The Beautiful Tragic World of Jackie Shane

“To bear witness to the beautiful is not to be conflated with escapism or naiveté. It is a deep form of survival inherited from our ancestors. In a time when we have more access than ever before to the traumas of this world, how will you resist the tide of despair? Let beauty be your anchor.” —COLE ARTHUR RILEY

Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story, the new film by Michael Mabbott and Lucah Rosenberg-Lee, bears witness to terrifying, transcendent beauty. Through a vibrant blend of archival clips, interviews, contemporary footage, and unique rotoscope animation re-enactments synced to vintage recordings, the extraordinary life of trans R&B singer Jackie Shane is evoked.

A rising star who burst onto the Canadian scene in the ’60s, Shane found success in Toronto, which she made home before disappearing from public view in 1971. Before stepping off the stage and into the night, Jackie Shane was a true R&B phenomenon. After gaining a siz­able fanbase in Montreal, Shane, performing with Frank Motley and his entourage, took Toronto by storm. An outrageous performer who presented as a sexy, gender-ambiguous soul singer, Shane hit Toronto pop station CHUM’s charts in the spring of 1963 with the song “Any Other Way,” peaking at number two.

“It became an anthem in Toronto,” writes York University professor and Grammy award-winning music writer Rob Bowman. Shane played frequently at Toronto’s Saphire Tavern and was known as “a man with makeup, glitter, silk shirts, and an openly gay persona,” notes Bowman, who continues: “Much has been made for years of the line in the song, ‘Tell her that I’m happy, tell her that I’m gay.’ The lyric is in the sense of being happy rather than in regard to sexual preference. Jackie says she chose the song because she liked the story it tells. The second meaning she brought to the song was certainly not lost on Jackie nor, probably, on most, if not all, of her audience.”

Having disappeared in 1971, Shane’s fate remained a mystery for 45 years until a series of chance events led to her re-emergence, following the release of the 2017 compilation Any Other Way (by reissue label Numero Group), which contains all of Shane’s singles and live material largely sourced from her sole official album Jackie Shane Live (1967).

One Grammy nomination and several high-profile interviews later, Jackie Shane was poised to return to the world and reclaim her rightful spot in the history of music. But, close to the eve of her planned come­back tour, she was found dead, alone in the home where she had lived as a recluse for over four decades.

For Mabbott, the loss was devastating both personally and profession­ally. He had spent over a year getting to know Jackie over the phone, eventually recording con­versations, which are used in the documentary, with her blessing. “We spoke for a year, once a week at least, for anywhere from four to 11 hours,” Mabbott says. “It was her laying out her life story in a very thoughtful, methodical way.”

He gradually became a trusted friend, and, towards the end of her life, Shane had finally agreed to work with him on a biographical docu­mentary. With Shane’s sudden passing, Mabbott thought that the project had died with her.

“This is right after the Grammys, which she was nominated for [in the best historic album category],” he recalls. “When she passed away, it was incredibly heart-breaking for me, per­sonally. I cried buckets…but I also was like, ‘I don’t know how to make this film.’ What we had was about 25 hours of audio with her.”

Mabbott knew that Shane’s resurgence and subsequent death would attract a lot of preda­tory attention-mongers looking to capitalize on her story, and he felt deeply reluctant to move forward with a film about Jackie under those circumstances.

“A part of me was like, ‘I can’t do this because…I don’t want to get down in the muck.’ Rob Bowman said, ‘You know, if you don’t do it, somebody else is going to, and she wanted you to do it.’”

Mabbott was first introduced to Shane by Bowman, who wrote Shane’s biography—a staggering 20,000-word liner note for the Any Other Way album release—and who became close to the performer in her final years.

In fact, it was Bowman who was responsible for discovering that Shane had passed.

“I was the one who called her on a Monday, eight days after the Grammys,” Bowman recalls. “She didn’t answer. And Jackie always answered, unless the line was busy, because she [only] went out once a month. Called her two or three times; didn’t get an answer again on Tuesday. Finally, Wednesday morning, I called Lorenzo Washington, who’s briefly in the film.”

A close friend of Shane’s, Washington was the only person who saw her regularly, as he would drive her into town once a month to do bank­ing and get groceries. After receiving the call from Bowman, Washington discovered Jackie’s body in her home.

