This is your typical indie coming-of-age tale about a teenager, though it’s clearly working with a very tiny budget. Set within a migrant family living in Southern California’s Coachella Valley, the movie digs into how fragile old-school traditions and expectations can be. We follow a teenage son as he goes through the process of coming out and struggles to find acceptance while dealing with homophobia, domestic abuse, and a messy love triangle that involves his own sister. Goyo is seventeen and just about to graduate from high school. Since he’s been a bit more feminine since he was a little kid, he’s always had to deal with emotional and physical transition from his dad, Ramon, who is obsessed with him being "a man." The only real love he gets is from a lady next door who actually respects him for who he is. The family lives in a Mexican community where everyone works on a grape farm, but things get shaken up when a new guy named Lucio arrives. Lucio basically seduces Goyo ...
The makers talk to a plethora of people in this 100 minute film. Each represents a different aspect of the hentai life — in the Japanese sense of the word, roughly denoting unconventional sexual desires or practices. We meet a butoh dancer who questions the need to classify everyone, a trans activist who writes video-game strategy books, a gay man who’s the MC of Department H, a fashion-runway party for the latex-and-rubber set, a gay erotic artist whose unapologetically sexy and explicit body-fetish drawings have made him a kind of Tom of Tokyo, a deaf lesbian who went to court with her fiancé, who was petitioning to change his legal status from female to male, and had to pioneer new sign-language characters simply to communicate to the judge some of the things they were talking about. As you can see the diversity here is crazy.
The people we meet in “Queer Japan” represent a powerful cross-section of LGBTQ life, and they make a vivid case for how wrong it is to assume that members of that community are all in the same box, or five boxes, or 50 boxes. The message of the movie isn’t merely “tolerance.” It’s more demanding and exacting: Each and every one of us - gay and straight, trans and cisgender, wild and traditional, whatever — are who we are. The movie is a plea not simply for respect but for a recognition of the existential reality of each of our identities. This documentary was very different from what I was expecting to be honest. The kind of broad spectrum that we got to see here was not something I imagined. It felt we had everyone covered except the cisgender gay male. Some of the identities were even a bit scandalous even to me. What Iw as very excite to see what the animation creator and drawings done for 'My Husband's brother, a famous manga and one of my favorite series based on the book. I can see how and why this documentary is a very important step in understanding many aspects and semantic issues of “gay” or “queer” becoming “LGBTQIA+”. But for some odd reason, it failed to keep my attention focussed on the proceedings, as much as I wanted to watch it. (4/10)
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