When the Story Answers Back

A Case Study of Lavender Men (2025)

Written by Joshua Allen
Founder and Executive Director, The Atlantis Awards

“Taffeta can give two lovers new bodies, new light, and another chance. The trouble begins when those lovers want different things from that chance.”

Atlantis Awards context: Lavender Men was submitted for consideration at The 11th Atlantis Awards.

The Atlantis Awards Case Studies are not reviews. Their purpose is to examine the craft behind exceptional filmmaking—celebrating successful creative choices and identifying the mechanics behind why they work. This study follows the construction of the finished film, with production history and filmmaker commentary alongside the analysis.

Content notice: Full spoilers. Discussion includes sexual assault, discriminatory abuse, and disordered eating.

A Panoramic, Singular Thing

Before Lavender Men asks us to believe in its romance between Abraham Lincoln and Elmer Ellsworth, it asks us to notice the person maintaining the room in which a version of their story is being performed. Taffeta works behind the audience, calling cues, managing other people’s appearances, and making a production possible without becoming its center of attention. On the wall, Lincoln’s portrait stretches across open books. A recognizable historical face occupies a collection of separate pages; the living person keeping the performance together occupies the back of the theatre.

Directed by Lovell Holder and adapted with Roger Q. Mason from Mason’s play, the film eventually gives that stage manager the whole room. Taffeta, played by Mason, conjures a different Lincoln and Ellsworth, supplies their surroundings, and plays nearly everyone the two men encounter. They can turn a lighting assignment into a musical number, become a wife demanding affection, or interrupt a scene that threatens to proceed without them. Their imagination draws its faces and injuries from contemporary life, making a historical romance into an intimate theatre of desire.

Taking control is the beginning of the experiment. As the romance develops, its participants make incompatible claims upon the power that assembled them. Lincoln asks Taffeta to change the ending and save the man he loves. Ellsworth insists on the history through which he believes his life will be remembered. Meanwhile, the tenderness Taffeta has created grows increasingly painful to watch: it is beautiful, it is available to their imagination, and it still does not make them the person being loved.

The final shift involves choosing what authorship is for. Taffeta can stop using another couple’s story to satisfy a need it cannot answer without destroying the love they have made visible. The film develops that choice through changing performance roles, a camera that alternately glides and searches, color that turns familiar rooms into new emotional environments, and words that acquire different owners as they return. Its aspiration comes from allowing the person who can imagine a future for everyone else to begin extending that possibility to themself.

Everybody's Show but Theirs

The opening moves as though the theatre knows how to run without anyone questioning its arrangements. Smooth, floating photography passes through stage and auditorium while a piano plays “Hail to the Chief.” The actors perform; the audience watches with limited enthusiasm; Taffeta comments directly to the camera about a missed cue. An opening quotation from Edmund White has imagined a pitiless spectator sitting in the dark. Taffeta’s address temporarily makes us something more companionable: the person at the light board finally has someone with whom to share an exasperated look.

Their phone opens a second performance within the first. On Backdoor, Taffeta finds Max, an attractive man sitting in the audience, and sends an invitation to meet after the show. The profile and the auditorium give him two frames: someone to look at, and someone who might look back. Taffeta is briefly attending to a possibility of their own while keeping everyone else’s evening functioning.

Once the play ends, public appreciation and private judgment separate. Two spectators who have mocked the production enthusiastically compliment its director, played by Philippe Bowgen. He redirects the praise toward Taffeta, describing the stage manager as the person whose show it now is. The film follows that compliment into flag-folding, resetting, and cleaning. Responsibility has been transferred much more completely than recognition.

In the green room, Taffeta discovers that Max and Chris, the actor playing Ellsworth, have already begun dating. Max is Pete Ploszek; Chris is Alex Esola. The encounter gives the earlier message its sting: the man Taffeta has approached is attached to someone they work beside. Chris asks for discretion, kisses Taffeta’s cheek, and acknowledges how hard they work before the couple leaves together. The kindness does not erase the disappointment, but neither does disappointment make the couple’s affection an offense. Their happiness exists independently of what Taffeta hoped might happen.

The older actor playing Lincoln, portrayed by Ted Rooney (credited, in the film’s own cast list, simply as The President), enters soon afterward. Taffeta challenges his use of the wrong pronoun during the post-show interview. He apologizes, then immediately speaks as though he and Taffeta are simply two boys alone together. While removing his costume, he turns undressing into a sexual approach, touching and kissing Taffeta without permission and assigning them desires they have not expressed. When they insist that he stop, he responds with contempt for the body he was just claiming to want.

Here the camera acquires a slight handheld wobble. The difference from the opening glide is small enough to belong to the encounter rather than advertise an entirely new film. Rooney’s character overrides the professional boundary, and the image loses some of its earlier ease. After they push him away, his abuse recedes beneath ringing. An extreme close-up of their eyes takes us into an experience in which his words continue to matter after their literal intelligibility disappears.

Holder developed this stage-manager frame for the adaptation. Harrison Blackman’s interview-based account in The Brooklyn Rail attributes to him the decision to ground Taffeta’s fantasia in an abusive encounter with the actor playing Lincoln, establishing both the protagonist’s circumstances and the immediate availability of this historical figure. The fantasy therefore begins with materials already in the room: the public icon, an aggressor wearing his costume, and a desired couple whose bodies can be recast.

My Fantasia, Your Ending

Back at the stage, the camera regains smoothness while the soundtrack remains crowded. Whispers circulate through Taffeta’s solitude, incorporating insults, judgments, and Chris’s earlier acknowledgment of their labor. Praise now sits beside contempt inside a space where Taffeta is useful to others but struggles to feel wanted. The empty auditorium provides no visible source for the voices, allowing remembered speech and internal accusation to overlap.

The camera begins a circular approach, settling directly in front of Taffeta and holding there without a cut. It makes small corrections as Mason performs, keeping them centered without freezing them into a pose. The movement brings us into an encounter that the subsequent duration refuses to interrupt. Taffeta names the humiliations they expect other people to attach to their body, then directs the accusation at the lens. Our earlier intimacy with the stage manager is no exemption from the possibility that we, too, have been looking badly.

