Elliott Page, author of Pageboy: A Memoir, says "Vantage Points is a stunning work that offers new ideas, compassion, and hope for a kinder, egalitarian future that may let us all heal, breathe, and truly be."

Chase Joynt is a director and writer whose films have won more than twenty-five jury and audience awards internationally. His latest documentary feature, Framing Agnes, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the NEXT Innovator Award and the NEXT Audience Award. Joynt is the author of the Lambda Literary Award finalist You Only Live Twice (co-authored with Mike Hoolboom) and Boys Don't Cry (co-authored with Morgan M. Page).

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Vantage Points is such an engrossing read, combining memoir and other sources, most notably excerpts from the work of Marshall McLuhan. When and why did you decide to structure the book this way?

Thanks so much for saying so! To be honest, this is the first time I’ve been asked to answer questions about the book and so it is notable and exciting to me that you have read it.

I’ve been circling around questions of intergenerational violence and masculinity for as long as I have been making creative work, occasionally experimenting with short films and short form writing, but never finding a structure that felt capacious enough to hold all I wanted to say and do. Encountering traces of McLuhan in my family archive—however tangential—offered license to explore unexpected connections and take formal leaps.

My engagement with McLuhan's work provided theoretical foundation and structural inspiration: from the trim size and layout, to the use of graphics and image alongside text, and creating chapters that riff on some of his early writing about media and their effects.   

For readers who aren’t familiar with the connection, can you speak more as to why McLuhan is such an important figure for you?

McLuhan is perhaps most famous for the phrase "the medium is the message" which is an invitation to consider how we communicate, more urgently than what we communicate. The question of how is very energizing to me, especially when thinking about life writing, and in particular, life writing about trans subjects. Memoir comes with its own history of genre expectations—as it is itself a technology—and so I consider how rerouting our expectations of the form might help us to encounter something different about ourselves and each other. Throughout his writing, McLuhan held artists in high esteem, proclaiming that we are, in fact, the ones with the sharpest tools to craft different socio-political futures. I deeply resonate with his sentiments and took the proclamation as a form of creative permission!

At the heart of the book is the exploration of a very personal trauma, which you examine from multiple vantage points and lenses. It’s such a potent way to consider how this experience has shaped your own memories and ongoing creative and intellectual practice. How does it feel to have the work out there in the world, in the hands of a wider audience?

Well, it took me a very long time to write what is, if you consider the word count, a very short book. While the project takes seriously the impacts of childhood sexual abuse, it is by no means a tell all, nor is it a take down, and that is because my hope is to reveal far more nuanced connections between people, subjects and histories, and to obliterate the too-easily-relied-upon binary oppositions between good/bad, us/them, then/now.

Because of my experience as a filmmaker, I am keenly aware of the transition between a work that is mine (through ideation, development, construction and execution), and an audience’s (through exhibition, distribution and dissemination), and I know the same is true for books. That said, I guess I don’t know how this will feel! I am nervous, but hopeful.

I was so struck by how much the inclusion of found objects—archival documents, photographs, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera—add layer upon layer to the meaning-making and storytelling. Why was it so vital to include these visual elements?

Much of my film work engages questions of the archive and its limits. I remain suspicious of what can ever truly be known or discovered through these excavations and returns. Archives—especially familial ones—are such rich tapestries of experience and thus playgrounds for personal projection! There is so much about my family history that is contradictory and unknown and the book doesn’t attempt to settle those discrepancies, but rather, to treat the archival traces on their own terms. It asks: what new connections can be made by taking seriously the form of the information presented, not just the content? By doing so, I hope the stories become less about me and more about a creative collaboration with the reader.

The structure of the book made me think of work by writers like Maggie Nelson, whose books often weave memoir with theory, poetics, and intellectual research. What other writers and artists have had a particular impact on your practice and this book in particular?

I love this question, and yet it is a peculiar one to satisfy because in many ways, the citational practice of the book itself is the answer. Throughout the project, I move with and alongside other writers and artists to signal my influences and indebtedness.

That said, T. Fleischmann’s Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through is a thrilling engagement with trans life writing and the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres—a formal conceit which feels deeply akin to my project—and yet somehow it did not make it into my book. I consider this a missed opportunity, and will henceforth drop it into as many Q&As as possible.  

