“I wanted to write a novel about LGBTQ issues that wasn’t targeted to LGBTQ people. Southernmost was a book meant to challenge people who wouldn’t normally read a book with LGBTQ characters.” — Silas House
It Begins: Southernmost, the Film
Novelist Silas House with filmmaker Tim Kirkman
By KEVIN NANCE
Contributing Writer and Photographer
Fans of the fiction of Kentucky novelist Silas House have a treat in store, coming soon (if all goes according to plan) to a theater near you: a film version of his bestselling novel Southernmost, scheduled to begin production sometime next year. The award-winning writer-director Tim Kirkman, whose credits include Dear Jesse, The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, Loggerheads and Lazy Eye, has written a screenplay of Southernmost that’s currently being shopped to private investors, studios, streaming services and Hollywood actors, agents and managers. (Although the search for financial backing is still in the early stages, the project has already secured a distributor and is in discussion with a major actress about a lead role, its producers said.) As part of that fundraising effort, the Southernmost team recently held a table reading at Lexington Theatre Company featuring Jefferson White (a star of the TV seriesYellowstone and the 2024 film Civil War), who’s attached to star in the film. Also on hand: Tess Harper (Tender Mercies, No Country for Old Men, Crimes of the Heart, Loggerheads) as well as a group of Lexington performers including the child actor Zach Cotter.
Southernmost is the story of Asher (White), an evangelical preacher who has been dismissed by his conservative congregation in rural Tennessee after he unsuccessfully tried to encourage his flock to welcome two gay men. Just before losing custody of his son Justin (played in the reading by Cotter) to his ex-wife Lydia, Asher kidnaps Justin and hits the highway bound for Key West, famously the southernmost point in the United States. There Asher and his son find refuge in a guesthouse owned by Bell (Harper) and begin searching for his long-estranged gay brother, Luke, believed to be living somewhere in Key West.
I sat down with House (who currently serves as Kentucky Poet Laureate) and Kirkman (who moved to Lexington this year with his husband) recently at a Chevy Chase coffeehouse to discuss the project. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Silas House as the Southernmost table-reading gets underway
Kevin Nance: Why don’t we start at the beginning, which is the original version of Southernmost as a novel.
Silas House: The novel came out in 2018 after I’d worked on it almost eight years. It’s my most successful novel, my most bestselling novel and my most critically acclaimed novel. I had been writing it for a while and [the 2015 Supreme Court ruling on] marriage equality happened, and suddenly a lot of the stuff in the novel seemed very antiquated. I had to go back and reshape it and rebuild it around the marriage decision. Another event that influenced the novel was the big flood in 2010 in Nashville, where I was at the time. It was one of the biggest floods in the South in a hundred years, and it became the impetus for a lot of the action. Asher is one of those characters who’s been evolving in their belief system, and you need a big event that kind of catapults them forward. The flood sets that in motion. I was also invited to the Key West Literary Seminar for two weeks around that time. I was writing a novel about a kidnapping, and I thought if I was kidnapping my child, Key West would be where I would take them.
KN: You’ve always written about gay people in the rural South, and in that respect, this book is no different.
SH: Yes, in part because you hardly ever see LGBTQ people portrayed as being rural. The narrative in popular culture is that rural LGBTQ people escape rural places. LGBTQ people are either dying or they’re the best friend or they’re party people and they have endless resources. And so people have all these stereotypes that we’re all wealthy and childless and godless. So I very consciously wanted to have characters who wanted to live in the rural South.
KN: Tim, what attracted you to the book as the basis of a screenplay?
Tim Kirkman: I read the book when it first came out and loved it immediately. It’s a story about a brother pursuing another brother, and I can personally relate to that. One being straight and one being gay, and their estrangement is very personal to me. I have family members who are evangelicals who believe the way that Asher used to believe and that a lot of his congregation still believes. I always look for opportunities for healing and building bridges where there are conflicts between people. I love that it’s two brothers, because we don’t often see stories about straight men and gay men, especially rural, and especially faith-based stories. For a long time I’ve been looking for a story to tell what I would call a family film. This is a family film, and not in a way that a lot of people think of those films when they come out of Hollywood. You could take your 12-year-old kid to this.
SH: Or your 90-year-old mother.
KN: Most of your films have had gay themes, right?
TK: Oh yeah. It’s my whole mission in life.
SH: He’s a big homosexual [laughs].
TK: I’m a big homosexual [laughs]. I have three things that I look at when I consider whether or not to take on a new project: Is it in the South? Is it LGBTQ? Is it political? If it has two of those three things, I’m going to do it. If it doesn’t have those things, it belongs in somebody else’s lap.
SH: Me too. In this case, I wanted to write a novel about LGBTQ issues that wasn’t targeted to LGBTQ people. Southernmost was a book meant to challenge people who wouldn’t normally read a book with LGBTQ characters. When it first came out, there were people in the LGBTQ community who were having a hard time because it was a book in which the main character was a straight man — a straight, cis, white, Christian man. But they were missing the whole point. It’s always the gay character who’s the sidekick or they’re in trouble. So I wanted my straight, white, cis Christian man to be in trouble. The gay character, the brother, he knows who he is. He’s settled, he’s good. And I think that’s why the book has been successful. I can’t tell you how many people who’ve told me that they read the book because it was pressed on them by a family member, knowing that they would be resistant to it. I really love not preaching to the choir, if that makes sense. But at the same time, a lot of LGBTQ people can really relate to it, because they all have people in their lives who back up their bigotry with religion.
