Justice Singleton wasn’t trying to make a film when he met John Cameron Mitchell in New Orleans in 2017. “We met in a café. It was funny, playful, sweet, tender — and a little raunchy. We talked about fears: fear of age, fear of queerness,” Singleton tells me. Through their conversations, it became clear that Singleton had a film to make. “I saw a lot of transmedia as just traumatic,” he says. “This is about someone who’s fearing themselves, a version of themselves, and … figuring out how to have genuine love as a person in this society without race or gender or sexuality causing these walls.”
Hard-won queer rights are under attack. HuffPost remains committed to standing with the LGBTQ+ community. Support our work by joining our membership program today.
Singleton wanted to make something funny, playful, sweet, tender and a little raunchy — something like his meeting with Mitchell. That conversation became the seed for “Cockroach,” a short film about fear, intimacy, and what it takes to connect across difference.
Set and shot in New Orleans, ”Cockroach” is a madcap romp of a short film. Singleton plays Seven, a trans sex worker trying to pay for top surgery, who’s hired by a middle-aged white Republican named James, played by Mitchell. When the men try to hook up in already awkward circumstances, a talking cockroach appears and foils their plans. Obviously. What unfolds is part hookup comedy, part tender farce.
While Singleton and Mitchell are the only two (human) characters seen on screen in the film, ”Cockroach” feels populated by queer community and queer camaraderie. That’s for good reason. This is film made for us, by us, and with us in mind. Achieving that kind of inclusive dopamine hit is difficult and requires skill and experience, which just happens to be Mitchell’s forte.
In Queerlandia, John Cameron Mitchell has something of a reputation — the kind you only earn by showing up as a collaborator and a mentor. Singleton confirms. “The only other John I know that’s been so helpful to other people is my father,” he says.
There was a golden age of queer cinema in the ’90s and 2000s, Mitchell explains. He feels lucky that he got to make ”Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” now a queer classic, in 2001. “I just continue what I learned as an acolyte of people like Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant,” he says. “Pass it on. Pass on all your information and wisdom. That’s queer community.” That ethos — of passing it on, of nurturing queer community through creation — became the core of ”Cockroach.”
“Cockroach” is a rom-com, for sure — and a very sweet one at that. But somewhere between flirtation and extermination, the two men end up talking about fear, politics, and what has to die for us to survive. It’s funny, tender and deliberately hard to categorize, a love letter to both sex and discomfort as sites of transformation.
The cockroach, voiced by emerging actor C.G. Taylor, plays many metaphorical roles in the film. “The cockroach is the character’s worst fear of what would happen if they fuck this white guy,” Singleton explains. “So it’s the thing that makes them feel insecure about it. But in some ways, it’s the most insecure part of themselves.”
While I’m not sure there’s one neat takeaway from ”Cockroach,” it’s hard to miss the metaphor at its heart. We all have a little cockroach living rent-free in our brains. “It’s like the voice that’s not ours that we keep hearing. It’s an actual mental pest,” Singleton says. Mitchell agrees. The cockroach, he adds, is also our fear. “Fear of the known and fear of the unknown. The known is hating, fearing Trump. Fear of the unknown is like, what’s gonna happen if I fuck this guy? What’s gonna happen if I transition?”
Mitchell’s character, James, isn’t exempt. “He has a fear of being alone,” Mitchell says. “A fear of stepping outside his comfort zone. I imagine him getting stoned, going through Grindr every day.”
Valid. Who among us cannot relate to these fears of both the known and the unknown? Don’t most of us spend most of our evenings lobbing DMs with our own imaginary cockroaches on Grindr?
But ”Cockroach” isn’t just about personal fears. It asks how we come together across differences when everything’s falling apart. “Sex is one of the few places where you can have those conversations,” Mitchell says. “It’s the realm where everything is worked out.”
For Singleton, making the film was partly about challenging queer community divisions, and sex becomes the place where those divisions break down. “Yes, John is white, yes, I am Black, yes, I am trans,” he says. “I don’t give a fuck, because we are the same people. We do not need to be on the opposite team. We’re facing something — literally, the cockroach is like, ‘we’re all being stomped on.’”
Singleton and Mitchell see ”Cockroach” as more than a film. It’s an experiment in how queer artists can build community and resist the erasure and condemnation we face in this administration by making things together. “Our goal is to go to different cities, specifically in the U.S., that have universities or queer groups,” Singleton says. “We’re doing screenings where a percentage of funds go to trans housing or income projects.” In New Orleans, a portion of the proceeds supports DeeepSpacecraft, a Black trans housing collective for artists in Holy Cross.
The choice to circulate ”Cockroach” through mutual aid — community organized screenings where proceeds support local projects — and not just the festival circuit, though the film has also been selected by several major festivals, feels of a piece with the film itself. ”Cockroach” is scrappy, generous and defiantly local, a story that refuses both the binary of trauma and triumph and the gatekeeping of the industry. “I was already told, once I got on this journey, ‘You will not be making money in this,’” Singleton says.
Mitchell laughs. “The future of art is in smaller cities. The big ones are too expensive now. The future of art is in places like New Orleans, Detroit, Denver, Baltimore, Mississippi — places that still have that Wild West feeling. You can’t control the weather or the potholes,” he says, “but that’s the beauty — it’s temporary, and we make it work.”
“Cockroach” premiered in New Orleans, a fitting birthplace for a film this defiantly vibrant. The city’s long queer and artistic history makes it both the backdrop, a character, and a reminder that community doesn’t just survive here — it reinvents itself. For films like ”Cockroach,” and for the teams of queer artists keeping scenes alive, survival isn’t about killing what’s ugly. It’s about living with what’s real — fear, love, and all the messy pests in between — and resisting the erasure that comes with pretending it’s easy or clean.
Cockroach is being screened online Oct. 23-Nov. 2 as part of the 2025 New Orleans Film Festival. Additional screenings nationwide to be announced.