Louis Theroux has said that he regretted the way in which he addressed a transgender prisoner while filming the 2008 documentary Behind Bars.
The documentary saw Theroux spend time with the inmates of San Quentin State Prison, including one, called Deborah, who was a trans woman.
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“There’s moments where because of the nature of sensitivities now, and how much more educated we are, the conversation would take place in a different way,” Theroux said, in an interview with UniLad.
According to Theroux, he had not been informed of the inmate’s gender, and so had arrived at the cell expecting to meet a cisgender man.
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“I arrive at the cell and I’m told that this person is called Deborah,” he said. “And Deborah comes out with long hair and with a kind of traditional feminine affect. And I say, ‘Do you consider yourself a woman?’ And she says, ‘Yes, I’m a trans woman now’.Others are less entertaining. Although it’s still shocking to see a neo-Nazi throw Theroux out when he refuses to say whether he is Jewish, the most interesting passages in “Belief” are with more ambivalent subjects. In his first Weird Weekends series, in 1998, Theroux met a right-wing patriot in Idaho, Mike Cain, a mild-mannered and charming host utterly convinced another American civil war was imminent. The baby-faced Louis was rather taken in by Max and his family, who possessed charm and ammunition in equal measure. When Louis made the documentary, President Bill Clinton was signing new gun control legislation and Cain’s view of the world looked absurd. Over video call this summer, with Donald Trump in office, mass protests over Black Lives Matter, and coronavirus prompting unprecedented government involvement in American life, Max’s outlook seems worryingly close to reality. “The travesty of the Covid thing is not the virus itself,” Cain says, “but the tyranny it’s allowing to prosper.” Many will agree.
Perhaps the most alarming archive footage is with Lamb and Lynx, twin girls from Montana whose mother, April, was raising them to be a neo-Nazi pop act called Prussian Blue. They received widespread coverage after Louis featured them in 2003, but in their teens, the girls renounced their upbringing and previous views. Given all they’ve been through, the two adult women who speak to Theroux seem remarkably well adjusted, and bewildered by their childhoods.
Lamb and Lynx’s story draws out the sentiment that lurks in Theroux’s work: there’s always the hope of progress, however weird the weekends of the past.