Believe it or not, the second-most climbed mountain in the world is in Oregon: the 11,245 ft peak hosts around 10,000 climbers a year and is the most frequently visited mountain in America. Who’s On Top?, with inimitable voiceover narration by George Takei, takes as its subject matter a particularly unique group of mountain climbers whose goal is to scale Hood. The LGBTQ summit group comprises all the colors of the rainbow: a gay male, a trans woman, an Africa American lesbian, and serves as, among other things, an important lesson in tolerance and teamwork.
This documentary, although using a mostly conventional by-the-numbers combination of interviews and footage of the climbing troupe’s ascendance of the often-treacherous Mt. Hood, does take the trouble to get to know each climber and get their personal history of growing up gay and all the social traumas associated with it. The film even manages to delve into how the scourge of prejudice within the LGBTQ community: some, like Feldman, aren’t considered “queer” enough, while some lesbians in the hardcore feminist community think transwomen (like Stacey Rice, featured in the film) are just men in drag.
In this way, the film makes a clever analogy with overcoming stigmas and prejudices associated with gay lifestyles and the intimidating challenges of scaling an 11,000-foot mountain. Leading the team is Taylor Feldman, a lesbian climber who has logged over 40 journeys up Mt Hood. The rest of the group are mostly newbies to mountaineering, a sport that Who’s on Top? maintains is still too often dominated by straight white middle-aged males. Despite feeling rote and predictable in a technical sense, the film does accomplish more than the usual documentary didacticism and delves deeper into more diverse, emotional human stories of how, with hope and self-confidence, stereotypes can be shattered and the barriers of prejudice transcended. Recommended.
Check out our interview with the director Devin Fei-Fan Tau!