Mason’s performance permits defiance and doubt to remain audible together. Taffeta insists they are more than the identities being used to dismiss them, then qualifies the declaration with “I think.” As the sustained shot gives way to montage, “I’m gonna tell you a story” repeats. The authority being claimed is real within the fantasia, but it emerges from a person who has not first become certain of their own value.

The film dresses that authority in an American flag of modern design, distinct from the period flag Taffeta has been handling for the production. It then introduces the two men before culminating in the “Fantasia” title. The replacement Lincoln is the face from Taffeta’s unanswered invitation; Ellsworth retains the face of Chris. Their reunion begins with an embrace, making the love visible before the narrative returns to how it developed. For Taffeta, casting is already a way of arranging proximity to the people around whom their longing has gathered.

A right-facing profile of Lincoln against pale pages presents the new body with the composure of a portrait. Taffeta openly rejects the obligation to reproduce the familiar aged likeness. They are making a man they want to look at, and the camera gives that choice a carefully shaped image. The wall’s assembled face and the living profile coexist as different ways of picturing the same historical name.

The conjured men do not accept every term simply because Taffeta has supplied their entrance. Ellsworth is delighted to be reunited with Lincoln and wants to stay. Lincoln recoils from the prospect of reliving a story whose ending he already knows. Taffeta persuades him by offering revision: this time could be different. When a stage light switches on and blue-lavender light washes the lovers, the assurance that anything is possible hardens into a promise apparently supported by a working piece of the room.

This is the bargain that will later make authorship an obligation. Lincoln agrees to enter the romance because Taffeta offers a way beyond its loss; Taffeta wants the romance because of what witnessing and inhabiting it might provide. Asked who they will be, they answer, “Everything you’re not.” The men retain the central relationship, while Taffeta takes responsibility for the rest of its world.

Holder told We Need to Talk About Oscar that he approached the figures as Taffeta’s versions of the men, asking Ploszek and Esola to play the immediate truth of coworkers discovering a deeper connection. That emphasis gives the performers a relationship to develop rather than an impersonation to perfect. In an interview with The Brooklyn Rail, Mason described Holder’s approach as making the film “simultaneously panoramic but also deeply singular”: many roles, places, and times, organized through one person’s experience.

Coal Heat and Other Invitations

The Drillyard provides a beginning for the romance and an initial demonstration of Ellsworth’s appeal. He is commanding, physically energetic, and capable of producing confidence in another person through pressure and encouragement. Taffeta plays Cadet Kenny, alternately submitting to the exercise and disrupting its rhythm with their own comic energy. The repeated one-two-three turns instruction into a physical rhythm that they keep bending toward play. The camera follows bodies and makes small corrections as they move, contrasting with the opening’s effortless glide. It creates the impression of discovering the exercise alongside its performers.

Lincoln arrives as a spectator of Ellsworth’s competence. His attraction first has the socially available language of professional admiration: the young man commands respect, has a gift, might become a leader. Ellsworth returns the attention by treating Lincoln’s own modest military history as a form of service rather than a failure to fire a shot. Each finds something to recognize in the other before either makes an openly romantic claim.

The conversation moves from accomplishment to possibility. Ellsworth wants to become a general. Lincoln offers the law, asks about his circumstances, and invites him to the office. The practical advantage of coal heat begins to sound like an excuse to keep someone close through the coming cold. Ploszek’s interest works through the questions he continues asking after a straightforward professional conversation could have ended; Esola’s guarded pleasure leaves room for the younger man not yet fully understanding what is happening.

Taffeta has meanwhile moved from cadet to spectator. They take a seat rather than disappear when dismissed, then watch from the edge of another composition as the men reflect on their first encounter. Ellsworth compares emerging attraction to hearing an unfamiliar language and wanting to hear more. The story has begun producing something Taffeta cannot receive merely by supplying the scene: the experience of another person becoming newly intelligible through desire.

“Next scene” restores their command. Yet that command controls where the film goes, not who inside it has just found a connection. The difference is already visible in the blocking: Taffeta can stand within the encounter, watch it from the seats, or appear at the curtain, but the men’s attention keeps making its own path between them.

The captain’s quarters then place Taffeta on the other side of a judgment about bodies. Wearing an officer’s uniform, they measure Ellsworth while he asks how to advance. The camera smooths out, but insert shots of tape and skin alternate with sharply different postures and arrangements, making the cutting itself a comic act of repositioning. Ellsworth’s body is an object of interest and an object of assessment at once.

His ambitions meet a verdict that his size is insufficient. Taffeta, humiliated for their own body, now performs the authority that limits another person’s future by his dimensions. Taffeta has acquired a role with power, but the scene reveals how easily an inherited role can bring its prejudices with it. Ellsworth will carry the injury beyond the joke, giving it consequences the storyteller cannot simply leave behind with the costume.

The Chandelier and the Contract

Rejected by the military hierarchy, Ellsworth accepts Lincoln’s invitation and enters the law office. Lincoln has cleared a desk for him. What began as an offer now provides daily proximity, an alternative ambition, and the possibility of being valued for something the captain’s measurements could not contain. The room settles into a workplace in which instruction can gradually develop into intimacy.

Lincoln begins with contracts, moving through an explanation whose language gives Taffeta opportunities for sexual commentary. Then he complains about the light and tells Taffeta that supplying it is their job. They respond by becoming a chandelier. The assigned function remains illumination, but the form makes the supposed background indispensable to the foreground: the person asked to light the scene emerges as its center of attention.

Pink and magenta saturate the musical interruption. A crown, face jewels, glittering clothing, and dangling ornaments make the body itself a lighting event. The camera rocks around the performance, drifting off level in both directions rather than holding a single ominous Dutch angle. Its repeated sway feels like a camp music video whose frame wants to dance along. Taffeta gestures toward the lens and recruits the men into the number, briefly converting spectatorship into participation on Taffeta’s terms.

