Vantage Points: On Media as Trans Memoir

Following the death of the family patriarch, a box of newly procured family documents reveals writer-filmmaker Chase Joynt's previously unknown connection to Canadian media maverick Marshall McLuhan. Vantage Points takes up the surprising appearance of McLuhan in Joynt's family archive as a way to think about legacies of childhood sexual abuse and how we might process and represent them. To do so, Joynt stages a series of vignettes that place memoir in the context of other sources, media, and stories to create a tapestry - a montage-like experience of reading with surprising and revealing juxtapositions.

Joynt writes about difficult pasts and connects them to contemporary politics and ways of being, employing McLuhan's seminal Understanding Media as an inciting framework. Vantage Points is a kaleidoscopic reckoning with the impact of media and masculinity on the stories we tell about ourselves and our families, a unique and highly visual approach to trans life writing, and an experimental move between gender and genre.

About the Author

Chase Joynt is a non-fiction filmmaker and writer who works at the edges of genre. His documentary features THE NEST (with Julietta Singh) and STATE OF FIRSTS both premiered in 2025 at Hot Docs and Tribeca, respectively.

His documentary feature, FRAMING AGNES, was named a Best Movie of the Year by The New Yorker after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival where it won the NEXT Innovator Award and the NEXT Audience Award. The film has played more than 100 festivals internationally and is distributed by Kino Lorber. With Aisling Chin-Yee, Chase co-directed NO ORDINARY MAN, which was presented at Cannes Docs as part of the Canadian Showcase of Docs-in-Progress. Since premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, NO ORDINARY MAN has been hailed by The New Yorker as “a genre unto itself” and Indiewire as “the future of trans cinema.” For the CW, Chase directed episodes of TWO SENTENCE HORROR STORIES which are now streaming on Netflix; his episode Elliot from Season 2 won a Telly Award for directing.

He is the co-author of three non-fiction books: including the Lambda Literary Award Finalist YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE with Mike Hoolboom and BOYS DON’T CRY with Morgan M Page. His latest book VANTAGE POINTS was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust of Canada Prize for Nonfiction and named a Best Book of the Year by CBC Books, The Walrus and Autostraddle.

With Samantha Curley, he runs Level Ground Productions in Los Angeles and Toronto.