Jefferson White as Asher
KN: Silas, Tim said he related to the book in part because of his own family situation. Do you have anything similar in your own life?
SH: Yeah. None of this plot happened to me, yet everything in the book happened to me. I never kidnapped my child. I never had a brother who disappeared for ten years, nothing like that. But every act of homophobia that happens in the book happened to me personally, all the way up to having a gun pulled on me for being gay. So everything that happens in the book is true, in the sense that it’s based on people that I know. Not meaning one person I know, but several people. They’re almost like archetypes of people that you encounter as an LGBT person. There’s the person who’s sort of blatantly bigoted, or the one who’s blatantly discriminatory. Then there are the ones who are sort of mealy-mouthed about it. They’re the ones who will accept you privately, but publicly, they don’t want you in the church, or whatever.
KN: In the story — and in life, probably — where the rubber meets the road is that many people interpret the Bible, and not implausibly so, to mean that gays are an abomination. That word is in the Bible. It seems like an intractable problem for some Christians, especially in parts of the country like Tennessee, where this story takes place. We’re living in a world in which the attitudes of people like the ex-wife in the story are very much still practiced and acted upon.
SH: Yeah. To me, the ex-wife is the story. She is the most offensive archetype because she espouses “love the sinner, hate the sin.” Which is problematic in its own right, but she doesn’t even really love the sinner either — “sinner” in quotes.
KN: There’s also the child in the story, and there’s this fear that gay people are going to influence them to be —
SH: That it’s catching, yes.
Zach Cotter as Justin
TK: On the other hand, we’ve made huge progress. I mean, yes, we have lingering attitudes like that. But in my own family, my mom and dad were never evangelical, but they were deacons in the Baptist church. They thought [being gay] was a sin. But way back in 1996, they were practically a one-couple, one-home Gay Pride parade in my hometown [in North Carolina], which had 2,000 people. Their friend group was affected by that as well. So I’ve seen change happen, enormous change. It’s frowned upon to be anti-gay now. People who are anti-gay now are in the outskirts of society. And the numbers show that young evangelicals are not anti-gay. Evangelicals under 30 are anti-abortion, but they’re not anti-gay.
SH: Why are they voting the way they do, then?
TK: Because they’re anti-abortion, and that trumps everything.
KN: Tim, how did the table reading at the Lexington Theatre Company come about?
TK: The producing team in L.A. had already been making some financing inroads in Kentucky, and they said, “Let’s have a reading to encourage more backers.” As soon as I got here in May, I started looking for venues. We know [LCT’s] Jeromy and Lyndy Smith from the theater and New York. We approached them and said could we use your black box, and they said sure.
KN: I was struck by Jefferson White’s very naturalistic performance in the reading.
Tess Harper as Bell
TK: Yes, he’s attached to play Asher in the film. Tess Harper, a close friend of mine from L.A., read the part of Bell, although she won’t be in the film. Lyndy helped me find Zach Cotter, the local child actor, to play Asher’s son. They were all wonderful actors. If we’d had time to rehearse, we would have, but they were doing it for free, mainly for Silas.
KN: How do you think it went?
TK: I thought it was fun. And I learned a lot from the reading. As a writer, it was great to hear what resonated, what needed to be cut or expanded.
KN: What needed to be cut or expanded?
TK: It became very clear in the reading that I need to establish that there’s been a bad flood. It’s told in flashback in the screenplay, but it comes later. Somehow I need to establish really early, in the first fifteen minutes, that the flood has happened recently. I also need to introduce a scene between Asher and Lydia from earlier, when they were still happy.
SH: The chronology of the script is different from the novel. The script sort of goes backwards, in a way. The novel is linear.
KN: Tim, what was your thought process in terms of the screenplay’s sequence of events?
TK: When I was first reading the novel, I wasn’t thinking of it as a movie at all. Then I got to Part 2, where they get on the road, and I thought, “This is a movie.” It was such a great way to start a movie: with a kid in the back seat of a car and you have no idea who this man is, where they’re going or what has happened. That was thrilling to me, the mystery of it.
SH: I’ve always been such a cinephile, such a film lover, that I really liked the idea of the movie being a separate entity from the novel. It’s like when you write a play, every production is a different interpretation. So a film of course should be an interpretation too. I love the changes, and the way the chronology is different. It’s the same story. It’s just being told in a different way.
KN: How’s the production coming together? What’s the timeline?
SH: We’re shooting next year. I’m manifesting that. Wishing it into existence.
Screenwriter, and Director, Tim Kirkman thanks cast and audience
The Cast
ASHER JEFFERSON WHITEJUSTIN ZACH COTTERBELL TESS HARPEREVA ELENA GUERRALYDIA MARIANNE PHELPSZELDA CATHERINE GAFFNEYLUKE JOSIAH CORRELLJIMMY SHAYNE BRAKEFIELDCALEB TIM DAVISFISHER MELISSA WILKESONSTEPHEN WYLIE CAUDILLDANIEL ELLISNOT LUKESOUTHERN PREACHERGAY GUEST #1BEARKARYN CZARMOTEL CLERKHOLDERNEWSCASTERMARKET CASHIERCHRIS ROSEBARTENDERJUDGEOFFICER 1TACO TRUCK WORKER
Also in this week's edition of UnderMain: Tim Kirkman, as guest interviewer on WEKU's Eastern Standard, talks with LEXStudios' Tim Sabo about what's driving recent energy and growth in the Kentucky film industry. And, old meets new in Meander, the latest project from Lexington filmmaker Lexi Bass. She's the latest guest on the Kate Savage podcast series, Art Throb.