Shane’s sudden death put a halt to everything that had been planned, the tour and film alike. But it turned out Jackie wasn’t done telling her story yet.

Mabbott connected with co-director Lucah Rosenberg-Lee through the latter’s 2015 film Passing (co-directed by J. Mitchel Reed), a short documentary about three trans men of colour and their experiences with gender and representation.

“Lucah’s film represented something to me of what Jackie would have wanted in terms of how you express ideas,” says Mabbott. Adds Rosenberg-Lee, “Michael was looking for somebody to help make this. He had seen my film and really enjoyed what it was, which I really appreciate. I hadn’t heard of Jackie Shane, to be honest. And that was a reminder about how much is erased from trans history. That reminder about how many people would be great to know and be seen. And I was like, let’s do it.”

While she was alive, Shane had also been speaking with other filmmakers before ulti­mately deciding to work with Mabbott. One of those people was NFB producer Justine Pimlott, who adored Shane’s story and ended up joining Mabbott, Rosenberg-Lee, and Banger Films to make the film.

This documentary is as much a tribute to the mystery and magic of Jackie Shane as it is an unfolding discovery of it. It is a film about identity, about race and queerness and gender and all the ways they overlap and intersect. Any Other Way is about the history that gets told and the history that is forgotten, erased from view. It is about self-preservation as an act of rebellion.

The film opens with a bright, vibrant intro that swings between rotoscoped animations of the older Jackie Shane dancing in her living room, and the younger version, luminous and vivacious, performing on stage. The stirrings of music and the murmurings and cheers of a live audience are followed by the sound of a young Shane bantering with an appreciative crowd before launching into her next song. This is a glittering moment in time drawn directly from the live album she recorded in downtown Toronto in the ’60s.

Music is used so effectively in Any Other Way that it becomes a character itself, steering the narrative just as clearly as the visual elements of the film. Figuring out how to present this character was a major problem for the filmmakers.

“One thing I talked about with Jackie was how little live footage there was of her performing,” Mabbott says. Though he admits to being “obsessed” with rotoscope animation, “the idea of using it to bring her voice to life was not something we had planned on doing.” But with Shane having passed away, animation provided the opportunity to bring back the joy of encountering her as a galvanizing performer.

Despite the celebration evident in the re-enactments of Shane danc­ing at home as well as the stage performance, there is a sense of loss imbued in the film right from those first scenes. The bittersweet interplay between celebration and loss remains throughout the film, and in many ways feels like a reflection of Shane’s own life.

After her death in 2019, Shane’s personal effects were inherited by her remaining living family members—two nieces who she never knew, and who were never told about her existence, despite living no more than a few blocks away in Nashville.

As the story unfolds, it becomes evident that, as much as Jackie disappeared from the history books during her long absence, a more personal erasure was also occurring within her own family. Howard Gentry, another relative of Jackie’s interviewed in the film, says, “When we were young, that was taboo. We just didn’t talk about Jackie.”

When we meet her nieces, who detail their shock at being named heirs to an unknown relative, their disappointment and sense of loss is palpable, but so too is their awe as they uncover Shane’s personal effects.

For co-directors Mabbott and Rosenberg-Lee, discovering Shane’s extensive personal archive alongside the family was the catalyst that finally spurred them to make the film. “With the family, we unpacked her home. There was a handwritten autobiography, all her stage clothes, male clothes, female clothes…it was a documentarian’s treasure chest,” Mabbott says.

“We went from feeling that all was lost without Jackie to having this relationship with her family,” he observes. “The family was discovering Jackie, and we were watching the family discover Jackie in this film.”

In a large, brightly lit white room, Jackie’s record collection, show posters, jewellery, personal papers, writings, and other effects are laid out on rows of white tables, with all the reverence of a veteran museum exhibit. Her commissioned portraits, glamourous outfits, and performance costumes are proudly displayed on the walls.

In going ahead with the film, the directors knew they needed to find a way to bring Jackie Shane to life on screen, and after a series of auditions, they had found their Jackie—or rather, Jackies.

