In 2014, D Smith was a successful singer-songwriter and a Grammy-winning music producer for Lil Wayne, André 3000 and Billy Porter, among others, overseeing recordings with Keri Hilson and Ciara, cowriting with Katy Perry, Kendrick Lamar and CeeLo Green, and collaborating with Timbaland and Marc Ronson.
That success soured when Smith transitioned. Overnight, she says, phone calls and emails went unanswered; work dried up. Within two years of coming out as a trans woman, Smith was marginalised and homeless.
“It was shocking,” Smith says. “I’ve always stayed pretty consistent, as far as being fun to work with and creative. I made a lot of money for a lot of labels and artists. I feel l was just about to get going as a producer. It was a wake-up call. It was the timing as well. It was as if I had never happened in the music industry, especially within my demographic: the black, urban, R&B, hip-hop community. That was my bread and butter. These were my connections, and they all just scattered. But it was also very important that I went through that, because it taught me so much. Number one: who are my friends and who are not my friends – which, it turns out, I don’t have a lot of.”
The songwriter is not unaccustomed to slings and arrows. A precocious and talented teenager, Smith won awards for photography and drawing; the latter saw her work exhibited in Washington, DC. When she came out to her father, she was kicked out of her home and taken in by a local church member. After graduating high school she bought a one-way ticket to New York and busked until she was offered a publishing deal with Sony ATV.
By 2018, after her music career, Smith was couch-surfing, out of cash and living a precarious life. A friend paid for a film camera so that Smith could begin shooting Kokomo City, a vital, urgent portrait of four black transgender sex workers – Daniella Carter, Koko Da Doll, Liyah Mitchell and Dominique Silver – living in Atlanta and New York. Smith approached various film-makers before finally picking up a camera and shooting the documentary herself.
“It was an upfront production,” she says. “There was no luxury and there was no safety net. It was tough. I think that was the toughest thing. It’s, like, what am I doing? You know, I’m broke, I’m homeless. And what am I doing? I’m making a film. But there was something very intriguing and exciting about it. That kept me motivated.”
Kokomo City – named for the 1930s blues singer James “Kokomo” Arnold – shot in ravishing monochrome, is a landmark in trans representation on screen. Smith, who was the first trans woman cast on a prime time unscripted TV show in the United States, Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta, walked away from the series after eight appearances because of producers’ demands and her portrayal in the final edit.
With her work, Smith was especially keen to avoid what she calls the “red-carpet narrative” of “fabulous gowns” and “pageant-finalist speeches” that is too often used to frame transgender women on screen. Her movie’s heroines chill out at home, smoke in bed, pontificate from the bathtub, talk about emergency shower shaves. The banter is not for the fainthearted.
“They want to see a pretty-ass girl with a big dick,” Koko says of her clients.
“Violence doesn’t happen before the orgasm. It happens after,” Dominique explains as she relates a shocking interaction.
Smith says: “I wanted this to feel different to anything else out there. I wanted music that people are not used to singing with transgender stories. I was just very honest when I approached the girls. I wanted them to feel the urgency but not think that I was desperate, because that probably would have been a red flag. I said, ‘I want you to shine. I don’t want make-up, I don’t want glam.’ And they’re, like, wait, what?
“I just think that was refreshing, but at the end of the day it was an opportunity for these women to be at their most comfortable and a dignifying space for them to speak their piece. And how can you not feel safe in your house? It’s better than going to a studio with six or eight people with lights and cameras in your face. I didn’t have a lighting person. It was just myself, a light and a bag. Being transgender helped.”
It’s a remarkable film-making debut, winning Smith Sundance Film Festival’s Next Innovator Award and audience awards at both Sundance and the Berlinale. Early in Kokomo City, Liyah Mitchell relates a near-fatal encounter with a client. The blow-by-blow details – her split-second decision to steal his gun, the tussle for the weapon that followed – culminate in business as usual; they make up and get on with the original transaction. The story, which is enlivened by Roni Pillischer’s sound design and Stacy Barthe’s slinky music, is typical of the film’s edgy humour.
“Trans women are magic,” says Smith. “When trans women are allowed to be themselves they’re beautiful, they’re funny, they’re gold. We need more projects where trans women can just be trans women. Not with spokespeople and PR, not models. Just be a trans woman and let that shine. I didn’t want to censor anyone, but I did tell the girls at the beginning what my intentions were. I wouldn’t mind serious conversation, but I want to keep it upbeat. I kept a lot of the things that I thought people will react to. And that doesn’t mean I wanted to shock. It means I wanted something people can relate to, whether genius or funny. I wanted to reset the LGBTQ documentary. Let’s have fun again.”
Against this, Smith and her subjects are keenly aware of the dangers of sex work. “The black experience has always been limited to the way in which a white person told us we could live,” Daniella Carter notes on camera. “And we threaten that as black trans people, because what we’re saying to black people who have been conditioned in that mindset that our black men should be this way and black women should that way, we’re saying f**k all that.”
“Here in America it is the brown-skin trans women that are being violently attacked or killed,” Smith says. “It’s the ones that look a certain way. That’s the reality, and even in the black community we don’t pay attention to that. We don’t embrace them; we don’t protect them.”
In April, weeks after the film’s triumph at Sundance, one of Kokomo City’s stars was shot and killed. A 17-year-old was subsequently arrested over the killing of transgender performer Rasheeda Williams, better known as Koko Da Doll. She was 35.
“I first read about her passing on Instagram, and I thought it was a cruel joke,” Smith says. “I just couldn’t even imagine it was true. I thought, People are so horrible, and the more we expose the film, the more mean the opinions and comments. And then I got another DM. It was very difficult to process. Everyone that’s involved in the film – my producers, myself and the other girls – understand how amazing she was and how important it is to continue to shine her light.”
Kokomo City is in cinemas from Friday, August 4th