The sequence draws upon an existing theatrical collaboration. Skylight’s 2022 program credits Kevin JZ Prodigy’s chandelier song, Stephen Gifford’s scenery, David Gonzalez’s original music, and Jobel Medina’s choreography. The feature retains Gifford, Gonzalez, and Medina, with additional screen credits including Cece Suazo’s vogue choreography and ONCH’s headdress and jewelry design. The film can preserve the pleasure of a theatrical interruption while using close proximity and changing angles to give it a mobility unavailable from a fixed seat.

Mason, Ploszek, and Esola had also played the central trio onstage. Blackman reports that the feature was shot in ten days, with the stage production serving as rehearsal; producer Mia Chang describes the transition into filming as seamless. Their familiarity supplied a practical foundation for repeatedly changing the photographic and emotional terms of an established encounter.

When the number finishes, the camera regains composure and Lincoln resumes with “The elements of a contract are…” The abrupt return to straight-faced instruction completes the joke. The lesson has survived Taffeta’s attempt to turn a duty into a spotlight, and the men can resume the relationship being built at the desk.

Ellsworth admits that his military ambition has been checked. Lincoln offers him another image of himself: a leader using a pen, with the office as a different battlefield. The encouragement gives the professional invitation emotional weight. Someone has looked beyond the young man’s apparent inadequacy and offered him a future.

A premature gunshot briefly interrupts that future, and Taffeta objects that the story has not reached that point. Another incident supplies Sid, a figure whose pocket has been shot and whose scattered coins become potential legal business. Ellsworth wonders whether Lincoln might one day have his face on a coin; Lincoln thinks of Caesar, death, and a likeness surviving in metal. Gunfire, money, recognition, and mortality enter the room together, long before Ellsworth will demand a coin of his own.

Taffeta dislikes being made into Sid, another supporting figure whose misfortune helps someone else’s story proceed. Lincoln invokes their promise to play everybody, exposing the burden concealed inside apparent freedom. Taffeta responds by selecting a role with a stronger claim upon his attention: if he insists that he was a good husband, they will become his wife and ask him to demonstrate it.

Please See Me

As Mother, Taffeta can ask for something neither cadet nor captain nor chandelier could credibly demand: to be loved by Lincoln as a partner. They challenge his account of his marriage, then invite him to look directly at them. Recognition becomes a performed test. Can the person who sees a wife also see the body, desire, loneliness, and work gathered inside that designation?

The photography initially smooths further, lending the new domestic arrangement a composed surface. That surface breaks as abusive phrases intrude. The framing grows invasive; the camera reacts more quickly to gestures it can no longer comfortably contain. Taffeta’s performance as Mother crosscuts with contemporary distress, and the historical costume ceases to provide a secure boundary around the role.

The approach toward “rosewater between my bosoms” restores calmer, more conventionally proportioned coverage without returning the sequence to emotional innocence. Mother offers Lincoln a sensory invitation, and he leans toward the softness and scent. Contemporary glimpses of Taffeta with the director and of Taffeta preparing their appearance enter alongside it. The film lets desire find correspondences across those spaces before fully explaining the remembered relationship.

This movement between costume, interior speech, and contemporary life had a production precursor. Holder recalls that promotional filming after the postponed 2020 stage production became the short Taffeta. Working with cinematographer Matt Plaxco, he recognized during the second take that they had something beyond a promotional reel and developed the footage into a short. Plaxco subsequently photographed the feature. Cinema’s initial opening into this theatrical material came through Mason’s performance and the attention of a camera.

Mason later described performing scenes in different ways to give the editor interpretive options, while remaining responsive to the other actors and the director. Their phrase was “performing for the editor.” That process belongs beside Morgan Halsey’s cutting, which repeatedly carries emotional material across changes in costume, location, and persona. The sustained opening address and the fractured domestic passages make different uses of performance: one requires us to remain with an unfolding expression, while the other permits experiences to answer one another through juxtaposition.

The contemporary eating scenes introduce another kind of scrutiny. Compared with the smooth, buoyant cutaways involving the director, Taffeta alone at home is watched by a camera that drifts with slight, persistent uncertainty. Several times, low angles look across containers and glasses toward their face. The foreground makes consumption part of the act of seeing them. It can feel accusatory, as though the room contains the evidence for a judgment Taffeta has already learned to anticipate.

The imagery remains mundane: a kitchen, food, someone alone. Its near-dreamlike unease comes from the relationship between that ordinary action and an observing position that never quite feels neutral. Taffeta’s voice alternates between self-adornment as possibility and clothing as concealment, moving from the idea of becoming a star to instructions for making their body disappear. Mother and contemporary Taffeta share the attack across cuts.

The scene therefore develops more than dissatisfaction with a costume or a marriage. Taffeta keeps trying to make a body eligible for tenderness, while the language of eligibility changes faster than they can satisfy it. A notification from Studzz interrupts the distress with the prospect of a date, allowing an apparently new possibility to enter through the same phone that carried their invitation to Max.

Everything You're Not

Back at work, Lincoln and Ellsworth grow more comfortable testing one another. Ellsworth explains his interest in the Zouaves and the expressive possibilities of a uniform that changes how a soldier is perceived. The conversation turns into a playful challenge to Lincoln’s age and strength, then a boxing match that scatters papers. Looser, responsive photography accommodates the men’s physical ease. Their working relationship now has room for play.

Sadie arrives with a broom and needs the floor they have been using. Taffeta takes over the cleaner’s role from the actress seen in the opening production, and the camera steadies as the roughhousing stops. The formal change helps mark the reappearance of a duty that pleasure has temporarily ignored. The men can enjoy breaking the office’s decorum because someone else is expected to restore it.

