Early on a recent Thursday, the three stars of Jordan Forstmann’s directorial debut “Club Boys” were recovering from weeks of celebrating with caffeinated drinks in Seward Park on the Lower East Side, near where much of the movie was shot. Several older Chinese women were doing tai chi while a man wearing protective earmuffs and a neon vest was blowing a leaf blower. Actors Alaska Riley, Benny Jean Pierce and Saturn Risin9 decided to go for a walk. Riley was drinking milk tea and had been up for an hour. Pierce wakes up at six to work out, latte in hand. Saturn held up matcha tea and stayed up all night. He flew from Los Angeles the night before and went straight to the Swan Room to eat oysters and caviar chips. First Man chose these three actors because of their real-life involvement in New York nightlife.
Wearing a gray hoodie and small heels, Riley is a twenty-seven-year-old model and author. When she received Forstmann’s script, she was initially hesitant. “A little too methodical,” she called it. She then met Firstman at Basement, a Queens nightclub, after which he partyed with her for more than eighteen hours straight, proving his street cred.
The film premiered in Cannes and was nominated for the Un Certain Regard Award. In the film, a gay party promoter named Peter (Firstman) is in trouble when he learns he has a nine-year-old son from a woman he doesn’t remember sleeping with. Peter’s life is falling apart when her best friend shows up with the baby to try to impose custody on Peter. Riley, Pierce and Saturn play his friends.
Saturn is a 37-year-old DJ with a maternal temperament who has known Firstman for many years. “Seeing what Jordan did, the veil was very thin,” she said. “It’s like, oh, wow, we’re telling the truth.”
The three of them were sitting on a bench across from the playground, which was full of climbing children. “When I first saw the movie, I ran up to Jordan and said, ‘I need to wake up, I need to be a gay dad,'” Riley recalled.
Pierce, a twenty-seven-year-old actress wearing fur-lined boots and a baggy leather jacket, smiled at the screams coming from the playground. “It was so important to me that I had to make this movie,” she said, “because I had been talking about Planned Parenthood for a whole year leading up to it.” But she said she struggled to find role models of trans mothers to serve as role models. Forstmann’s depiction of queer parenthood, a rarity in film, moved her: “When I saw it, I couldn’t stop crying.”
“I always knew I was going to be a mother,” Saturn said through tears. As a trans woman, she was looking forward to having a child who wouldn’t face the pressures she had to contend with. “But I might just want to raise a straight son who plays football,” she said. “He’s going to have to live in fear of coming out to me.” A mother with tired eyes pushed her stroller forward.