A closer look at Queen Sugar — Toine comes out.

Although Smith auditioned for several different transmasculine roles, he landed one that was emblematic of his career to date: the role of Black trans police officer Toine Wilkins on Queen Sugar. The role was not initially written specifically Smith, but it is easy to imagine why he got the role: he was the Black trans man actor with the most television acting experience and he had repeatedly played a cop.[41] [open notes in new window] What was different about this role, however, was that he was not in a police procedural, but instead in a drama with a Black-led production team and an almost all-Black cast. OWN’s Queen Sugar was created and executive produced by Ava DuVerney with the support of Oprah Winfrey, and was loosely based on a novel by Natalie Baszile. However, Queen Sugar, like almost all television content, failed systematically to engage with the prison-industrial complex and policing. Such a traditionally normative narrative allowed for Toine’s inclusion as a Black trans police officer because the show remained distant from the realities of Black trans life while engaging with the existing logics of televisual police.

For the actor, this gave a significant boost to his career: it marked his first trans role and his first appearance in a majority-Black cast television show. The Queen Sugar television series follows three siblings who inherit their father's sugarcane farm in Louisiana after the father passes away. The show was under the direction and creative control of Winfrey, perhaps the most powerful Black woman in media, and DuVernay, an acclaimed producer of several Black films and television projects. For a passionate, ambitious Black actor, getting cast in Queen Sugar was a big deal. Like many of the other shows he appeared in, Queen Sugar was a long running-show with a core recurring cast in which Smith appeared in two scenes. His two “Caroling Dusk,” scenes focus on Ralph Angel, one of the three siblings at the heart of the show. Background information and the plot of the episode are important for understanding how the scene unfolds: Ralph Angel is the single father of his roughly five-year-old son Blue, who is a sweet and gentle child and marked queer through his consistent tending of his doll, Kenya.[42] Recently, Blue’s mother, Darla, has come to stay with Ralph Angel and Blue; she rekindles her romantic and sexual relationship with Ralph Angel and her parental relationship with Blue. However, Darla, jealous of Blue’s attachment to Kenya, throws the doll away.

Smith as Toine Wilkins enters the show while Ralph Angel searches through trash dumpsters in the town for the doll; the police arrive to question Ralph Angel, and one of the police officers is Toine. This is a high stakes moment because Ralph Angel was formerly incarcerated and has a police record. In this moment, Smith appears as he has in previous roles: serious and in a cop uniform. Unexpectedly the scene takes a turn when Toine tells his partner that he will handle Ralph Angel as he and Ralph Angel share a glance that registers as familiar, but not as friendly. Given that Smith is not professionally out as trans, it is unlikely the audience understands that Smith as an actor or Wilkins as a character is trans.

The episode then cuts to Ralph Angel and Toine having a relaxed conversation near the alley and the audience learns that Ralph Angel are friends from school. The men reminisce about the times that Ralph Angel got in trouble at school. Ralph Angel acknowledges that Toine helped him get out of trouble and makes the connection to the present moment as Ralph Angel says “I’d be getting processed right now, if you haven’t come along” and Toine replies “It was the least I could do. Man, the way you had my back, growing up."[43] Ralph Angel thanks Toine for preventing him from getting arrested for trespassing on private propert, and Toine frames his sparing of Ralph Angel as returning a favor. Mutual gratitude frames their conversation.

Ralph Angel then talks about his family and the conversation then shifts to Toine and provides more information about why exactly he is grateful to Ralph Angel:

“Ralph Angel: I want it all with this girl, man. House, farm, kids, whole nine. All of it.

Toine: So what, man you got a soft spot for your son?

Ralph Angel: Period point blank. Darla shouldn’t have thrown away that doll, man. I don’t know why he hang on to Kenya, but he does. I know how it was for you. Shit, I saw it. And I don’t know everything about it, but I’m gonna keep him close. Just let him, you know, do whatever he wants, be whoever he want to be.”[44]

Ralph Angel details that through his relationship with Toine, he witnessed transphobia. In turn, this experience has motivated his care and support for Blue as a queer child. More context for Tonie’s experiences follows as their conversation continues:

“Toine: Man, I really can’t let this moment go by without saying thank you, man.

Ralph Angel: We’re good.

Toine: Nah man, I never really did. You let me be me when I didn’t know who I was. And the best part is you let me be me when I did know. ‘Girl why your voice so deep?’ ‘Come over here, Antoinette, I’ll remind you how to be a girl.’ Shit, man. I would’ve died or killed somebody up in that piece if you didn’t keep my head on tight.

Ralph Angel: I feel you.”[45]

As Keegan describes a good trans media object as one that “successfully absorb transgender identity into their representational fields without threatening the intelligibility of preexisting gender identifications,” here Toine through repeating the phases he heard in school marks himself as once a girl who is now a man.[46] The function of the term “girl” and Toine’s deadname in a conversation about identity situates Toine as a trans man. Neither Toine nor Ralph Angel use the language of “transgender” to describe Toine, although the press and other promotional materials around the show refer to Toine as “transgender,” such as the title of the YouTube clip from OWN’s channel: “Ralph Angel Reconnects with a Transgender Man He Once Protected” and Smith’s coming out interview with Milan.[47] With the absence of the word “transgender,” the script refuses to suggest that Blue himself might be trans, but it still draws the links between queerness and transness.

