Chatting with Nicola Marsh and Alex Schmider – Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story
Netflix released Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story last week. The riveting documentary follows pro skateboarder Leo Baker on their journey towards qualifying for the first ever professional Olympic skateboarding team back in 2020 right before COVID-19 hit. In addition to this, Baker was in the middle of a gender transition, which made holding onto their place in the skateboarding competition world emotionally difficult.
As Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story clearly documents, the competition skateboarding world is a place of firm gender binaries that were causing Baker nothing but emotional pain and grief. Baker’s entire competition career was based around the idea that they competed as a girl and as time went on, this became detrimental to Baker’s emotional and mental health.
Q+ Magazine had the chance to sit down and chat with Stay on Board’s director Nicola Marsh and Producer Alex Schmider recently where we got to chew the fat about Leo’s journey, gender binaries in the sporting arena, and trans presence in sports competitions. Alex Schmider is an Emmy, Peabody, and Critics Choice Award nominated producer, and he works at GLAAD as the Director of Transgender Representaion. Nicola Marsh has a long list of works to her name, and has currently worked on titles such as The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez and Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer.
It was important to all involved that the telling of Leo’s story was done right. However, Marsh says that when they got into the edit room, there was definitely something missing. Marsh – a gay woman – and her co-director Giovanni Reda – a cishet white man – realized that their ability to tell this story through an authentic trans lens was limited by the fact that neither of them were, in fact, trans.
According to Marsh, the only source of education for them on this matter within the space was Leo – the subject of their documentary – and they both deemed that wildly inappropriate.
Enter Alex Schmider. A trans man himself and no stranger to the world of storytelling, it was important for Alex that Leo’s story be told in a way that was honest, but new and fresh. Alex wanted Leo to be the trans protagonist that we’ve never seen before.
When Schmider says that Leo chooses himself this point actually serves as the driving factor in Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story. When the documentary kicks off, Leo is in preparation for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. It’s the first time in history that skateboarding has been included at the event as an Olympic sport and all the best skaters in the game wanted a place on the team.
Here’s the thing though, in the skateboarding competition world, at that time, Leo was still competing as a girl. They competed in female events and they used their previous name – because they had to. Leo had been skating and competing since he was really young and attempting to break through that whole brand and identity that had been created around his previous life proved way too hard for Leo.
By the time the Olympics rolled around, Leo was deep in the midst of gender transition, especially emotionally, and the thought of continuing to compete as a female was absolutely ruining him. Leo made the difficult decision to choose himself and his transition over the Olympics and he dropped out of the team.
Schmider talks about trans visibility in sports and says that there is a mythology that trans people are taking over sports right now. Schmider says that Leo’s version of the story – that trans people end up having to choose themselves or the sport when they enter competition spaces – is actually more common than the alternative version being fed to us right now.
Nevertheless, it was a clear moment of decisiveness for Leo and he forged forward with his transition and set about building himself a life that revolved around doing things he wanted, without the burden of competing in spaces that relied on gender binaries.
Leo’s story resonated with us so loudly because of all the transphobic rhetoric being spewed into societies all around the world right now. There are no pretenses with Leo’s story at any point throughout his journey. The documentary shows his pain with acute detail. It is actually hard to watch him on screen suffer in the way that he does, knowing there is a solution that would take all the hardship and misery away.
The filmmakers managed to humanize the trans process in a way that is sorely lacking from the conversation.
Those moments of joy that Schmider is talking about are moments where Leo is able to live as Leo – a man that doesn’t have to battle with the fact that he was somebody else before. It’s these moments that make this story so important and so compelling. The world needs to see more trans people living their authentic lives, finding and experiencing joy in the same things that everyone else does. Folks need to see the pain it causes trans folks when unnecessary barriers are placed in their way, preventing them from doing this.
The change that folks can see in Leo once he is able to live as his authentic self in the body that he chooses, is immeasurable. Despite the current state of trans legislation, despite the hate rhetoric circulating at the moment, this is what is at the heart of this important story. Leo is a human before he is anything else, and his happiness and his ability to love himself is all that should matter.
Marsh says that Leo is doing things now that have had incredibly positive and profound impacts on his life. He’s released music on Spotify, he has started his own skateboard company, and he has built a life and identity for himself that doesn’t revolve around skateboarding competitions and spaces that try to marginalize and oppress him. Since coming out as trans and changing his pronouns to He/Him, Leo’s success has only amplified.
He works with Nike, he’s done commercials with Colin Kapernick. He’s been sponsored by Mercedes, he’s got over 150 thousand followers on Instagram, and his visibility as a trans man is doing incredible things for people everywhere. Visibility matters. Representation matters. The right representation matters even more.
At the end of the documentary, Leo says that he wishes someone had told him there were trans people everywhere when he was younger. When we asked the filmmakers what they wanted to say to trans folks who might be struggling to find their way in the world right now, this is what they had to say:
Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story is available to stream on Netflix now. If you’ve made it this far through this piece and would like to hear the full length interview, click here. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram for all queer stuff!
