‘Club Kid’ tracks a partier’s transformation—but there’s an actual kid in an actual club, too

Jordan Firstman, the actor and filmmaker who makes his feature directing debut with Club Kid (opening Fri/13 in Bay Area theater) about a gay New York party promoter presented with a 10-year-old son, the fruit of an encounter he cannot even remember, has a theory about why people have children. He himself is childless, but he considered the issue while writing and making the movie.

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“I was just thinking about my life and what it would take for me to have to instantly grow up,” Firstman says during a short stay in San Francisco where SFFILM screened Club Kid to a packed house at the Castro Theatre. “I think that’s why a lot of people do have kids. They’re like, ‘I want to feel like a grown up and I’ll have to be responsible.’ It just becomes exhausting to think about yourself all at the time, and a kid really forces you to not think about and to actually take care of someone else.”

That, at least, is the learning curve for Firstman’s Peter as he at first reluctantly takes Arlo (Reg