Black transmasculinity joins the force: police-affiliated TV roles of Brian Michael Smith

by Adrian King

In the center of the above photo stands Black trans actor Brian Michael Smith in a police officer costume. Featured in a 2014 New York Times article titled “To Hollywood, All Things Hip Lie in Brooklyn,” the photo was taken on the set of HBO’s Girls in Brooklyn, New York.[1] [open endnotes in new window] Smith and actress Jemima Kirke are caught in mid-motion with other actors, crew, and filming equipment clearly visible. Similar images are found in Daily Mail and Daily News, as clearly the press was invited to take photos to promote an upcoming season of Girls. At the time of this photo, Smith was an unknown actor and new to television from a stage acting career. Still, the police officer role was a familiar one as Smith explained in his self-published interview on Buzzfeed Community, “Who’s That Guy Arresting Girls’ Jessa??,” which included photos published in the New York Times. Not only had he been specifically seeking out police officer roles, in fact, as Smith shared:

“I think I’ve played a cop or a detective on almost different [sic] 20 projects."[2]

In this article, I argue that pre-existing police representations and content in Hollywood allowed Brian Michael Smith to find regular work, while also absorbing Black transmasculinity into existing television police representation. As his cop-filled acting career collided with changes in trans representation in the media, his characters were able to be folded into dominant modes of media via the police.

Smith’s career offers a compelling case to understand how a Black trans man actor not only successfully made a career in Hollywood—an anti-Black and trans exploitive industry—but also how his television career relied on the persistence of police-centric television content during a time when trans visibility and representation in media increased. Indeed at that time, many entertainment journalists, LGBTQ+ organizations, and viewers claimed that trans representation was becoming “positive.”

Smith’s career offers an opportunity to challenge narratives about good and bad trans representation. On one side, many viewers consider police officers, but especially police characters as heroes, as the “the good guys” working to protect innocent people from evil. From this perspective, Smith’s career offers a “good” representation of a trans character as strong, protective, and desirable; it refuses the image of the Black man criminal. On the other side are those of us viewers who know that, in reality, police do not keep people safe, but instead, inflict violence on many communities on the margins of society, including Black, Indigenous, and poor just to name a few. When I started researching Smith’s career, I had to work through my own negative feelings about a Black trans actor playing a police officer. How could he proudly play a cop when Black trans people are especially harmed by the prison-industrial complex? I write this essay not only as a response to my feelings, but also to counter a claim that police officer roles like Smith’s are inherently good because they help make audiences less racist and/or transphobic. By analyzing the television industrial conditions that gave this actor a successful career, I seek to challenge how trans representation and Black representation are easily understood in binary terms of good/bad or positive/negative while I also want to articulate the larger structural impacts of anti-Blackness and transphobia. Here, I situate television as a unique medium that shapes the limited roles offered to trans actors like Brian Michael Smith.

Smith in background as a detective in a 2014 Blue Bloods episode titled “Burning Bridges.”	Smith in a 2016 episode of Blue Bloods titled "Confession."
Smith as a police officer on a 2016 episode of Person of Interest titled “Reassortment”."	Smith as a police witness on a 2017 episode of Chicago PD titled “Snitch."

Smith's TV roles as a police officer,
in procedurals, or in police-centric content [3]

Role/ Character	Show	Episodes	Network/ Platform	Year
Police Officer	Blue Bloods	“Burning Bridges (S5E3), “Confessions” (S7E9), “Friendship, Love, and Loyalty” (S8E18), “Trust” (S9E6)	CBS	2014- 2018
Energy Company Worker	Law & Order: SVU	“Forgiving Rollins” (S16E10)	NBC	2015
Police Officer	Girls	“Female Author” (S4E3)	HBO	2015
Patrolman	Person of Interest	“Reassortment (S5E8)	CBS	2016
Firefighter	The Detour	“The City” (S2E1)	TBS	2017
Police Officer (Toine Wilkins)	Queen Sugar	Caroling Dusk (S2E5), Here Beside the River (S3E10), Pleasure is Black (S4E1), Spaces Fill (S7E4)
Police Witness (Roland Garrett)	Chicago P.D.	“Snitch” (S5E4)	NBC	2017
Sheriff’s Deputy	Seven Seconds	Pilot (S1E1)	Netflix	2018
EMT (Nate)	Homeland	Like Bad at Things (S7E4)	Showtime	2018
Firefighter (Paul Strickland)	9-1-1: Lone Star	All 57 episodes	Fox	2020 -2025

