The Canadian web series Cam Boy is back for a second season, and I'm a bit late getting to it. While the first season really stuck to Aston’s story and his struggle to make ends meet, this season spreads things out much more. Across six episodes, the show gives us a bunch of mini-stories about different guys in the industry, while still showing us how things are moving along for Aston. Like I said, there are about 21 or 22 tiny stories packed into these six episodes. Aston is now in a relationship with the handyman from the first season, but he’s still working as a cam boy. One day, he accidentally starts streaming a live sex show with his boyfriend. He realizes what's happening halfway through, but he doesn't stop because he sees the money pouring in. When the boyfriend finds out, he’s furious and walks out on him. Then we have Riley, another guy who usually sells a "boyfriend experience" to his viewers. Things get creepy when one of his clients just shows up a...
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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