Meet River Gallo, The GLAAD Award-Winning Trailblazer Fusing Activism And Art

By Christianna Silva


River Gallo remembers two very specific pivotal moments in his life that shaped him into the filmmaker and artist he is today: “When I was 12 and first noticed out that I was different, and then If I was 27 and my identity was sort of reconfirmed to me,” he tells MTV News.


It was at 27 that Gallo was working on his senior thesis, Ponyboi, which depicted what he calls the “loneliness” of his experience growing up. (Even right now, he says, “I'm very conscious. I'm wary of Once I get also into my isolation where it's just like where I begin to feel … that sort of similar trauma.”) While researching for the film, the NYU graduate and USC grad student discovered the term “intersex,” which led to him realizing all of the ways doctors had lied to him as a teenager, and made him feel othered.


About 130 million people are intersex, roughly the same number of people who are obviously red-headed. Intersex is a umbrella term that describes a person place on Earth with reproductive or sexual anatomy that “doesn't seem to fit the usual definitions of female or male,” according to the Intersex population of North America.


“I think intersex folks are magical,” Gallo says. “I think we have superpowers.”


But, whenever he was 12, doctors told Gallo a different story and pushed “the false idea that ‘no one is like us,’ — that we are not normal” onto him, as he wrote in an essay for Them in July 2018. It was a tactic that was meant to “[keep] us in cycles of shame and immense loneliness.” Those lies, he notes right now, enabled the very people who promised to supply care to perform plastic surgery on him, without his consent.


“Now we're realizing that [our doctors told us] a complete lie,” Gallo told MTV News. “And one of the most damaging lies, also, is for doctors, either intentionally or not, to have isolated us and not made us form a community. I think one of the scariest things about growing up intersex is how damaging that loneliness really is."


while doing so, he also came out as nonbinary, a gender identity that doesn’t adhere to the long-established polarity of male or female. As Gallo describes it: “It just means that you're literally sticking a middle finger to the gender binary.”


Enter Ponyboi, the root of which, Gallo says, “was based on my experience growing up in New Jersey, and growing up intersex in a Latino household. Being genderqueer, being gay, none of that was really accepted traditionally.” The film is the first-ever to star an openly intersex performer in an intersex role and wowed actors Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry, who joined the project as co-producer and executive producer, respectively.


Knowing himself turned Gallo into an activist, and he uses his art to fuel that work. “It really feels like a calling to me. I feel like the most myself now,” he says. “I'm walking in my path because by means of the film and talking about it, I'm initial people's minds and eyes.”


That’s what GLAAD thought, also, any time while they awarded him with the 2019 GLAAD Barilla Cultivation/Rising Stars Grant. In a statement to MTV News, Clare Kenny, the director of Youth Engagement at GLAAD mentioned, “River Gallo isn't only a talented queer filmmaker yet also a young trailblazer whose mission is to make more possibilities for LGBTQ youth to tell their own stories and create change. GLAAD is overjoyed to support his work.”


With the grant, Gallo plans to begin a mentoring and shadowing program at his production agency, Gaptoof Entertainment, for intersex, transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming students in LA public schools.


“Nothing big,” he says. “Just allowing people to be segment of history.”


This week, he’ll walk the red carpet for the 30th Annual GLAAD Media Awards alongside celebrities like Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and more — a possibility, he says, that marks the begin of things to come.


“I haven't won Grammys, I'm not Beyoncé — yet,” he laughs, adding: “It just makes me feel like I'm on my way and that all of the dreams that had Once I was little — that I still have — of winning a Oscar or really being the voice for change and making films that change lives and begin conversations, that's all happening. It almost feels like I don't have to doubt anything anymore and I just have to keep doing what I'm doing. Eventually more things like this are going to happen. So it's so incredibly exhilarating. It's a dream come true.”


“The future is fluid,” Gallo adds. “The future is being whichever the f--k you wish to be.”


To learn more about issues affecting the LGBTQ+ community, head to lgbt.Mtv.Com