The cult documentary “The Aggressives” began with a queer NYU graduate film student, Daniel Peddle, hanging out on the West Side Highway with a minicam before becoming a groundbreaking indie sensation in 2005. Shot with a vérité brio throughout New York City, “The Aggressives” pivoted around half a dozen queer and BIPOC people struggling with health and housing while finding community in identifying as masculine-presenting “AGs,” or aggressives, stretching their self-expression beyond the borders of their assigned gender. But Peddle was left dissatisfied with that documentary’s ending, which left doors of uncertainty ajar in detailing the pleasures and pains of queer life. Thus, a quarter of a century later, he returns to his subjects for “Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later,” a heartfelt and hopeful portrait of four of the original AGs that feels more complete and finds each of them on steadier footing — eventually.
A few of the lesbians profiled in 2005 have now transitioned or are in the middle of that process and identify differently than they did then. In this less scrappy and more polished panorama, “Beyond the Aggressives” catches up with Kisha, Octavio, Trevon, and Chin from the first film. Kisha Batista, a “fem-aggressive,” is a Bronx-living artist who’s appeared in Spike Lee films and on TV’s “Orange Is the New Black.” The former model is candid about her struggles maintaining relationships, but thinks of herself as a “one-woman woman.” Another, Trevon, who now lives in Palm Springs with his fiancée Jade, admits to wrestling with fidelity, his own transition, and with Jade’s battle with body dysmorphia, which has led her to seek many plastic surgeries abroad. How her transformations create friction with Trevon’s own makes for the most compelling drama in the film.
“Beyond the Aggressives” meanwhile shows Octavio Sanders still in flux with his transition, but with an open-minded and now-adult son, and fulfilling a dream of top surgery. The subject of the documentary’s grimmest moments, however, is Chin Tsui, a trans man and human-trafficking survivor with a green card who spent 19 months in solitary confinement at a George ICE detention center. Peddle interweaves scenes from a Free Chin protest led by Chin’s sister with snapshots of what solitary looked like for him after ICE came knocking on his door in early 2017, not long after Trump took office and brought down an iron fist on immigration policy. Peddle makes it clear that Chin’s specific treatment during incarceration is also the direct result of the transphobia that continues to run rampant in the prison system.
The North Carolina-born-and-raised Peddle, a white gay man, is now more examining of his own privileged vantage point in portraying othered individuals even further on the margins. That’s an appropriately contemporary response in a documentary space nowadays where filmmakers have the obligation to reckon with their own position in their storytelling. Where the original documentary took a, well, aggressively fly-on-the-wall approach to its subjects, with an even charming student-film quality, “Beyond the Aggressives” is a sleeker package where Peddle will sometimes insert himself into the story. Only fair, as “The Aggressives” in 2005 was wrought out of his friendship with Kisha.
Plus, we now have a more nuanced and ever-evolving vocabulary for the spectrum of queerness that can provide necessary labels even as it’s eschewing them. Trevon wonders whether or not he is now non-binary, something Jade, dating a trans-masculine partner for the first time, is still coming to comfortable terms with. Peddle started filming with the four subjects who were willing to in 2017, and so “Beyond the Aggressives,” too, is evolving in real-time. And this time around, the documentary is less infused with the inherent pain of queerness after the millennium and since and more buoyed by the joys of gender expression and wresting oneself from the fictions of institution. At just under 80 minutes, “Beyond the Aggressives” ends on an ellipsis and feels somewhat unfinished as a piece of documentary filmmaking, but how could it be? I would be surprised if Peddle doesn’t return to these folks once more in a decade or two.
Grade: B+
“Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later” opens in select theaters on November 17. The documentary will premiere March 30 on demand for Paramount+ subscribers with the Paramount+ with Showtime plan before making its on-air debut on Showtime.
