Kit Williamson

Thanks so much. It's been a labor of love. I have been working on this show since the quarantine times. It has been a journey getting it finished and out there, and I'm so excited for people to see it.

It was a little bit like that. That was actually based on real life. I have a master's in playwriting and realised quickly while I was there that academia was all kinds of bullshit. My best friend has a PhD and so many of the people in her life were having full scale meltdowns around the time of finishing their dissertations, that I was privy to. I think this is something that people don't talk about enough, the whole life crisis that occurs in finishing a PhD programme.

I wanted it to be a spiritual successor to EastSiders, which is about being a gay mess in your 20s. So this show is about being gay mess in your 30s. I really wanted to kind of grapple with these points of no return, when major life choices feel irreversible. Decisions have a permanence when you're in your 30s, that they don't in your 20s. You begin to think: this is what I'm doing. I'm either an academic or I'm not. I'm a husband or I'm not. I'm starting a family or I'm not. We can't all be Elton John having kids in our 60s. The first three episodes show a last gasp of frivolity and the recklessness of youth, and the characters grapple with the reality that their lives are all about to change in ways that they can't even comprehend.

I'm just not interested in respectability. I don't think that we've actually gained anything by conforming. The people who want to fit us into a box have no interest in giving us a seat at the table. We will never actually be heteronormative enough for the people who expect heteronormativity, so why even bother? I think this is something that the next generation understands in a way the previous generations haven't. This all goes back to the Mattachine Society and the Queer Liberation Front. Going into this next administration, I think there's going to be a real tendency to get quiet and conform and I don't see the benefit in that.

I do think you have to chart your own course. The roads laid out for us are not built for us to go down. So often in media, people present a happy ending without honouring the challenges, road hazards, that you face while starting a family while considering adoption, chosen families, donor moments, surrogacy. These things are a lot more complicated than stories make them appear.
I have an anecdote about that. One of our writers shared to our team that she and her partner had gone through the entire adoption process, been chosen when to go pick up the baby and found out that the extended family of the biological mother wasn't comfortable having the child go to a queer family. So, they intervened and the biological grandmother chose to adopt the child instead. On the one hand, it’s good to keep families intact, and on the other, they had gone through the process of paying for all of this family's medical bills, had built a nursery, and had planned their lives around welcoming this child into their family.
Spoiler alert, we wrote that into the show while we were in post-production. This same scenario unfolded with two close friends of mine. I think it's a lot more common than people maybe want to talk about.

I had gone to a baby shower! They had already made a nursery in their house for this child. We were talking about bigger issues like class, social stability, and our broken insurance system that anybody would feel the need to request a third party to pay for their medical bills related to birth, that's obviously emblematic of a deeper sickness in the United States which is perhaps even worse than homophobia.

I started writing it before 2020, and developed it in the Sundance Lab, and was writing in response to the first Trump administration. When we were in post-production, I thought, it's a good thing that I'm going to have to cut this because it doesn't apply anymore. Then Roe v Wade was overturned, and there are a lot of lines about bodily autonomy and women's reproductive rights in the show (they jokingly refer to themselves as handmaids at one point). All of that seemed like a thing of the past. Unfortunately, I think that we saw a huge pendulum swing during the Biden era to a coordinated fight against the progress we have made. We are going to have to make the same considered concerted effort during this Trump presidency to prevent them from undoing all of our progress.

I have always loved the desert. My husband and I got married in Joshua Tree and had the reception in Palm Springs at a mid-century house similar to the one in the show. I love the Americana of Palm Springs and what that sort of represents in terms of both aesthetics and norms. Palm Springs is obviously a radically Queer and inclusive place but also represents this bygone era that was not in any way, shape or form inclusive. I was really happy to place the boys’ storyline in the William Krisel designed Alexander Construction Company Home in Twin Falls, which to me is just iconically Palm Springs, it’s literally on the Modernism Week tour.

I found it because I was just taking pictures of houses and posting them on my Instagram stories. The owners of that house wrote to me saying that they were fans of EastSiders. I was like, well, would you like me to shoot another gay TV show in your house? They let us film for free. As an independent filmmaker, this isn't a micro-budget project, but EastSiders started out as a true micro-budget project: $2,000 and stick of gum to hold the first two episodes together, I approach filmmaking with that same kind of independent spirit, guerrilla filmmaking. I was inspired by the Duplass brothers and working with what resources were available to me.
In knowing that that house was available to me, I made it a character in the show. We had a six-month long break while shooting during which my husband and I actually moved to Joshua Tree and bought a 1950s homestead on five acres in the middle of nowhere. We removed it and then used it as the shooting location for Eliza, sort of art imitating life imitating art. I had already wanted Eliza to be an interior designer working to create this American dream in the desert: that's what homesteading has represented to me.