Sadie tests the limits of her conversational permission, teasing Lincoln about Mother and recognizing his fondness for his student. He reminds her that he helped secure her employment, then withdraws into the authority of a man who expects the sweeping to continue. Taffeta’s new persona can speak, but the employer can decide when the speech has exceeded the job. Once left alone, Sadie names the trap: even the daydream has placed Taffeta back in the business of cleaning up other people’s lives.

The woods offer the men an escape from the office and Taffeta another supporting function. Taffeta becomes a tree. Within the theatrical landscape, yellow light catches Lincoln against cyan haze while the camera adjusts dynamically around his movement. These frames are less inclined to settle into portraits; the looseness accompanies men experimenting with how to be together outside professional routine. Taffeta, conspicuously costumed as the setting, has not escaped the demand to supply their surroundings.

As the men undress, Ellsworth admits that his commanding military presence is partly an act. He fears that short legs and arms make him insufficiently substantial, repeating the wound created in the captain’s quarters. Lincoln answers with his own ungainly dimensions and with the force he remembers seeing in the Drillyard. Ellsworth, in turn, challenges Lincoln’s retreat into the office after political disappointment. Each calls the other back toward an ambition he has allowed someone else’s judgment to diminish.

Their affection gains conviction through this reciprocity. They do not merely exchange flattering descriptions; they remember one another’s capacities and argue against the smaller selves each has begun to accept. The film’s imagined Lincoln rediscovers political ambition, while Ellsworth briefly inhabits the general he wants to become. Professional recognition has developed into something more intimate: being known well enough that another person can challenge your account of your limits.

The bright, soft exterior images of the two men running, climbing, and resting together extend that ease beyond the theatrical set. Their smoother, floating treatment gives the outdoor companionship a buoyancy distinct from the searching movement within the stage-built woods. Taffeta remains the tree, watching love receive an apparently effortless landscape. Their commentary resents the latitude given to these bodies while acknowledging the couple’s appeal. The glamour of their companionship and the loneliness of its observer coexist; the film keeps both in view rather than requiring one to disprove the other.

Blue, lavender, magenta, yellow, and naturalistic light are now functioning through these relationships rather than as fixed character labels. Pink has accompanied exuberant showmanship and private bodily distress. The cool world that brings the lovers together can leave Taffeta alone in an auditorium washed with the same hue. Sharing the palette does not guarantee sharing the experience.

The Other Side of Wanting

Returning as Mother, Taffeta confronts Lincoln about being left alone. Her dieting, financial contribution, and attention to his ambitions have failed to obtain the attention she wants from him. He describes his work as something he is doing for her; she asks why the person supposedly benefiting from all that effort remains unseen. The exchange reveals how easily usefulness and affection can be substituted for one another by people who are not asking the same question.

The camera around this disagreement has a more exposed handheld texture, full of microadjustments that register the effort to stay with the performers. It does not become wildly shaky. The loss of composure is intimate enough to make an already familiar room feel less dependable, matching a conversation in which familiar assurances no longer reassure.

After Lincoln leaves, Taffeta recalls a middle-school dance. Another lonely boy invited them to dance, and Taffeta recognized his need with unusual clarity. They also recognized the power that the invitation gave them: they could answer the loneliness or withhold the answer. The staged encounter allows an offered hand and a brief shared dance to become visible before the memory arrives at their refusal: “Maybe next time.”

This admission complicates the fantasy of control. Taffeta knows what it means to be on the side of the person who can choose, and being wounded has not always made them generous with that choice. The memory does not explain away the abuse they suffer. It exposes a separate truth: attention can become power even for someone who usually experiences its absence.

In the law office, the camera regains steadiness while another asymmetry develops. The fictional Lincoln and Ellsworth discuss racial exclusion and public image with Taffeta listening from the seats. Their increasingly intimate understanding of each other has not made their outlook inclusive of the person assembling the conversation. The romance can offer real tenderness while retaining assumptions that injure its observer.

Ellsworth now feels taller in the office, but a letter from Carrie reveals a part of his life that Lincoln has not been invited to manage. Lincoln presses to read it, treating mail received in his workplace as something he is entitled to inspect. Jealousy takes the language of professional authority. When he orders Ellsworth out, the younger man’s statement that he only works there echoes into Taffeta’s own sense of exclusion.

The relationship has acquired its first substantial conflict over ownership. The office that made Ellsworth feel larger can also be used to make him answerable. Lincoln’s desire to keep him close is beginning to resemble a claim over where he goes and whom he loves — a pressure that will eventually expand from a letter on a desk to the ending of his life.

The House That Loses Its Listener

Taffeta’s midnight alarm returns the film to the empty theatre and the promised encounter with Studzz. The date takes place over the phone. He asks for a new scenario, and Taffeta moves beyond the expected erotic setup into a shared domestic future: land in the woods outside Virginia, a house of ordinary proportions, seasons changing, and warmth beside a hearth.

What they supply is a life together. The imagined pleasure lies in duration, in repeatedly occupying a home with somebody who remains. Close, slightly unsteady photography keeps Taffeta at the dressing-room mirror while their voice creates a much larger space. Their actual surroundings remain small and solitary even as the story accommodates two people.

The caller reaches his own sexual gratification and hangs up. He does not reject the fantasy’s content; he ends the encounter when his need has been met, regardless of whether Taffeta’s has. Their sentence carries wood into ash and ash into dust, then loses its listener before it can say what comes next. Once again, Taffeta has successfully made an experience for someone else without receiving the experience they were trying to make.

The sound of shattering cups gives frustration a physical consequence, and the edit carries it into Mother’s declaration that she has broken the china. She has also been writing, planning, cultivating connections, and imagining the social work required by her husband’s future. Listing those contributions amounts to a plea for personal acknowledgment. She asks him to say that he needs her.

Lincoln can help her out of painful clothing and still refuse a kiss. Mother converts that refusal into a verdict on her body, then slaps him. The film allows us to understand the hurt without making it a right to another person’s desire. Taffeta’s power over a scene has not supplied a safe distinction between wanting tenderness, offering service, and demanding an answer.