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Excerpt from Vantage Points: On Media as Trans Memoir, by Chase Joynt

Mixtape
(The Phonograph)

My first crush lived on the same cul-de-sac as 1990s Canadian rocker Tom Cochrane, though the term first crush can only be assigned in retrospect. At the time, my compulsion to rollerblade up and down her street felt like a natural extension of my urban curiosity rather than the literalized route of my unarticulated feelings.

Kitty-corner to the fast-aging singer, my crush lived with her parents in a modest house with ample front lawn and garden. To me, her family existed as a salve, a place of possibility when imagining a future for myself and an oasis of ease and carefree connection. On the occasions when I did run into her, I always had an excuse: life was a highway, and I was there to ride it.

Cochrane’s album Mad Mad World was released on cassette in 1991 by Capitol Records. Local neighbourhood sleuthing confirmed that his most famous song—Side A, Track 1—had been recorded in his backyard with friends.

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The phonograph, a precursor to record and cassette players, was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison, the same man credited with creating the light bulb and capturing cinema’s first white kiss. McLuhan proffers that invention requires one to "begin with the effect one wishes to achieve and then to go backwards" toward production. Though he is talking about advertising, his logics apply to music as well; the question “How do I want to make you feel?” motivates both construction and arrangement.

As far as I was concerned at the time, my crush invented the mixtape. Her first gift to me was a sixty-minute Memorex DBS cassette in a case splattered with stickers and flamboyant handwriting. My gaze found the words “In Your Eyes” long before they were attributed to Peter Gabriel.

For McLuhan, audiotape represents a mechanical extension of human language.

For poet and novelist Lavinia Greenlaw, the mixtape proclaims, "This is who I am and what I know and what I can show you."

For me, the mixtape was a gateway to otherwise incommunicable ideas.

Perhaps we are all saying the same thing.

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My crush was my crush long before she met her first boyfriend, a bumbling boy with a haircut that could only be explained by a disinterest in his own reflection. I remember feeling overwhelmed by his insignificance. She was exponentially more powerful than he was, and I identified myself as being infinitely more capable … of what, I am still unclear.

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The second song on my crush’s mixtape was "Return to Innocence" by Enigma. For a moment in time, I understood the song to be about me. That was, until it was featured in a TV spot for the 1996 Summer Olympics. I wasn’t prepared to encounter the song so publicly, and I didn’t yet understand why I’d become so attached to its sensation.

"Through this song, much of the world came to hear Taiwan aboriginal music for the first time, without realizing what they were hearing," reports Shzr Ee Tan.

"Difang (1922–2002) discovered his stardom through a friend who had caught the song on radio … Enigma sampled Difang’s voice without authorization from him; the group drew its sample from a 1978 recording of a weeding song collected by Taiwanese ethnomusicologist Hsu Tsang-Houei.”

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When X finally purchased his long-coveted pickup truck—"the car is a superb piece of uniform," boasts McLuhan—his priorities were simple: haul a camper in the summer and load a snowmobile in the winter. At first chance, he would take me and the truck into the woods to go camping. On our first trip to the provincial wilderness, I was relieved to discover the truck had a tape deck. The commute to our local campground took two to three hours. For the duration, X would tolerate listening to my crush mix on repeat.

The American Bar Association defines grooming as a process by which adults build trust with children to gain access to extended time alone. Common behavioural methods of approach include favouritism, gifts, and special privileges.

With X, the car emerged as a technology of entrapment disguised as a technology of entertainment.

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In addition to music meditation, our road trips functioned as a primer on how to be racist. While our hometown boasted “multiculturalism” as a cornerstone of its progressive urban planning, my family remained untethered from racial difference.

The only jokes I can remember from that era are at the expense of people and communities X deemed subordinate. It took years of distance from these experiences to digest their ongoing implications. "A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding," warned McLuhan.

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The last vehicle to be made with a cassette player was the 2010 Lexus SC 430.

In 2011, the Oxford English Dictionary removed cassette player from its condensed edition and added definitions for new media of communication, most notably, retweet.

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Decades later, when my first crush reached out to me on Facebook, I was shocked that the typical before-and-after questions about my transition were absent. I’d been so accustomed to rumour-fuelled curiosity masquerading as judgment-neutral inquisitiveness that I had come to expect it in exchanges with those long distanced.

"I’m so happy to have found you," she said, amid updates about her kids and her husband.

"Every time I hear Peter Gabriel, I think of you …" I thought to confess.