 

Since 2014, Smith has appeared in about 16 different television specific projects, which include both independent web series and broadcast, cable, and streaming television. Out of those sixteen appearances, ten roles have been as either a police officer, another government official, or on a procedural show. The above table outlines these specific roles, which he continued to play after professionally coming out as a trans man in 2017.[4] By 2020, Smith earned a regular spot in a cop-adjacent role as Paul Strickland, a firefighter on 9-1-1: Lone Star. Through this role, he became the first Black trans man to play a regular role on a television series. To date, Smith is an out Black transmasculine actor with the largest body of television acting work, notably more than his contemporary, Marquise Vilsón, as Smith is just one of a handful transmasculine television actors working in television. In fact, Black trans women, white trans women, and young white transmasculine people are more frequently seen in popular media as symbols of transness. In contrast, I am turning to consider the presence of Black transmasculine people on television to consider another kind of insight into how the co-constructive nature of race and gender shapes trans representation and in particular, hope to offer a different way to think about the contours of both Black masculinity and transmasculinity as they merge in contemporary media.

Poster for Tom Swift (2022) which featured Vilsón as a regular character.	Promotional poster for Amazon's A League of Their Own which features a minor Black transmasculine character Uncle Bertie played by Lea Robinson. Uncle Bertie is not featured on the poster.

Smith launched his career the same year that Time claimed was “the transgender tipping point,” a term that sought to capture a moment in which trans representation in the media increased and brought trans legal and political issues to the forefront of public discourse.[5] Featured on the accompanying cover of Time magazine was Black trans actress Laverne Cox, then starring as a regular in Netflix’s Orange is the New Black. As the documentary Disclosure (2020) discusses, the transgender tipping point marked a changing moment in trans representation in media which moved away from depicting physical violence against trans people or from storylines that sought to exploit the outing and exposure of a trans character for the sake of the plot.[6] Prior to the contemporary shift in trans representation, trans characters and narratives on crime dramas—also known as police dramas or police procedurals, a genre centered on policing—easily engaged transphobic sentiments.

Traci C. Abbott writes in The History of Trans Representation in American Television and Film Genres that a crime drama will often leverage “the view that trans persons deceive others by illegitimately representing their gender (and sexual) identity and deserve punishment for doing so.”[7] Abbott details how trans characters in crime dramas mostly are trans women, often featured as villains attacking cisgender people, or as disposable sex workers, usually played as trans women of color. This kind of negative representation might make Smith’s characters and other emergent trans character seem “better,” ‘good,” or “positive,” more so than other trans representations especially in the context of these generic narrative structures. But such a search for “good” representation can fall into another trap.

Poster for the documentary Disclosure which features many trans creatives who work in Hollywood..	Promotional Image for scholar Katherine Sender's documentary Beyond the Straight and Narrow: Queer and Trans Television in the Age of Streaming which discusses the role of LGBTQIA characters during the growth of streaming television.

Cáel Keegan critiques the goal of “positive images” in struggles around minority, here trans, representation. In his essay “On the Necessity of Bad Trans Objects,” Keegan writes that these objects, or in relevance to my discussion here, these characters, “are considered ‘good’ when they fold transness into the visual economy of existing normative media."[8] Characters like the ones Smith plays offer no avenues for challenging state violence or the prison industrial complex, since all the while they fit in neatly to generic narrative and thematic demands. Keegen’s critique does not set up a new good/bad trans character binary by saying that these characters are bad, but instead to points to the emergent forces that shape new normative ideas about trans representation on television, and he describes ways in which Black transness can still be co-opted into serving seemingly positive, but still normative police narratives.