When the historical persona gives way to contemporary Taffeta, Lincoln remains available to speak with them. The fantasia no longer waits for a costume to establish the terms of interaction. Its central figure can look back at the storyteller and suggest they continue, even when the story has exposed how little its promise of closeness has repaired.

I Could Watch This All Night

The alley gives the men a chance to move beyond jealousy and toward an intimacy neither can explain away as work. They meet while drinking; Carrie has ended her relationship with Ellsworth; Lincoln complains about Mother. Taffeta enters carrying a lantern, supplying the warm light in which the two can see each other. The camera’s smoother passage through the cramped space allows awkwardness and attraction to develop without the abrasive closeness of the preceding distress.

Ellsworth interrupts the possibility of a drunken encounter because he wants it to be real. Inside a fantasia, that request has a precise emotional meaning: he wants a choice that will survive the immediate circumstances. His care for Lincoln includes refusing to treat opportunity as sufficient permission. Desire grows more persuasive because it can wait for the other person to participate fully.

Their play turns into a waltz, recalling the military exercises and the three-count Mother had earlier tried to remember. The dance expands beyond the alley, and the film places Lincoln in the auditorium with Taffeta farther back. He watches Ellsworth with the pleasure of a person whose attention is being returned. Taffeta watches the whole event. Their similar declarations that they could watch all night align them emotionally while preserving their different positions within the romance.

The nomination brings the couple back to the office and makes the future suddenly less private. Lincoln imagines the public life ahead, then mourns the possibility that an ordinary afternoon together will never recur. The transition and initial coverage are notably smooth. Stability gives the moment a composed surface before the men sit side by side on the desk and expose what that surface has contained.

Lincoln asks Ellsworth to close his eyes and imagine nothing, then puts a hand over his. The camera’s tremor deepens just as the touch makes feeling impossible to evade. Vulnerability here is welcome and uncertain together. The small movements that elsewhere accompanied injury now accompany the risk of asking to be wanted, demonstrating that photographic instability does not mean only danger.

Sadie arrives to resign, returning the scene to a more observationally responsive camera. Her husband has died, she has discovered money he kept from her, and she plans a future in Los Angeles. She possesses ideas, resources, and ambitions beyond the role of cleaner. Yet the men’s farewell threatens to make even her departure another convenient clearing of the scene. Taffeta refuses erasure, removes part of the costume, and moves into the audience, telling the lovers to continue.

The love scene gives them time. Bodies lean, lower, support, and return to each other; hands and mouths travel along arms; the desk and chairs become surfaces for yielding weight rather than conducting business. The camera glides, floats, and sweeps with an attention that can feel like another caress. The sequence is not rushing to an act that will certify the relationship. It makes the experience of being handled tenderly its subject.

Holder described tailoring the sexuality to Taffeta’s emotional world, emphasizing “partnership and tenderness and comfort” rather than simply increasing explicitness. The screen production credits Talya Klein for intimacy coordination, alongside Medina’s choreography and Suazo’s vogue choreography. In the finished passage, movement, performance, David Gonzalez’s score, breath, Plaxco’s photography, and Halsey’s intercutting allow the encounter to remain both sensual and relational.

Contemporary fragments of Max and Chris enter among the historical lovers. These close images are smooth and affectionate, joining the actual couple Taffeta encountered to the romance made from their bodies. The inserts extend their intimacy rather than interrupting it with a wholly incompatible visual register. At the same time, they keep returning the story to the contemporary circumstances that Taffeta cannot revise.

The cuts to Taffeta make duration costly. They remain visible beyond out-of-focus foreground activity, isolated among the seats, or standing at a doorway as the men move away. Shared blue-violet light places them inside the emotional environment without giving them the touch that defines it. Mason’s attention eventually dissolves into tears. Taffeta has made a love scene persuasive enough that watching it can no longer pass for receiving its love.

When He Needs Them

As the narration moves through Lincoln’s election, the film returns to the right-facing profile seen near his introduction. Its outlined face and composed shoulders evoke the familiar likeness on the Lincoln penny, giving the image a reference beyond historical portraiture in general. Here is a body arranged in the form through which a public figure survives. Yet the man inside that arrangement turns toward Taffeta with something remembrance cannot supply: he wants Ellsworth back. The contrast will sharpen when Ellsworth asks for his own coin. Lincoln seeks to preserve the relationship; Ellsworth insists that the act through which he understands his legacy must also be allowed to remain his. The camera’s composed image anticipates the difference between them: being remembered and keeping someone you love are not the same kind of survival.

Lincoln says that the lovers have given Taffeta what they wanted and asks for the new ending. Taffeta answers that what they wanted has changed. The law-office lesson now turns into an argument between participant and author: he invokes the contract, while they insist upon their right to change their mind. What initially sounded like playful omnipotence has generated an expectation in someone else.

The camera returns to the responsive, documentary-like register as Lincoln and contemporary Taffeta confront each other. They no longer occupy neatly separated historical and present-tense compartments. The conversation depends upon their ability to hear an immediate need rather than on either person’s mastery of the story’s declared rules.

Ploszek alters the encounter by letting Lincoln surrender his commanding posture. He kneels and asks forgiveness, describing the compassion he sees when he looks at Ellsworth. His plea makes impending loss particular: he wants to continue looking into those eyes, to retain that experience of being met by another person. Taffeta is the one person he believes can help.

He takes their hand and kisses upward along the arm, repeating a form of tenderness from the lovers’ encounter. Taffeta is finally being touched in the way they have watched, and by the figure wearing the face of the man they approached at the start. Mason’s anger softens; they cradle his face and kiss him. The moment contains real compassion, but it also binds the desired tenderness to a request for service. Lincoln needs Taffeta to do something for another relationship.

The film then completes the memory of Taffeta’s attachment to the director. Shared outings, conversation, and a motorcycle ride had made closeness feel like the beginning of a romance. The need to hold tightly on the bike supplied physical contact that Taffeta could imagine expanding into other forms of intimacy. When they finally expressed their feelings, the director said they were not his type and that the two of them were friends.

