what’s safe, what’s gross, what’s selfish and what’s stupid is, on its face, a film about gestation - desiring it; fearing it; the lengths taken and obstacles faced in achieving it. When Jasmine Johnson set out to make their debut film, which premiered at the BFI Flare festival this year, it wasn’t originally intended to centre the process of queer family-making - they tell us, in their Q&A at Modern Art Oxford’s screening, the project was originally going to tackle “lesbian love addiction”. But as their own intentions to start a family became woven into the text, the result becomes much more expansive in its scope. what’s safe feels at times like wandering a landscape of queer hopes, frustrations and anxieties, as different perspectives fuse and mesh to become something pulsing with life.
The documentary consists of a series of conversations Johnson held over three years with queer people of many stripe - some known to them (their partner, their partner’s therapist, close friends), and others found organically as the project went on, including from community groups like Queer Platonic Parenting. They discuss queer awakenings, repression, finding community, finding partners. But we begin firmly in the realm of childhood.
As each recounts their upbringing - typically within cishet two-parent households, though not exclusively - the periods of dysfunction, instability and infidelity they describe broach the topic that will hum quietly under the entire picture - that the social monolith of the nuclear family is one built on sand. Everyone on this screen has learnt, one way or another, that they will never fit neatly within a ‘conventional’ family dynamic; so what are the implications when starting a family yourself?
The film’s narrative through-line is Johnson’s own experience with IVF treatment; we open with a giggling exchange between them and their friend Edward about potential sperm donation, and each ‘act’ of sorts is introduced with footage of them taking samples for STI testing ahead of the process. Johnson often doesn’t provide a verbal account of their own experience, but their matter-of-fact presentation of the sometimes beautiful, often mundane, and frequently demoralising bodily bureaucracy in making a new life still feels intensely vulnerable. One attempt at self-insemination takes place in what sounds like a public bathroom - you can hear passers-by outside the door, a constant risk of intrusion on an act so profoundly intimate (not dissimilar to their friend’s account of sperm donation at a very poorly appointed clinic).
And there’s no more heartbreaking example of this intrusion than that of the state itself; we are shown Johnson all but breaking down during a phone call with a faceless healthcare worker learning that, as a same-sex couple, they will have to self-fund around £1800 per 6-12 rounds of intrauterine insemination (IUI) - heterosexual couples don’t have to worry about such an expense.
But the story is never just Johnson’s and they’re conscious of this. Selfishness may be invoked in its title, but the filmmaking process feels distinctly unselfish; indeed, what struck me most about what’s safe is the sense of communality and collaboration across the piece. Some of Johnson’s interviewees film their own footage, another interviewee plays drums to music arranged by Johnson’s partner. Johnson describes their projects as like putting a band together, but, if I might get cheesy, it’s like their contributors are co-parenting the film as it gets made. There is a looseness to what’s safe’s structure that can sometimes feel a bit unfocused, but its conversational feel reflects the act of building a collective, and in doing so beginning to dissolve those hegemonic family structures that were never really stable to begin with.
One attendee at the Q&A asked what Johnson’s thoughts were on the theory that men create art because they are not able to achieve the ultimate act of creation that is birth, and while I can see why it was mentioned, I think part of the goal of what’s safe is to dismantle these sorts of essentialisms. The impulse to create art, like that to have children, is not a gendered impulse but a human one, and such desires are ever-shifting and subject to change both from within and without. Queer people of all genders and sexualities are hurt by infrastructures that lack the imagination to make room for them, and what’s safe in its own way communicates the power of queer community to imagine new, more expansive structures of care beyond Mum and Dad.
I had a small quibble in that the experiences of trans women and trans-feminine people, who also face significant hurdles when it comes to fertility options, didn’t get much of a look-in; Johnson themself acknowledges this and hopes to one day return to the project in some form and expand on it further. As it stands, though, what’s safe, what’s gross, what’s selfish and what’s stupid is a sweetly and uniquely queer look at the process of building a family - however you define it - that is well worth your attention.