In Joshua Tree, Homesteaders were given five-acre parcels if they settled the land and stayed there for a period of 3 to 5 years. They're called Jackrabbit Homesteads. Our home is an original Jackrabbit Homestead that's been updated over the years. Joshua Tree represents our American dream. So, what is the American dream for, a queer family? That's one of the questions we kind of set out to grapple with in this show. What is our utopian ideal of America, because we all know it isn't fulfilling those promises now. Let's pop the bubble on that in terms of marriage, family planning, homeownership.
I wanted the characters to exist across socioeconomic states, we deal with that in Margo's relationship with Eliza. Noah and Dan also have a prenup, so there is always a bit of financial unevenness and uncertainty for both couples, which is just a reality of American life. I would say the majority of people in this country are not on stable footing in terms of knowing that they're going to be okay, in the short term, medium term or long term. If you don't have a 401K, what comfort is it to you that stocks are going up while the quality of life is going down?

I think this is a part of guerrilla filmmaking. I look around to my available resources. I started filming EastSiders in Silver Lake and Echo Park, not because it's a queer haven dating back to the Black Cat Protests which pre-date Stonewall and the Mattachine Society, but because I lived there and I had an apartment where my landlord said, sure, kid, you can film your little show. I had expectations for the life that it had, for it ended up on Netflix. It's in part looking around at available resources and also trying to extract or honour meaning in the world around you.
I think that as queer people, we need to be appreciative of the bubbles that we have, because they're actually very hard fought and hard-earned safe havens and exist from previous generations’ efforts. My husband and I shooting our little gay web series in Silver Lake didn't make it a Mecca. It was already a gay Mecca and had been since the 1960s. Palm Springs has a history of people coming out there to be left alone and it became a hotbed for the Aids crisis. These are places where community was created by previous generations. And I think we would all do well to be grateful for that.

It's been really complicated because I never really set out to make money, these were always projects that I did for myself and for my community. I am an independent filmmaker and artist trying to tell stories that were not being told by mainstream studios and networks. In 2012, the GLAAD Media report showed that something like 4% or less of characters were LGBTQ across streaming, cable and network television. It was getting better, but we have seen a nosedive in representation over the last three years. That's not even taking into account the quality or prominence of the representation.
We saw a lot of progress followed by a massive wave of cancellations from our supposed allies and streaming networks. We've seen a wave of bribes from tech companies and streaming companies vying to get a seat at the table for the Trump administration; and this is all happening out in the open. It is disheartening, but also galvanising and motivating. I'm not waiting for anybody to greenlight a queer ensemble about love, sex, relationships, and families because, spoiler alert, they're not going to.
There's a very long list of really successful showrunners who are openly queer and who would love to tell these kinds of stories. But the financial reality of working in this business is that they won’t approach things where there isn’t financial support. But I do think that they're there is an audience for this, there is money for these streaming networks to make. At one point they understood this and were creating content specifically to bring in subscribers from our community. I think it's fair to say that they have not lived up to their end of that bargain by canceling these shows and diminishing representation over the years.

I would say the queer people should vote with their viewership and their dollars. This show is streaming for free on an LGBTQ streaming network, an emerging streaming network that is specifically catering to these kinds of stories that speak authentically to our community. I think maybe even five years ago there was a question about whether or not these sorts of spaces were needed in the world. I think our current atmosphere really underlines the need for these kinds of spaces where our stories are centred, whether or not the current political climate embraces us or not.

A safe space almost became like a punchline at some point over the years, quite literally. In comedy, it became a punchline. But safe spaces were always rooted in very real needs. Coming from Mississippi, there were no safe spaces. There was not a place growing up where I could authentically be myself without fear or a need for self-censorship in the name of self-preservation. Those spaces have never and will never be given to us. We have to create them.

I don't frequently go through the traditional auditioning process, in part because I have PTSD from going through that as an actor. I am a reformed actor, I'll still act in my own and my friends’ projects, but I'm not really pursuing it in the same way. I think as an industry, it is not conducive to fostering and supporting queer artists. Most of the parts in the show were written for specific actors, like James Bland. I connected with him because of his show Giants. I had written the first three episodes, and then Cold Iron Pictures came on board to finance the writers’ room.
My first call was James because I was so, enamoured with his talent. So we wrote, acted, and directed for Unconventional (he directed episode six, which we co-wrote together, and he wrote episode five). This level of collaboration didn’t exist on EastSiders. I wrote and directed all but one of the episodes throughout the four seasons of that show. Television is a collaborative medium, unlike independent film which is often thought of as like an auteur director's medium, TV is really driven by the writers, and it was really cool to be able to bring together that group. Same with our ensemble; we have an entirely queer core cast. Being able to engage with people's creativity and previous work is very inspiring to me.