Brandon Deyette is staying busy.
When we hopped on the phone for an interview earlier this week, he was just breaking for lunch on the set of a new project. He’s been working on a film industry-specific operating system that integrates things like scheduling and budgeting into one platform, set to launch at the end of January. He has a book coming out in February that he wrote with Young Bae, a tattoo artist on the reality show “Black Ink Crew: New York,” of which he’s also a producer. And he’s got two films on the festival circuit.
The first is a documentary called “Latter-Day Glory: The Aftermath of Growing Up Queer in the LDS Church.” The second is a short film called “Kitty,” which is playing at this year’s Out on Film festival on Oct. 5.
“Kitty” follows the relationship between AJ (Luke Bucaro), a gay teen who has been kicked out of his home, and Baby Girl (Rafi S. Perez), an 18-year-old Black trans sex worker who takes him under her wing. At the beginning of the film, Baby Girl convinces her pimp to take AJ in as a replacement for a sex worker named Pedro, who has contracted HIV.
“Kitty” is a very personal film for Deyette, who started work on the story as a feature back in 2016. He has a lot in common with AJ – he was also kicked out of his house as a young gay teenager and lived in his car for a while. In the film, AJ grew up in a strict Mormon household. Deyette’s mother was Catholic, and she held a deep sense of fear surrounding queerness.
“What do you do when you’re full of fear? You make irrational decisions,” Deyette said.
Deyette has a good relationship with his mother now, but was initially worried about how she might receive the film. On the way to a screening in Palm Springs, he told her that he was nervous. Don’t be, she said, proud of him for making the film so that families like theirs today can have these conversations.
“It is so in the distant past that I’m able to create this kind of art, so that we can talk about this subject matter,” Deyette said.
AJ’s Mormon background is something that Deyette lifted from “Latter-Day Glory.” The character was originally Catholic, but Deyette wanted AJ to feel more cut off from the world around him.
“As I was interviewing people [for “Latter-Day Glory”], the one thing they kept telling me was, once you get kicked out, or you get ostracized and you become a pariah, you have no context for the world outside of Mormonism, because it’s so insular,” he said. “I was like, how can I make AJ be even more isolated?”
Deyette based the character of Baby Girl on his friend, a trans woman and drag artist named Letha Weapons, who died in a car accident in 2003. The film is dedicated to her.
“She always gave me this encouragement that I could do things. Anytime there’d ever been a doubt in my career – I can’t accomplish this, or why would I even try to attempt? I’m just gonna fail – I would hear her voice in the background,” Deyette said. “I wanted to give a story of hope to kids that feel like they’re discarded, specifically trans women.”
Another aspect of the film came from an article Deyette read in Out Magazine about men who, after having contracted AIDS, suddenly had access to benefits and services they wouldn’t have had otherwise. That paradox – having to contract a deadly disease in order to live more comfortably – struck a cord for Deyette. AJ and Baby Girl talk about this trend in the film when they first discuss Pedro’s diagnosis. As Deyette started further mapping out the story, he had conversations with organizations working to combat homelessness as well as people who had been or were currently unhoused. He also brought on Emmy Morgan, a trans woman, as a co-writer to help find Baby Girl’s voice.
“What she wanted to do is make sure that anything that deals with trans life is accurate,” Deyette said. “To make sure that the way that Baby Girl speaks is very authentic to her experience.”
The movie originally started out as a feature film, but just as production was almost ready to get underway, the COVID-19 pandemic started. Then in 2024, Deyette got an email from Georgia State University, where he did a graduate degree more than a decade earlier. He had never finished his thesis, and the school was giving him until May of 2025 to do so. He needed to make a short film, so he decided to make one out of “Kitty.”
Sean Baker’s 2015 film “Tangerine” and the 1995 movie “Kids,” directed by Larry Clark and written by Harmony Korine, served as reference points for the film. Deyette pointed to “Tangerine” specifically as a film that was needed when it was released, but something that can and should be iterated on. He also wanted to explore the idea of platonic love between two ostracized queer teens.
“I’d never personally seen on screen before how quickly discarded kids can instantly fall in love with a friend,” he said. “We don’t explore falling in love in a platonic way.”
“Kitty” has already played at multiple film festivals, and Deyette said he finds that different generations view the film differently.
“The older generation, in their mind, this is normalized. This is just what happened to them. They all got kicked out of the house. They all have dealt with this,” Deyette said. “Whereas the younger generation are just absolutely appalled that they could be in this situation. How could parents still be doing this? It’s 2025!”
One choice puts the fact that queer people’s lives – particularly trans people – are still in danger today into sharp focus. During the credits, Deyette includes a list of trans people who have been murdered since he started making the film in 2016. The list is staggering.
When the list starts to roll, the chatter that inevitably comes with movie credits starts to die down. By the end of the list, you can feel the palpable emotion in the room, Deyette said.
“If people see the film, it might generate dialogue about the subject matter,” he said. “Hopefully, that can mitigate, or even eliminate, this happening.”
The film takes place in Atlanta, and although Deyette was not born here, he considers the city a big part of his story and creative journey. When he got the notification that “Kitty” had been accepted for Out on Film, he cried.
“I want to give back in these stories. I want to be able to allow people to tell their own personal stories through me, or with my assistance,” he said. “I just love that Atlanta is a part of it, because it is a part of me.”