If a good trans media object seeks to assimilate trans characters into existing television without disrupting “dominant models of gender and sexuality,” then Toine serves to reinforce something about the idea of a good transgender character. That is, the script incorporates trans identity into the depictions of policing without interrogating policing itself as a white supremacist structure that shapes racialized gender.[48] Toine is not the first police officer character on Queen Sugar; that was Calvin, a white cisgender man who is the love interest of Nova, an investigative journalist and sister of Ralph Angel. In season one, Calvin and Nova are tangled in a prison-industry complex themed-plotline when a Black teenage boy is sent to an adult prison that the police department is attempting to fill with arrestees in order to gain a profit. In this plotline the show engages to various degrees, the public discourse about from the Black Lives Matter movement.[49] Nova exposes the prison and the police department where Calvin works, resulting in Calvin and Nova’s breakup. Here, it is through the characters’ relationships with police officers and as police officers that provide the space in which critiques about policing are leveraged and resolved. Season one concludes with Nova and Calvin getting back together after Calvin calls in a favor to have the teen released. Similar to Ralph Angel’s and Toine’s encounter, the script reduces exploring threats of harm caused by the structural aspects of the prison industrial complex; instead, it develops a plot about bad individuals where the problem can still be redeemed by individuals.[50] While Toine Wilkins lacks the screen time and overall integration in the plot compared to Calvin, he marks Queen Sugar’s continued disinterest in engaging within the impacts of carcerality as a system.

Yet Toine’s role also marks the police as another site for discussing a different contemporary discourse: the trans tipping point and trans inclusion in media. Perhaps this is why Toine only appears briefly in the show; his short appearance might make audiences feel like the show is contemporary and relevant (like it does with Calvin and Nova) but without doing the work on building out a trans character. In The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom, Alfred L. Martin argues that the presence of Black cisgender gay men on all-Black cast sitcoms often functions as a narrative catalyst that repairs relationships between cisgender straight main characters. These characters are framed as good and nice people in their ultimate handling of the cis gay character, but the gay character is dismissed from the show after coming out.[51] At first glance, Ralph Angel and Toine’s scene seems to reflect what each man offers the other: Toine kept Ralph out of trouble in school, while Ralph Angel defended his gender non-conforming friend from bullying. Yet, it is after Toine comes out and christens Ralph Angel as a qualified parent of a queer child, that Toine is dismissed from the episode and the season as well. Through his brief appearance as a trans police officer, Toine functions as a state representative who approves of Ralph Angel’s role as father to a queer child.

While dismissed from the “Caroling Dusk” and season two, Smith did manage to earn three more appearances on the show for a total of four appearances over the seven seasons that Queen Sugar aired. These episodes include:

• Season 3, Episode 10 “Here Beside the River” (2018)
• Season 4, Episode 1 “Pleasure is Black” (2019)
• Season 7, episode 4 “Spaces Fill” (2022)

Toine’s appearances remain brief and serve to offer approval for on-going father-child dynamics between Ralph Angel and Blue. In “Here Beside the River,” Ralph Angel and Blue are under the threat of family separation from the Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS). At the DCFS office, Ralph Angel and Toine run into one another, and Toine affirms that Ralph Angel can indeed be a good father.[52] Toine’s roles in “Caroling Dusk” and “Here Beside the River” as an out trans character (alongside queer child Blue and a bisexual Nova) helped DuVerney to win a 2018 Excellence in Media Award from GLAAD.[53] In “Pleasure is Black,” Toine appears briefly as a guest at Ralph Angel’s aunt’s diner opening and suggests that Ralph Angel hire a person who has been recently incarcerated to work at his farm.[54] In “Spaces Fill,” Toine and Ralph Angel run into each other while taking their kids to an early childhood class. Notably, Toine shares that he resigned as police officer and started a center for trans kids.[55] While eventually Toine exits the cop role, his character mostly serves to offer nuances to seeing Ralph Angel as a good parent and supportive father.

While Queen Sugar provided Smith the opportunity to disclose his transness professionally, on the flip side, Toine’s brief appearances provided Queen Sugar the opportunity to engage with the transgender tipping point in the media. In particular, Toine’s appearance as a Black trans man police officer fails to interrogate policing. The show exemplifies how a trans character can be mobilized to fit into the larger existing logics of television without disrupting structures of anti-Blackness or cisnormativity present within the prison-industrial complex. Queen Sugar exposes a broader potential within contemporary television to assimilate trans characters into existing narratives, but television still neutralizes the connections between transness and the very systems that harm Black and trans people.

At the top of the ladder?

Promotional poster for 9-1-1: Lonestar (2020-2025).	Smith as Jeremy Washington in After (2021).

In his interview with Milan, Smith shares his dream role:

“I want to be a part of a well-written, ensemble-based TV show that I could work on each week with amazing directors, and I’d get to bring attention to some of the issues facing black men, transmen, people working with young folks or someone starting a family."[56]

By coming out on Queen Sugar and having previously marketed himself a police officer in his roles, Brian Michael Smith was well positioned to play his biggest role to date: an out Black trans firefighter Paul Strickland on 9-1-1: Lonestar. A procedural, Lonestar first aired in January 2020 and aired for five seasons, ending in February 2025.

In this essay, I have detailed Smith’s career by exploring the challenges he faced as a Black trans actor in Hollywood. The availability of police roles and quantity of television policing content allowed him to specialize strategically in order to find regular work. While not professionally out as trans at the beginning of his career, the increase in content created by or featuring trans people inspired Smith to come out, which he did via the character Toine, a trans police officer on Queen Sugar. Although his appearances in that series are brief, Toine’s character as a Black trans police officer reveals how television content during the trans tipping point—and specifically in policing scripts—easily absorbed Black transmasculinity into the logics of the prison-industrial complex. While Smith successfully managed to find work, his career as made possible through its affiliation with police fictions illuminates emergent constraints for Black transmasculinity on television.

Promotional photo of Smith as Paul Strickland in 9-1-1: Lonestar.	Brian Michael Smith accepts the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Drama Series for 9-1-1: Lonestar with co-stars Rafael Silva and Ronen Rubinstein beside him.