The polished, smoothly moving fragments of that relationship contrast with the restless observation of Taffeta eating alone. Memory preserves the possible romance in an attractive form even while recounting its refusal. When the director appears to speak the rejecting words, we hear Taffeta supplying them. The judgment has become reproducible within the person carrying it.

Lincoln responds with sympathy, but Taffeta insists they are not continuing for his sake. Their motives remain entangled: recognition of his grief, identification with the person left behind, desire for the man whose body he wears, and the hope that being necessary might lead somewhere beyond usefulness. The next attempt at revision puts all of those pressures into one encounter.

The Story Refuses the Rewrite

As Mother, Taffeta intercepts Ellsworth in the law office and attempts to keep him from accompanying Lincoln to Washington. The request serves Lincoln’s hope of saving his lover by preventing the journey toward his death. But in the role of the wife, it also speaks the language of rivalry: somebody who has worked for this relationship resents another person being welcomed into its future.

The scene initially holds with unusual restraint. The camera makes tiny adjustments but often lets the actor move without reorganizing the frame around him. After so much responsive movement, its refusal to accommodate hardens into a pressure of its own. Taffeta has selected the role, entered the office, and established the confrontation; Ellsworth has walked into a scene whose terms seem already fixed.

Ordering him to perform push-ups collapses Mother’s authority into the earlier military hierarchy. Ellsworth protests that this is not what happened. Taffeta replies that it happens today. For a moment, the fantasy demonstrates revision in the most literal available form: an action can be imposed because the person running the scene wants it.

Ellsworth refuses to surrender the opportunity he has earned and lashes out with the bodily insult that has already circulated through Taffeta’s life. At the line, the camera loses its restraint and the period identity falls away. His subsequent apologies confront contemporary Taffeta, whose hurt is no longer contained by Mother’s grievance. The fictional Ellsworth has spoken the language of their wounds; this does not establish that Chris has said it in contemporary life, but it makes the persona built from his body newly capable of injuring them.

The train to Washington drives the disagreement into the film’s most aggressive visual passage. Red floods the set, cyan cuts against it, and close perspective enlarges foreground faces while the horizon repeatedly tilts. The camera circles and corrects; the edit collides confrontation, remembered rejection, food, and Taffeta’s distress. The result is a space whose inhabitants can no longer be kept at the comfortable distances of a composed portrait.

“Chandelier” had also used a rocking frame and saturated color. There, the image participated in Taffeta’s pleasure in directing attention. Here comparable freedoms feel invasive, as though the performance can follow them wherever they try to withdraw. The stylistic device changes allegiance through its relation to the body and the demand being made upon it.

Lincoln insists that Ellsworth remain behind. Ellsworth rejects his claim to decide where he goes. Taffeta, pressed to deliver the intervention they promised, declares that a moving train cannot be stopped. The conflict has moved beyond a maker’s inability to keep the scene tidy: the participants want genuinely incompatible outcomes, and each experiences the others’ preferred version as an injury.

The founding monologue returns in pieces. A story coming “through me” had been Taffeta’s declaration of authorship; now it accompanies an experience that seems to pass through their body without respecting their wish to leave. Holder describes the fantasia turning upon its creator and forcing a reconsideration of why they began it. The film accomplishes that turn by reusing its initial language, faces, and freedoms as the pressures from which Taffeta seeks relief.

A Coin of His Own

Once the train gives way to Washington, the camera steadies before the emotional conflict is resolved. Lincoln and Ellsworth still disagree about what must happen, and the Confederate flag brings the story back toward the event staged at the beginning. Ellsworth intends to remove it. Lincoln already knows what follows and wants to prevent the repetition.

The historical event provides the fantasia with a fixed point. The National Park Service records that Ellsworth removed a Confederate flag from the Marshall House in Alexandria and was fatally shot on May 24, 1861. It identifies him as the first notable Union casualty, a more specific description than the character’s claim to be the first casualty of the war. The romance remains the film’s invention around a documented death.

By now, that death means different things to the two men. For Lincoln, it is the end of a relationship the film has given us time to experience. For Ellsworth, the act is also the basis of a legacy that he does not want reduced to someone else’s memory of losing him. He calls it his coin: a life stamped into time. One man already has that kind of image; the other is refusing to settle for borrowing it.

The coin gathers the office’s earlier conversation about faces surviving in metal, but Ellsworth’s request is inseparable from his earlier struggle to be substantial. He has wanted rank, presence, a future in which his dimensions do not determine his importance. Love has made him feel larger; it has not extinguished the ambition to possess a story of his own. Saving him solely according to Lincoln’s wishes would require overriding the very person Lincoln wants to keep.

That is why the steadier camera can feel like inevitability rather than safety. The scene becomes easier to see while its choices become harder to reconcile. Lincoln is asking the author for more intervention. Ellsworth asks for less. Taffeta cannot satisfy both by declaring that everybody is now free to have what they want.

Their own confession finally names the contradiction in watching. Taffeta resents a warmth they believe they will never know and could look at it endlessly because it seems the closest they will come to love. The first statement gives the second its desperation. They are not merely admiring the romance; they are treating it as evidence that their own future has already been decided.

Mason identified this confession of conflicted voyeurism as a monologue added during the stage production’s previews. In the film, the statement arrives after the camera has repeatedly placed Taffeta behind the relationship, within its scenery, or alone in its audience. The writing articulates an investment that the visual construction has already made difficult to escape.

Even then, Taffeta urges Lincoln to speak to Ellsworth while he still can. Their anger at what the men possess does not erase their capacity to care for it. The movement toward the Great Beyond begins with an effort to help love find expression, even though the desired rescue remains contested.

This Is Your Love Story

The Great Beyond changes the question from whether Taffeta can produce another ending to what they now want from the opportunity. Ellsworth remains committed to removing the flag. He can acknowledge Taffeta, ask whether they will miss him, and offer a kiss, but none of those gestures requires him to abandon his own choice.

