it takes its cues from vivid, straight-talking films such as Paris Is Burning and Word Is Out.
But Smith also drew influence from a film rarely mentioned in the same breath as staples of the queer canon: Todd Phillips’s pulpy, controversial 2019 superhero flick Joker. “Not to compare trans women to the Joker, but when I saw that film, it was mind-blowing – it stripped him down, all of the makeup and stuff, and we saw the human side of him,” she recalls. “I thought to myself, ‘This is riveting.’ I just wanted to re-create the narrative of what trans women truly are – we’re human, and this is what we look like. We look like you, we’re fun, and we’re vulnerable like you, and we want love like you.”
As lightbulb moments go, it’s unconventional, but Smith has had an unconventional life. She made her first film at 38 after a period of homelessness and intense emotional distress. Kokomo City, which premiered to overwhelming praise at Sundance earlier this year, is her reintroduction to the public eye after the music industry turned its back on her in 2014, when she came out as transgender after finding success as a record producer. “It was important for me to introduce myself as a creator and say ‘This is my style, this is what I want to bring to the table,’” she says.
Born in Miami, Smith didn’t grow up wanting to be a film-maker. She was raised in a religious household and loved music from a young age, singing in her church choir and realising quickly that “the ability to create music, and the amount of freedom and influence that music gives you, is priceless”. She knew she was a woman from the age of seven, and every night would pray to wake up female: “I was trying to make a deal with God – ‘I won’t be mad at you any more if you just make me a girl – we can just move past this.’”
Growing up in the 80s and 90s, the closest thing Smith saw to a role model was RuPaul: “He was closest to what I wanted, but I didn’t want the flashy, over-the-top [look],” she recalls. “I wanted to be like my aunt, or a woman from church who was just feminine and soft, quiet and demure and attractive.”
Even now, Smith is critical of what she calls the “red-carpet narrative” of trans femininity: the idea that the only time we see trans women in the media is when they’re dolled-up to the nines, and never just in their day-to-day lives, without the makeup and gloss. Kokomo City – which captures four women, Koko Da Doll, Daniella Carter, Liyah Mitchell and Dominique Silver, in the comfort of their own homes, without any glam – is a conscious alternative to the way trans women are often portrayed in the mainstream.
“I love seeing girls on the red carpet, but it’s an opportunity for organisations and PR teams to get their brownie points, by getting a trans girl dolled up and [asking her] to speak on trans talking points,” she says. “It’s actually dehumanising – I don’t think the red carpet necessarily is the place to talk about transgender statistics.”
After graduating from high school, Smith moved to New York, where she quickly found a footing in the music industry, working as a producer for artists such as Lil Wayne (netting a Grammy nomination for her work on his era-defining Tha Carter III), Katy Perry and CeeLo Green. In 2014, after years of success, Smith came out as transgender, and was taken aback to find that her collaborators immediately distanced themselves from her. Songs that were about to come out were pulled; friends stopped returning her calls.
“I absolutely felt betrayal, but I was in denial for two years. I’d always done everything by the book, I’d made a lot of money for labels, so I thought there was no reason for people to separate themselves from me,” she says. “It took me years to think about the fact that people around me loved D Smith the guy, they trusted that person – literally one day I was wearing jeans and Timberlands and a trucker hat, and the next day I was wearing blue eyeshadow and heels. I didn’t give people a heads up, and you don’t owe anybody an explanation of who you are, but at the same time, how do you realistically expect people to completely accept you [straight away]? That’s actually not fair.”
Shortly after coming out, Smith was cast on Love & Hip-Hop: Atlanta, a long-running reality show about people in the hip-hop and R&B industry. Her goal with going on the show was the same, she says, as with making Kokomo City: “I wanted to show people how fun and talented and non-threatening and non-problematic we could be,” she says. Unfortunately, she says, she ended up portraying the exact opposite. “I don’t regret a lot of things in life, but I would completely scratch that out.”
Smith describes the show as “one of the worst things I’ve done to myself”. After her first appearance, producers told her she was boring, and that she had to “turn the fire up”. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m a trans woman, I don’t want to be the boring person on the show! I have to call someone a bitch, I have to throw some water!’ I’m not a confrontational person, and I forced myself to be, and it was a complete, utter disaster for myself,” she recalls. “I was being a bitch to everyone because in the first episode – they took this out – all the girls gave me a derogatory and offensive nickname. I immediately went into defence mode after the next episode, because I didn’t know who was on my side and who was saying what.”
After just a few episodes, Smith left the show, realising that “nothing should be able to purchase or tamper [with] your integrity.” At that point, she had been “living off fumes” from her music career. By 2018, she was out of cash. “I got evicted, they repossessed my Benz, my credit just went straight to hell,” she says. She moved back to New York from Atlanta in search of a new start, crashing on people’s couches and spending her days taking black-and-white photos of the city with her phone and posting them on Instagram. She slowly started putting together the concept for a documentary about trans women – initially hoping to film trans women with ordinary day jobs, before deciding to follow trans sex workers – and started contacting directors who she thought might help her film it, all of whom knocked her back. Finally, she asked the friend whose apartment she was staying at to buy her a film camera, and decided to shoot Kokomo City herself.
It was “the torture of depending on people” that pushed Smith to complete Kokomo City. Over the next few years, she began filming trans women she met on the internet, still sleeping on couches in the interim. “There’s nothing that tears your confidence down more than someone coming out of their bedroom, and the first thing they see is you laying on their couch,” she says. “I started to feel like a nuisance, and it put me in a fucking frenzy, thinking: ‘I’m so talented, why am I in this position?’ I needed to allow the universe and the spirit to speak to me. I wanted instant gratification, but as creative people we have to be humbled. As creators, we feel entitled, we want things immediately. But you can’t pray to the universe for something and also pray to get it your way. You have to just be happy you’re gonna get it.”
Smith says she’s glad she endured her years of struggle in order to make Kokomo City, and you can understand why: it’s sprightly and sharply made, a poignant and often extremely funny look at lives that are often portrayed as solemn or depressing. “There are a lot of LGBT or transgender documentaries that I think are snoozefests,” she says. “I wanted to give these women an opportunity to really be themselves – I wasn’t going to correct them because of something politically incorrect they said, I just wanted them to be my friend, not give me the advocate shit.” The film’s loving lens feels even more poignant given the fact that Koko Da Doll, one of the film’s subjects, was fatally shot in April.
Making the film opened something up. “I am completely bitten, smitten, by the film bug – I’m not turning back,” she says. “I have found my absolute true calling, head-to-toe. I have no doubt this is what I’m supposed to be doing. My soul is aligned with my purpose.”
• Kokomo City is in cinemas from 4 August