In particular, Smith’s career engages with the normative aspects of television both as a medium with a deep legacy and also in terms of its contemporary high production volume of police-centric content. Indeed, much of the content in TV’s crime narratives is commonly critiqued as “copaganda,” the word a portmanteau of “cop” and “propaganda,” although police also appear across television genres.[9] Examples of these shows that Smith has appeared in include Blue Bloods, Law & Order: SUV, Person of Interest, Chicago PD, Homeland, and 9-1-1: Lonestar. These shows rarely feature explicit conversations about race, racism, or white supremacy and they still operate with the racist and settler logics that make up the prison-industrial complex as a site of harm.[10] Such a stronghold of policing-related content in Hollywood exists despite the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014 and in 2020 and on-going discourses that have critiqued police violence against Black people. Although this social movement occurs within the span of his career, the persistence of policing-centric television content, in fact, served as leverage for Smith’s television career launch in 2014. Of course, his cop-centered career as a Black actor is not uncommon, as Black cis men and women also frequently appear on TV as government agents, including rapper turned actors Ice-T as Odafin 'Fin' Tutuola on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and LL Cool J as Sam Hanna on NCIS: Los Angeles.

In this essay, I look at Smith’s career from three different angles. In the first section, I imagine how his strategy to secure roles as a police officer made sense in a color-evasive and transphobic industry and how it provided him with the opportunity to find job security in an industry with limited work for both Black and trans actors.[11] The second section explores Smith's decision to come out as transgender amid an increase of trans characters and trans creatives working in Hollywood following the transgender tipping point. In the third section, I closely read Smith’s coming-out scene in Queen Sugar as the script seeks to absorb Black transmasculinity into the normative logics of televisual police. In conclusion, I gesture to Smith’s biggest project to date, 9-1-1: Lonestar. Over the course of these sections, I remark on the challenges for trans actors in finding work, the powerful connection between Hollywood and policing, and the nuances required to understand emerging trans representation.

Career cop

Hollywood is an industry that often produces toxic and abusive workplaces. These environments, such as detailed in Maureen Ryan’s Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, especially impact people of color, women, and LGBTQ workers.[12]In light of these constraints, it is remarkable that Smith has managed to maintain a career in Hollywood over the past 10 years as one of the only Black transmasculine people working. Dealing with toxic work environments, racism, or transphobia are not experiences that he has discussed publicly, and in all likelihood, he will probably not, as he is still a regular on 9-1-1: Lone Star. As Ryan writes,

“the Hollywood machinery has been programmed to minimize, if not outright crush, people who step out of line or bring unwanted attention to individual, institutional, or systemic problems."[13]

To consider Smith’s career over the past decade, we need to evaluate the forces of transphobia and anti-Blackness in Hollywood and to ask, how did the industry shape the possibilities and realities of his career, and especially his decision to play police officers?

I understand Smith to be an ambitious and passionate actor (evident in a number of interviews in which he has discussed his career goals) who took advantage of the prevalence of police content in Hollywood in order to establish job security.[14] As an undisclosed trans professional and as a Black actor, his specializing in police roles and appearing in police-centric content allowed Smith to have a career. For him, getting typecast as a police officer helped him deal with several challenges, including limited opportunities for transmasculine actors and industrial “colorblind” casting practices that gave white actors more opportunities than Black and Brown ones. As a result, in career terms, his alignment with television portrayals of police prevented him from speaking about anti-Black police violence, particularly in light of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014 and 2020.

Smith’s television career began in 2014. In an interview with GLAAD in 2017, he recounts the beginning of his career and specifically says why he did not take trans roles or frame himself as a trans actor. He claimed he was not ready to be an out trans actor, but did say this:

“I knew that at some point I would want to explore my trans experience in my work but I wanted to make sure my self-understanding and skills were sharp enough to do justice to this deeply personal subject."[15]

Like all trans people, he should be afforded the decision to disclose if he is trans in both his professional and social spaces. For Smith, the very nature of his disclosure rests on the fact that he transitioned prior to beginning acting, was assumed as cisgender by others, including industrial professionals and gatekeepers, and only auditioned for cisgender roles.[16] He expands on this in the same interview:

“I also had concerns that disclosing my gender history, without establishing myself as a strong actor first, would exclude me from being considered for non-trans roles. I feel that because I began my career post-transition and am not 'Visibly trans,’ I had the privilege of choosing to disclose or not and I was able to go in for any role that fit my type.”[17]

For Smith, going stealth was both a personal and professional choice that was made possible by cisnormative ideas about what trans people, and particularly trans men, look like. For the sake of his career, he was initially able successfully to remain dissociated from trans media discourses.