Taffeta gently refuses the kiss. Ellsworth is surprised because it appears to offer something they have wanted; their answer is that they no longer believe it does. The men also offer them permission to remain and watch. Again, Taffeta declines the position as an answer to their need: “This is your love story. It is not what I need.”

The calm photography distinguishes this decision from the earlier loss of control. Where Mother’s confrontation began with a withholding, nearly fixed frame, this passage uses smooth, conventional coverage and minimal motion to let each person remain intelligible. The image neither crowds Taffeta into capitulation nor celebrates them by manufacturing a sudden spectacle. Their change is expressed through a refusal they are allowed to make gently.

They do not have to declare the romance worthless to stop using it as a substitute. Nor must they stop desiring companionship to recognize that being cast into somebody else’s intimacy will not supply it. The decision changes their claim upon the story while leaving their affection for its participants intact. They can release the obligation to be fulfilled by what they have created.

Lincoln then invites Ellsworth to speak freely within the fantasia. The permission originally dispensed by Taffeta can now circulate between the men. Ellsworth begins describing land outside Virginia, a modest house, the passing of winter into spring, and a hearth. The unfinished domestic life Taffeta narrated to Studzz has found another voice.

Soft exterior images give the couple room to build and embrace while the theatrical space remains dark, shaped by cool blue and warm amber. This gentler contrast follows the train’s harshly divided colors without pretending the known death has disappeared. The imagined future can be illuminated while loss remains present in the people describing it.

Wood becomes ash, ash becomes dust, and the sentence reaches “forever.” During the phone call, the listener departed before Taffeta could complete the thought. Here another person remains to share its completion. The repeated language makes explicit what the earlier call lacked: a second participant for whom the imagined life is more than a means to an immediate private release.

The transfer also preserves a productive ache. These are Taffeta’s words, and the completed image still belongs to the men. Dialogue and editing connect the two acts of imagining, allowing a wish to become fully expressive without making its originator live inside its picture.

Ellsworth proceeds to the flag and takes it down. A gunshot produces a reaction from Taffeta and Lincoln, fulfilling the event the older man has feared. Instead of centering a collapsing body, however, the film begins a shower of shining, gold-colored coins. Their impact on the floor gives the image physical sound as Ellsworth remains standing and moves through the transformed space.

His demand for a coin doubles as a form of departure. The fantasia does not prevent his death, but it can change how that death is pictured and what receives attention around it. The scene honors both the love that will mourn him and the claim to remembrance he insists on keeping. Taffeta’s authorship survives in the representation without having to erase the other person’s choice.

The imagined home need not replace the death for the lovers to share it. Love, loss, and possibility occupy different layers of the ending: a life they can describe together, an event Ellsworth insists upon keeping, and a way to make both visible. The romance does not become wasted because it cannot last, and loving Ellsworth does not require taking his ending away from him.

Good Luck Out There

The return to Taffeta’s eyes leads back to the theatre, where they are alone on the stage. Their phone vibrates with Max’s reply to the invitation sent near the opening. He explains that things are moving quickly with Chris, that he has forgotten to delete the app, and that it was lovely to meet them. He wishes them well.

The message gives the contemporary story a limit that fantasy has not removed. Max remains unavailable. His answer is considerate rather than cruel, preventing the film from treating every unreturned attraction as another version of the assault. Taffeta’s hurt does not require that Max and Chris be wrong to love each other, and their relationship does not have to fail for Taffeta’s life to continue.

The costumes are still waiting to be washed. Taffeta collects them, orders a ride, and leaves through the theatre’s actual exit. The garments that allowed so many transformations are once again material work, gathered in a basket and resting across their lap. They have walked out of the fantasia, but they are still carrying the labor that supported it.

Sharon, the driver, begins with ordinary conversation. Learning that the washing is for work leads to a question about Taffeta’s occupation. Their explanation — “I maintain other people’s stories for work” — now contains everything the film has shown them doing, from calling cues to supplying light and scenery to trying to preserve a love that belongs to someone else.

Sharon hears a person inside the description. She recognizes a familiar lack of acknowledgment and offers a glimpse of her own service work: preparing the vehicle so wealthy passengers can believe in a more luxurious experience. Their exchange about a pretty coin and pennies on the dollar brings the film’s language of value back from spectacular remembrance to ordinary pay. The conversation makes room for two workers rather than installing one as the other’s supporting character.

The camera stays in a responsive, observational register. Connection no longer requires a historical recasting or a room transformed by saturated light. Sharon’s affectionate instruction to stay themself meets a smile from Taffeta. The exchange is brief, but its scale is part of its force: a person encountered outside the authored romance can acknowledge them without asking them to become somebody else first.

Anything Is Possible

At the beach, Taffeta feeds the costumes into a fire. The laundry they have carried through the final stretch becomes fuel instead of another task to finish. The gesture has force without requiring an explanation of their employment tomorrow. In this moment, the work will not be reset.

Fire completes another movement through the film’s materials. In the Virginia fantasy, it warmed an imagined home and accompanied the language of transformation. Here it consumes the roles through which Taffeta has sought a place inside someone else’s life. Mother’s dress—the costume that put Taffeta in the role of wife opposite a Lincoln wearing Max’s face—joins the fire. Instead of preserving the garment for another performance, they let it burn. The decision to leave that place in the romance takes physical form. The song’s request for a forest fire meets an actual act of burning, joining renewal to something Taffeta does rather than leaving it entirely in what they say.

The brief return to the lovers’ outdoor embrace does not undo the release. Taffeta appears at a distance, able to look at them without being inserted between them. Their love can remain beautiful. It can also cease to function as a verdict on whether any other love is available.

By daylight, Taffeta removes the heavy necklace and walks barefoot at the shoreline. The film offers no thinner body as a reward, no romantic arrival to certify desirability, and no substitute costume to announce a finally correct identity. The glamorous earlier performances remain part of what this person could express. Removing adornment simply makes another presentation possible, with the same body still entitled to occupy the frame.

