River Gallo dishes on ‘Ponyboi,’ falling for Murray Bartlett, and the allure of the cowboy
Ponyboi, intersex actor-writer-model-activist River Gallo isn’t just making a movie—they’re making a movement.Raised in New Jersey by Salvadoran immigrant parents, Gallo was told from a young age that they were different—told they’d need to take hormones and undergo so that they could live life as a “normal” male.Years later, they would follow their creative passions to study acting at NYU, and later to USC’s School of Cinematic Arts to earn their master’s degree.
At 27, while doing research for the senior thesis film (the short “Ponyboi”), they first encountered the term “intersex”—someone born with male and female biological traits—and began to realize they weren’t so alone.
Subscribe to our daily newsletter for your front-row seat to all things entertainment with a sprinkle of everything else queer.Since then, Gallo’s career as both an artist and activist has taken off.
They were one of GLAAD’s Rising Star Grant recipients in 2019, they founded a production company focused on QPOC-created work, they appeared in a memorable episode of Love, Victor and a handful of other trailblazing short films, and they were one of three subjects of the groundbreaking 2023 documentary Every Body, examining the misconceptions of the intersex community and the challenges they face in their day-to-day lives.River Gallo’s 2019 short film Ponyboi, which he has called “the first film created by and starring an out intersex person in the history of cinema,” follows the story of a Latinx intersex runaway.And, all that time, they worked at fleshing out their short film “Ponyboi”—the project that became a catalyst for so much change and growth in their life—into a feature-length film.
