copyright 2025, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media
Jump Cut, No. 63, summer 2025

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

by Adrian King

In the center of this 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 newwindow]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'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.

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.

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 Mattermovement 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.

Smith did not believe he could launch his television career successfully as an out trans man, and even if he had wanted to be out, it may not have been possible. To have a public discussion around his transness, he would have needed a high-profile career, like Elliot Page, or at least a regular role, like Laverne Cox in Orange is the New Black. In the year that Smith appeared on Girls, GLAAD’s “2014 Where We Are On TV Report” tracked the number of transmasculine and Black LGBT characters on television in the 2014 -2015 season According to the report, there were only 17 Black LGBTQ characters on broadcast and cable and only 1 transmasculine character on television that season.[18] In terms of Black trans actors, Cox was one of the only Black trans women on television in a scripted role during this season. Yet, it would not only have been difficult for Smith to find work if he were out as trans, but even if he were out, Hollywood could have been a rough terrain to navigate. As Oliver Haug points out in an article about transmasculine actors: “it’s an unfortunate truth that when trans men and transmasculine actors do get hired, they’re often the only trans person on set” and must do their own advocacy sometimes for themselves or for their character.[19] Surely not having to explain himself as trans to cis industry professionals, let alone endure potential media publicity and the limitations to the very few (if any) transmasculine roles made strategic sense for an actor already braving low-wages, work precarity, and breaking into Hollywood.

As Smith came out later in 2017, I have to wonder what would have happened to his career if he had been involuntarily outed. While this did not happen, such a possibility exposes the industrial constraints for people in the media and it points to the need to understand the media careers of the few trans men who have appeared on television. In fact, just months before Smith would come out via his character on Queen Sugar, Survivor contestant Zeke Smith, a white trans man, was outed by a fellow contestant during his second season on the show. Zeke Smith had the support of executive producer and host Jeff Probst and worked with GLAAD’s Nick Adams to craft his first public statement via a guest column for the Hollywood Reporter.[20] As a Black actor with no industry giants to back him up, would Smith have been afforded the same opportunities to keep his acting dream alive?

It is likely that Smith could have maintained some type of television career if he were outed, but most likely not as an actor. For example, in 2009 Chaz Bono, the son of Cher and Sonny Bono, came out as trans. Bono then appeared in an OWN Documentary and later that year competed on Dancing with the Stars.[21] In another instance, Thomas Beatie, an Asian American trans man, gained widespread attention in 2007 for his pregnancies. He appeared on various television programs, most notably The Oprah Winfrey Show, 20/20, and even Secret Story, the French adaptation of Big Brother.[22] Smith might have been able to enter this talk and reality show circuit, like Bono, Beatie, and the many trans people on television shows before him as Joshua Gamson details in his book Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity.[23] Yet he wanted to be an actor, not just a celebrity or a trans advocate. Being out as trans, regardless of whether Smith wanted to be or not, was impractical for his dreams of having an acting career in Hollywood.

Notably, Smith was facing another challenge in Hollywood: seeking work as a Black actor. Although he has not publicly discussed his personal experiences in dealing with racism, Kristen Warner’s The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting provides insight into how he might have experienced securing work.[24] Warner discusses the color-evasive racism that Black and Brown actors face while auditioning and attempting to secure roles. This particularly comes to a head when Smith and other Black actors are told by industry professionals, particularly casting directors, that they do not have the “the right look."[25] While the casting directors, for example, claim that race does not matter, this “right look” as Warner explains, ultimately means selecting white actors or actors who are most appealing through a lens of whiteness. As a shorter, bald Black man, Smith was surely not cast in a variety of roles due to racism, regardless of the strength of his acting skills.