The photographic change has more substance than a retreat from style. Saturated theatrical rooms give way to an overcast horizon, and the camera can respond to Taffeta without negotiating desks, doorways, curtains, and other people’s bodies. Their figure can move through open space without serving as anyone else’s landscape. The film has spent so much time changing what they stand for that letting them simply stand beside the water counts as an event of its own.

Across that movement, the formal vocabulary has remained flexible. A rocking camera joined exuberance before it intensified distress. Stability housed convention, held a confrontation in place, made a known death feel inevitable, and finally gave self-recognition room to occur. Color offered pleasure and isolation within the same hue. Performance let Taffeta speak through roles that could also return them to familiar duties. Each device acquired meaning through the changing question of what the person at its center needed from the scene.

The final return of “Anything is possible” changes the audience for the promise. Earlier, Taffeta offered it to Lincoln as a reason to reenter a love story and trust them to deliver a different ending. At the beach, the assurance accompanies a life that has no completed script. They are no longer selling certainty about somebody else’s future; they are making room for uncertainty within their own.

That distinction allows the ending to be hopeful without asking us to believe that loneliness has been cured. Taffeta still wants love, and the film has taken that desire seriously enough not to replace it with a lesson that they should stop needing other people. What changes is their willingness to treat the absence of love so far as proof of its permanent impossibility. The imagined couple’s history is finished; theirs is not.

The last direct address also changes what the camera can receive. The opening monologue asked us to confront the judgments that looking might contain. Now Taffeta meets the lens without first turning themself into an exhibit in somebody else’s accusation. The face remains, the body remains, and the person who has supplied so many roles can offer a promise without disappearing behind one.

They have spent the night giving two men permission to meet again, to say what they could not say, and to imagine a home beyond the life they had. Now that generosity can reach the person who made the invitation. The love they watched does not have to be the last love they will ever know, and the stories that have hurt them do not have to determine everything they are able to imagine next.

Morning has made no guarantees. It has given Taffeta somewhere to begin — and, at last, a future they do not have to borrow.

Version Note: Lavender Men (2024/2025) was directed by Lovell Holder, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Roger Q. Mason, adapting Mason’s stage play. The film stars Mason as Taffeta, Pete Ploszek as Max/Lincoln, Alex Esola as Chris/Ellsworth, Ted Rooney as The President, Charlie Thurston as The Long-Distance Caller/Studzz, Philippe Bowgen as The Director, Gillian Williams as The First Lady, Mia Ellis as The Best Supporting Actress, and Natasha Dewhurst as The Patron of the Arts.

Matt Plaxco served as cinematographer and Morgan Halsey as editor, with production design by Stephen Gifford, original music by David Gonzalez, choreography by Jobel Medina, vogue choreography by Cece Suazo, headdress and jewelry design by ONCH, and intimacy coordination by Talya Klein; Kevin JZ Prodigy is credited for the chandelier number. Mia Chang, Mia Ellis, Lovell Holder, and Roger Q. Mason produced. The film received its world premiere at the OutSouth Queer Film Festival during its 2024 festival run and a limited theatrical release on May 2, 2025, following roughly a ten-day shoot.

A Note on Sourcing: The scene descriptions and formal readings in this study draw on an Amazon Prime purchase copy with a displayed runtime of 1:42:25, a complete chronological viewing record, screenshots, and targeted second-pass checks. Descriptions of glide, tremor, responsiveness, perspective, and apparent handheld movement concern the finished image; they do not identify a verified camera or stabilization package. Interpretations of color, performance, and audience position are readings of the film, distinct from attributed accounts of production or intention.

Production context comes from participant interviews, the Skylight stage program, and published screen credits. The stage production and screen adaptation are distinguished where their personnel or methods differ. The film’s Lincoln and Ellsworth are discussed as fictional constructions; the historical account of Ellsworth’s death is separately sourced to the National Park Service.

Sources

Roger Q. Mason, quoted in “Roger Q. Mason Tackles Taffeta in the Multilayered Movie ‘Lavender Men,'” Windy City Times, June 30, 2025.

“‘Lavender Men’ Review: An Intriguing Play About Abraham Lincoln’s Gay Affair Gets an All-Too-Heady Film Adaptation,” Variety, 2025.

“Lavender Men (2025) — Full Cast & Crew,” Rotten Tomatoes.

“Lincoln’s Log – Film Review: Lavender Men,” The Queer Review, May 1, 2025.

“Lavender Men,” review, Film Threat.

“LAVENDER MEN is queer revisionist history as self-discovery,” Moviejawn, April 25, 2025.

Lovell Holder, interviewed in “Director Lovell Holder on ‘Lavender Men,’ his Meta-Queer ‘Fantasia’ on Abe Lincoln,” EDGE Media Network.

Lovell Holder, interviewed in “‘Lavender Men’ Director Lovell Holder Creates Queer Community,” Metro Weekly, May 2025.

Lovell Holder and Roger Q. Mason, interviewed in “Lovell Holder’s Lavender Men,” The Brooklyn Rail, December 2024.

Lavender Men, film listing (runtime, release dates, cast, crew), Letterboxd.

Lavender Men (2024), title page (cast, crew, aggregate data), IMDb.

“Elmer E. Ellsworth,” Wikipedia.

“Who Was Colonel Elmer Ellsworth?,” PBS Antiques Roadshow.

Skylight Theatre Company, official production program, Lavender Men, 2022.

John Paul King, “Playwright Queers a Famous President in ‘Lavender Men,'” Los Angeles Blade, August 21, 2022.

Chloe Rabinowitz, “Photos: LAVENDER MEN Premieres at Micheaux Film Festival,” BroadwayWorld, October 30, 2024.

“Elmer Ellsworth,” National Park Service.

“Penny,” United States Mint.

Lovell Holder, interviewed in “From Stage to Screen: Lovell Holder on the Journey of ‘Lavender Men,'” We Need to Talk About Oscar podcast