There's a moment in every workplace, maybe you've felt it, when gratitude curdles into something else entirely. Someone thanks you for staying late. Again. Thanks you for fixing what they broke. Again. The words are correct but the transaction is wrong, and you're left holding a receipt for labour that was never properly valued in the first place.
Lavender Men understands this feeling in its bones.
Roger Q. Mason's film, adapted from their 2019 stage play with childhood friend Lovell Holder directing, opens in the aftermath of a small theater production about Abraham Lincoln. Taffeta, played by Mason with ferocious vulnerability, is the stage manager.
They know more about Lincoln than anyone in the building. They've done the research, managed the chaos, absorbed the indignities. And when the lead actor makes an unwanted advance, turning aggressive when rejected, Taffeta retreats into their imagination to conduct a "fantasia" of their own making.
I should say here that I went in expecting something more conventional. I was wrong.
The fantasia structure allows Taffeta to summon Lincoln (Pete Ploszek) and his devoted clerk Elmer Ellsworth (Alex Esola), reimagining their rumored romantic relationship while casting themselves in various supporting roles: a cadet, a ranking officer, a town drunk, a tree, a kerosene streetlamp. The supporting roles. Always the supporting roles.
This is where the film's economic logic becomes unbearably clear. Taffeta possesses the expertise, performs the emotional and intellectual labour, yet remains perpetually in service to other people's narratives. They are, to borrow from a different vocabulary, the gig worker of this particular historical fantasy.
What's devastating is how the film refuses easy catharsis. Even in their own imagination, Taffeta struggles to claim the spotlight. Lincoln, or rather the version wearing the face of Taffeta's crush Max, treats them with suspicion, prejudice leaking through historical costume. The dynamics of power don't dissolve just because you're the one writing the script.
And here's what I keep returning to: the Black women in this film. They appear in the margins of the real world sections. Mia Ellis as the actress playing Sadie, Lincoln's freewoman servant. Cherie Corinne Rice as Sharon, a rideshare driver who appears near the film's close. They are the only figures who encourage Taffeta to rest, to care for themselves. The film notices who does the noticing, who performs the labour of care when the spotlight has moved elsewhere. It's a quiet observation, almost easy to miss, but it lands.
Ploszek deserves credit for managing Lincoln's multiple registers: romantic interest, historical figure, embodiment of white male ambition willing to compromise with power to achieve his ends. Esola brings warmth to Ellsworth, the "Marilyn Munster of the group," as one might put it, "aggressively normal and just as down as the more overt outliers." His chair dance during a fantasy sequence is genuinely delightful, a burst of joy in a film that earns its melancholy.
The production limitations show. Shot on a shoestring budget over ten days, the film occasionally strains against its theatrical origins. Some text message sequences are nearly illegible. The love story between Lincoln and Ellsworth doesn't fully ignite until late in the runtime, the dialogue between them sometimes reading as two colleagues rather than two people burning for each other.
But I'm not sure these are flaws exactly. The film is reaching for something beyond polish. Mason has described it as "a rally cry, a fountain of joy and a grounding of purpose" for LGBTQIA+ audiences, and there's an urgency to that ambition that transcends technical smoothness.
What stays with me is the image of Taffeta alone in that empty theater, surrounded by the ghosts of a history that never quite included them, trying to write themselves into a story that keeps pushing them toward the wings. The transaction never balances. The ledger never closes. But maybe the act of demanding visibility, even in fantasy, changes something in the teller.
I'm still thinking about it, which is probably the point.