How’s a Black stealth transmasculine actor going to find work in Hollywood? As Smith tells the story in 2014, the idea for him to play police officers in order to find work was suggested to him like this:

“I met a guy onset early on when I was doing background work and he told me ‘get a cop costume, and you'll always get work.’ And he was right! So many productions out here need cops and if you have the costume you're in there like swimwear. So I started doing background work as a cop on the shows I loved, like Law & Order: SVU.”[26]

Smith saw an opportunity to find regular work through playing police officers and on shows that centered on police activities. In television, there are plenty of police roles and policing shows looking to hire actors. Obviously, these shows have more than just police officers as characters, they also have attorneys, detectives, vigilantes, criminals, and victims. Perhaps, being a police officer is the most practical choice: there simply are more police officer roles than, say lawyer roles, across television genres. In 2014, Smith even stated another reason why he chose to play a cop:

“I figured I'd go the complete opposite of the stereotype; instead of being cast as the thug I decided to get in the way of the cop."[27]

I question my own reading of Smith’s tone in this comment. He could be remarking on the stakes of binary good/bad representation and/or he could be joking, as he goes on to clarify that he does think he can find more work as a police officer. If we imagine that Smith is serious, it is tempting to offer a flattening critique of Black respectability politics in his decision to play a cop. However, such a critique would ignore the industrial connection between policing and television, especially police drama, which already constructs a binary view of morality. On television, you are good or bad, a cop or criminal, but cops get more work.[28]

What is particularly striking is that Smith experienced career milestones around 2014 and 2019, close to two significant years in the Black Lives Matter movement. 2014, just one year after the movement began, was when Smith began his television career and in 2019, one year before the global coronavirus pandemic and another resurgence of Black Lives Matter, he was cast in his first regular role in Lonestar: 9-1-1. Both of these political moments in the United States forced into public discourse discussions about anti-Black violence at the hands of the police. In a 2017 article for Shadow and Act, as writer Nadine Mattews engages Smith on his interest in playing cops, he speaks directly to the issue of police violence:

“I learn from what I play. There’s a lot of things that happen within the cop community that I don’t understand. Why the blue wall of silence? A lot of what motivates police action is safety and the perception of what is a threat. And sometimes those perceptions are based on faulty ideas but at the end of the day, that’s what it is. That’s why they have such a hard time with people not understanding.”[29]

Smith’s sympathy towards the police rather than towards those harmed by the prison industrial complex reflects his prioritizing his acting career, which relies on his ability to play and be cast as a police officer. Smith’s statements are also part of a larger phenomenon that Warner analyzes among Black actors working in Hollywood’s acolor-evasive industry. As Warner details TV’s economic realities,

“when these actors [of color] do earn parts, they will most likely not be trying to establish some accurate or realistic portrayal of their cultural specificity but will not create waves so as to be considered eligible for subsequent hiring."[30]

In interview quoted above, Smith refuses to engage in what it might mean for him to want to play a Black (and sometimes trans) police officer. By not denying or challenging policing, Smith ensures he is eligible to play police officer roles, the bread and butter of his acting career. While police roles and police-centered content did help him launch a successful television career, the professional trade-off was that he could not challenge the very nature of policing and the prison industrial complex if he wanted to.

For me, this review of his career poses a key question: Would Smith, one of the only two Black trans men consistently working on television, still have a television career if he did not play a police officer and secure roles in police-centered content? The consistency of police content in the television industry allowed Smith to strategically find work amidst transphobia and racism. What is especially clear, however, is that Smith’s decision to market himself as a Black man police officer shaped an important moment in his career: coming out publicly via a trans police officer on Queen Sugar.

“This is definitely the time.” Smith comes out.

 “Actor Brian Michael Smith, who used this character as his vehicle to come out as transgender, has been acting professionally for the last five years and hadn’t disclosed his gender identity until this moment,” wrote Tiq Milan in his preface to Smith’s coming-out interview on NBC News’s website.[31] The interview was published the same week after Smith’s debut in the season 2 episode 5 episode of Queen Sugar titled “Caroling Dusk." The character I discuss here is police officer Toine Wilkins, who appears in two scenes in this episode. I previously discussed how Smith mobilized already existing police content to build a career, but in the next two sections, I gesture towards understanding how media and television’s changing landscape of trans representation has incorporated trans actors and trans characters into its already existing industrial logics. While Smith’s appearance as Toine is brief, his appearance on Queen Sugar represents a pivotal moment in his career as it marks his personal and professional convergence as an actor specializing in police officer roles and as a Black trans man. Here, I provide context for Smith’s decision to come out.

