Kokomo City Review: Black Trans Sex Workers Spill the Tea in D. Smith’s Documentary

A series of portraits of Black trans sex workers and the men who lust after them, D. Smith’s Kokomo City plays as a hyper-stylized companion to Zackary Drucker and Kristen Lovell’s recent The Stroll. But where The Stroll elaborates on the relationship between New York City, particularly the Meatpacking District, and trans women’s hustle using rather formulaic storytelling, Kokomo City’s look at trans sex work in Atlanta is more original.

The film’s most significant accomplishment is the mood it crafts with its cool black-and-white images, fast-paced editing, unorthodox camera angles, handheld camera, and overall jazzy atmosphere. But Smith’s investment on surfaces can only sustain the documentary for so long, as the discourse level of its interviewed subjects—a mix of trans sex workers and, to a lesser extent, trans-attracted men—never quite catches up to the euphoria of the visuals.

Kokomo City begins as a purposefully chaotic mishmash of testimonials from the women and, then, the men who desire them, which features playful dramatizations of the their stories, including a demonstration of a blow job. That initially makes for a provocative concoction somewhere between the cheekiness of Madonna: Truth or Dare, Bruce Weber’s bewitching study of Chet Baker, Let’s Get Lost, and the vacuous breakneck rhythm of a VH1 documentary.

A multi-faceted portrait of a uniquely American trans experience emerges at times. It’s one that makes room for something we rarely get to see on screen: straight-identified Black men staring at the camera, at times next to a buddy, and speaking about their attraction to trans women. But what we hear from Kokomo City’s trans subjects is mostly commonplaces about trans-ness: the worshipping of white femininity, anxiety over passability, transitioning, outing men as trans-attracted, and the constant threat of death. There’s talk of “full operation[s],” poverty (one woman asks, “Why does a woman have to suck a dick in order to go to Benihana’s?”), and men so butch that “you’d never think they’d ever do anything with a trans woman.”

Occasionally, though, you feel as if you’ve heard something truly unexpected, such as when Koko da Doll says that she’s actually a total top (who bottoms sometimes), going against presumptions about what trans women do in the bedroom and what their clients go to them for. As Kokomo City shows, it’s impossible to generalize matters of desire. For one, not all trans-attracted men are attracted to trans women for the same reasons. Some want to bottom for big-dicked girls, while others instantly lose their erections at the sight of a woman’s cock.

Kokomo City’s attempt to provide a basic understanding of the relationship between trans women and the men who desire them is admirable, given how underexplored the subject is in cinema. But the documentary only gestures toward an exploration of who its male subjects are both because its visual language, as exciting as it is, calls so much attention to itself, subsuming everything else, and because there’s only so much that the men are willing to share.

D. Smith never quite figures out how to access the men’s vulnerability. Despite the willingness to speak on such a taboo subject, they seem very much guarded, and the film is content to extol that quality about them. The exception is Xotommy, who speaks openly about not knowing his incarcerated father, though it’s implied that he’s heard stories about the man also “getting down” with trans women. And as for the four Black trans women around which Kokomo City orbits, they, too, aren’t ultimately done any favors by the documentary’s visual grammar, which ultimately reduces them to an almost archetypal version of themselves.