‘Lavender Men’ Director Lovell Holder Creates Queer Community
Filmmaker and author Lovell Holder spins Roger Q. Mason's gay-Lincoln fantasia "Lavender Men" from stage to screen.
Whether directing and co-adapting the new queer feature Lavender Men, producing upcoming Shudder horror-thriller The Surrender, or publishing his debut novel The Book of Luke later this spring, creating community is key for Lovell Holder.
“Maybe this is just the only child in me,” he says, considering the emotional truths that connect his work. “I do think I have interest in both loneliness, but also the creations of found family.”
Accounting for the myriad fruits of his labors all set for release around the same time, despite the films being shot over a year apart, Holder highlights his own found family, including collaborators and close friends like The Surrender writer-director Julia Max.
“I had officiated her wedding,” says Holder, “in addition to producing her previous short film [Pieces of Me], because she is now married to one of my best friends from grad school.” Max brought Holder onto The Surrender about a month after he had wrapped production on Lavender Men.
“It’s just the weird way that the world works,” he notes. “Now these two films that were shot two years apart are coming out within two weeks of each other.” And the family resemblance should be undeniable. “It’s remarkable, but also just funny, in terms of community,” Lovell points out.
“Julia is an extra in the opening scene of Lavender Men, and then our producer on Lavender Men, Mia Ellis, also acts in both The Surrender and Lavender Men. Pete Ploszek acts in both The Surrender and Lavender Men. Mia Chang produced both as well. So it’s definitely an all-in-the-family operation over here. We all like to work with each other on very different projects.”
The family operation extends to playwright and performer Roger Q. Mason, who bared their personal truth writing and starring in the critically acclaimed play Lavender Men, staged by Holder in 2022 at Skylight Theatre in Los Angeles.
Mason and Holder collaborated on the screen adaptation, where Mason reprises their role as Taffeta, the lonely stage manager of a play about the clandestine gay affair between a pre-Presidency Abraham Lincoln and his law clerk Elmer Ellsworth.
Triggered by a traumatic event, Taffeta blends their reality with Abe’s history in a daring exploration of their experience as a “Black, Filipinx, queer, TGNC, and plus-size” person.
Holder and Mason, who met attending Princeton, have been friends for years, and share common experiences as queer people. Yet, as someone who is not Black, Filipinx, TGNC, or plus-size — he’s a white guy from Charlotte, North Carolina — Holder has said he understands that Lavender Men was a chance to center someone who represents those communities.
“Roger and I have known each other since we were teenagers. I have had a front-row seat to the Roger Q. Mason experience since 2005,” Holder says. “I think one of the reasons Roger and I collaborated so well on this particular story was because there is that history.”
“So many of the anecdotes and situations that Taffeta refers to are very rooted in the life that Roger has lived. And, for me, the phone calls that I’ve gotten at 11 o’clock at night on an idle Tuesday where we talk for two hours, three hours about what has just happened to them,” Holder recalls.
“So, while I personally could never claim to have a deep, in-depth understanding of what it is to be Black or Filipino in America, I very much do understand what it is to be Roger in America.”
Lavender Men is not rated, and is playing at LOOK Dine-In Cinemas Tysons at the Boro, 1667 Silver Hill Dr., Tysons, VA, and LOOK Dine-In Cinemas Reston, 11940 Market St., Reston, VA. Visit www.fandango.com.
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