After securing work as a stealth professional actor, Smith came out in 2017. Why? While the transgender tipping point failed to secure an improvement in the material and political conditions of trans livelihoods, it did see more trans actors, writers, and creatives finding work. Smith spoke with interviewer Tiq Milan, a Black trans man writer and media consultant who also gained notoriety during the trans tipping point. Smith said,

“Because of the work that you’ve [Milan has] been doing and Laverne Cox and GLAAD have been doing, there are more roles that have trans people in them that are better written and rooted in authenticity. This is definitely the time."[32]

Here, Smith’s evocation of “time” marks the boom in trans representation and discourse, but in particular, indicates the greater number of roles being written for trans characters to be played by trans actors. As Smith told GLAAD: “in the past five years, there has been a huge shift in mainstream film and TV writing” that created more trans roles.[33] He then named a variety of trans creatives, writers, and advocates who were a part of this boom of trans creatives in Hollywood. Alongside Milan and Cox, other trans creative included Janet Mock, Jen Richards, and Jill Soloway and as well as those outside Hollywood, such independent web series Her Story created by Jen Richards who starred alongside Angelica Ross and Brothers created, directed, and produced by Emmett Jack Lundberg. In fact, Smith appears alongside many of these creatives and actors in the independent documentary film Disclosure, which marks the transition of trans representation in media during the transgender tipping point and frames him as a member of this trans Hollywood cohort.[14] Smith felt that with more trans writers being hired, there would be opportunities for him to act in trans roles.

However, despite the increase in roles for trans actors, this did not translate into significant opportunities for transmasculine actors. In a 2022 VICE article, “Transmasculine Actors Are Still Waiting for Their ‘Tipping Point,’” Oliver Haug spoke to several transmasculine actors including Scott Turner Schofield, D’Lo, Chella Man, and Marquise Vilsón. Haug writes,

“the opportunities they [transmasculine actors] are afforded are sorely lacking. And when it comes to roles that show their full humanity instead of relying on sensationalism or Trans 101 narratives, the field is pretty barren."[35]

In 2019, Brian Michael Smith echoed these concerns, highlighting both the scarcity of transmasculine roles and the nature of the roles that were available. He told The New York Times,

“Of the few roles for trans characters that are out there, most of them have focused on trans feminine narratives… Of the very few trans masculine roles that are out there, they’re mostly white and young.”[36]

Smith shared this in the context of how and why he still sought work playing cisgender roles even after coming out on Queen Sugar; in fact, he soon appeared on Chicago P.D. as a police witness and on Homeland as an EMT. While coming out did position Smith among trans creatives working in Hollywood at this time and allowed him to play trans characters, coming out did not guarantee him more work. He then was clear that he wanted to come out via playing a trans character on screen—perhaps, as a litmus test of his ability to score a trans role.[37]

Yet if coming out did not promote his professional success or advancement, it was something else: a meaningful milestone in Smith’s life. He shared a little of his own process in preparing to come out publicly with GLAAD:

“As I kept working [as an actor], learning about myself, and resolving issues I would uncover in therapy, I became more comfortable with bringing my more challenging life experiences into my work, and I wanted to start exploring my trans experiences. I went looking for roles that would allow me to ‘paint’ with parts of myself that I wasn't comfortable digging into or working with.’[38]

I interpret Brian Michael Smith's comments here as an explanation of how he emotionally prepared to perform the role of a trans character, especially in taking on acting roles that might overlap with parts of his personal experiences. Actress Sandra Caldwell’s coming out experience has resonances with Smith’s. While Caldwell was in her 60s and had been in film, television, and stage acting for around 30 years, like Smith, she was not professionally out as trans; she then chose to come out via playing a trans character through a stage production titled “Charm."[39] On sharing her story for the first time with The New York Times, Caldwell commented that she was not sure how her coming out would be received:

"I don't know what it's going to be like… But I kind of want to live the rest of what I've got on this planet as if there's such a thing as complete freedom. I want to live in that."[40]

Like Caldwell, Smith had to prepare himself for the personal experience of coming out professionally and had to figure out how to present such a personal and private part of his life in a professional setting. Coming out was no easy decision for him and playing the role of Toine Wilkins on Queen Sugar was a major personal and professional moment within his acting career. In the following section, I will situate this coming-out scene in Queen Sugar in the context of his recurring television roles as a police officer.

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] 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?

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.

Notes