The actress Sandra Caldwell plays the older Jackie Shane, and Makayla Walker, a Toronto-based trans art­ist, community organizer and drag performer, plays a young Jackie at the height of her performing success. Together, they bring Shane beautifully to life, and for each of them the process of making the film was a pro­found experience.

Both Caldwell and Walker had much to say about the similarities and differences between and Shane’s respec­tive journeys. But, for Walker in particular, Jackie feels like a version of herself that existed in another time and place.

“I am used to not being able to connect with people [due to] not having shared experiences,” Walker says. “But when I got to listen to Jackie’s music and [learn about] her history through outtakes from her journal, it was like hearing someone who knows exactly how I think…it was magical.”

For Caldwell, playing Jackie and reading about what she went through in the unpublished hand-written autobiography that Shane’s family discovered after her death was a complicated experience. She had transitioned young, but came out publicly as trans only a few years ago. Caldwell recognized the compromises Jackie had to make to survive, such as writing “He” in all of her publicity materials.

“When I looked at that one performance that they were able to catch of Jackie [as a flamboyant soul singer in the ’60s], I said, ‘Oh my goodness’. She conformed halfway and gave them what they wanted,” Caldwell says. “Jackie Shane was just a CHALLENGE to the discourse.”

This tug of war between being authentically who you are while trying to follow your artistic calling in a world that demands choosing between the two is familiar to Rodney Diverlus, a Black, genderqueer author, dancer, activist, and co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Toronto chapter.

In the film, Diverlus talks about how incredible it was for Shane to present, dress, and act the way she did in the time she lived, knowing how difficult life was for Black people, especially in the South. Adding to that was Shane’s refusal as a Black person and a performer to conform to gender expectations.

“I think there’s a way that particularly for us non-binary folks—trans folk, genderqueer folk, gender diverse folk—society has a way of making us feel like we’re just aliens, a new apparition that should be a danger. And there’s a way that I think we internalize that, asking, ‘Is it too much for me to be myself?’” Diverlus says.

“This doc reminds us that we’re following a millennia-long lineage of gender diverse individuals, across all Indigenous societies, and all societies generally,” continues Diverlus.

When Jackie re-emerged, it was into a world that was very dif­ferent from the one she withdrew from in 1971. It was one that embraced her as a beloved trans elder. While performing in the ’60s, she could never be entirely herself. She was still presenting as an effeminate gay man while feeling, as she’d done her whole life, like a woman.

But when she sang, it didn’t matter who she was: Her songs drew in the public and left a mark still felt decades later. This was an antidote to the pain of living in a world where, as she says in her autobiography, “I was born, but I never lived.”

With the resurgence of interest in her music and the Grammy nomina­tion kicking off her touring plans, it seemed that Jackie would finally be able to show the world who she really was, unfiltered. “I thought it was so unfair,” says Bowman. “This woman was going to have an incredible second act, but death took her away.”

Any Other Way is both a love letter and a heart-breaking eulogy. In a quote read by Caldwell from Jackie’s autobiography, Jackie says, “I have never known this thing called happiness…I am forced to live life in an odd and difficult manner.”

But despite this, the film makes it clear that Shane became who she was because she was raised by a woman who, through what feels like a very modern sensi­bility, instilled in her an unshakeable sense of self-worth and an understanding that her authentic self was unique and beautiful, and worthy of being loved.

“I do not necessarily want to get into Jackie’s motivation [for wanting to have a comeback],” Mabbott says. “But I think she wanted to do this for the next generation. Throughout her life, she was concerned about young people being scared, people needing her message.”

“I said, ‘Aunt Jackie, you knew,’” niece Vonnie Crawford Moore says in the film. “There’s some young person out there now that needs to hear her story. There’s some person sitting in a room, feeling the same way she did.”

Love is a recurring theme that winds its way not only through the film, but also the varied experiences of the people who worked together to create it. Bringing Jackie Shane’s story to life in this film, using her words and performances, was clearly an important endeavour for everyone involved.

Watching the film, it feels certain that despite Jackie Shane’s many personal and professional setbacks, the knowledge from an early age that she was deeply loved allowed her to bring her truest self to every facet of her incredible life, from her trailblazing music to the art of simply being herself.

I suspect this film will leave viewers feeling the same way.

Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story opens in theatres beginning Aug. 16.