Julio Dowansingh | Family Affair / 2023

open to nearly everything

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ernest Anemone (screenplay), Julio Dowansingh (director) Family Affair / 2023 [16 minutes]

 

What do you do when a film or casting director employs a gender-breaking actor to portray a gender-breaking character? Well, in my case at least, you watch the film even more closely aware of not only its themes but how those same subjects shift, ever so slightly, in the portrayal of a character that does not comport with the pronoun designation of the seeming assignment of the person performing that role. Does it really matter? Should we treat it as we often do with racial disparities such as attending a version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, when the two young Renaissance Veronese teenagers are performed by a black Juliet and an Asian Romeo by simply ignoring what we know to be a factual discrepancy and concentrate on their acting instead of their race? In short, should we ignore gender, something Shakespeare’s audiences were asked to do in almost all of his work, as we are sometimes are asked to be color blind in contemporary theater productions? Or does the recognition of those gender and racial exceptions to our expectations add to the significance of the work itself? 

    These issues, I would argue, are central to Ernest Anemone’s and Julio Dowansingh’s short film Family Affair which begins with a mother named Beverly (Donna Vivino), wearing a dress with the words “Bite Me” stitched over her butt, who is sick and tired of being spoken to as a stereotypical aggressive single mother by an overweight effeminate black gay boy named LJ (Corey Barrow) who has come to pick up her son, Tanner, played by a then-female actor Claire D’Angelo, who looks to be a wanna-be lesbian and who later changed their gender pronoun to the they/them non-binary and their name to Bear D’Angelo. Bev is also evidently doing podcasts that, from the way she greets them on line, may or may not include chats with eager porn-minded males or maybe fellow females.  

     Tanner is on “his” (the pronoun assigned him by her/their role in the film) way to some secret mission which both LJ and later Tanner’s seemingly black lesbian friend Emily (Morgen McKynzie) arguing “isn’t going to end well” for him, and which he will come to regret. Tanner, incidentally, criticizes LJ, who is evidently doing a school project on curing cancer, for not wearing a suit and presenting a power-point presentation, while instead dressed in a floral shirt under a blue sleeveless vest.

      Their teacher (performed by the movie’s writer Ernest Anemone) arrives to class seemingly late, and announces that by a vote the science classroom skeleton has been named “boner.” Emily, meanwhile, dismissingly addresses a nearby gay boy as Simon, whose real name is Kevin, and who we see later dropping his small box of his planned panorama of figures. He seems just as unpopular as many a bullied high school gay boy, although Tanner seems to befriend him when he find the time.

     But Tanner has other things on his mind, phoning off and on all day the mysterious man he plans to meet up with and who himself suggests that Tanner should have revealed his plans to his mother Beverly, who as Emily predicts will murder him when she finds out, something Tanner hyperbolically proclaims as she has tried to do for the past 18 years of his life. Besides, telling his mom, texts Tanner, “would definitely complete her mental breakdown.”

    Meanwhile Tanner is approached by the cute school jock Mike (Luca R. Stagnitta) who wonders if he is planning on attending baseball practice after school, and saddened to hear that Tanner’s mother is still struggling with irritable bowel syndrome problems. He seems almost to have an unspoken crush on his fellow jock Tanner. Tanner promises to be at practice tomorrow for sure.

     We appear to have entered an LGBT queer story from other end of the alphabet, evident especially when his friend Emily drives Tanner finally to his visit to the offices of the man she plans to meet, greeted by a black receptionist who’s busy chewing celery as he explains that he doesn’t have answer for the question someone is posing to him on the phone, suggesting that they simply Google-it.

     The mysterious manager named Tommy (Dan Domingues) greets Tanner with a foreboding reminder that he’s told him to meet him in the parking lot, obviously not wanting to be seen together.

      Tanner’s response is that he wishes he might “stop acting as if they were criminals,” but Tommy is beginning to think “this is a big mistake.” Tanner reminds him yet again that “he can vote, he can join the military, I can decide…,” “This isn’t just about your age, Tanner,” Tommy insists.

      What’s going on here we’re forced to ask?; are these two, man and boy, having a secret affair: We are even further titillated when Tanner unzips the duffel bag he’s been hauling around the entire day, with Tommy immediately warning: “Whoa, not here. What are you nuts? We’ll go to my place.”

      In the very next scene it is the audio that bothers us, as the camera pans over a wall of photographs, so me of them of Tanner with Tommy’s arm around the younger boy. We hear a groan of “Ow! Can’t you just slow down, please?” followed by Tommy’s voice, “I’m doing my best. Be patient. Okay?”

     We soon get a glimpse of what is behind those words when we now see Tanner festooned in a glimmering white reflective-beaded dress. “How do I look?” “As beautiful as the day you were born,” answers Tommy, Tanner echoing “I love you too, Dad.”

      What follows is a drag number in a gay club in which, apparently, Tommy, a drag queen by night, performs, this time with his son. Into the club angrily strides Beverly, having been clued in to Tanner’s whereabouts by Mike, who has stopped by to see how she was.

     Tanner attempts to silence her certain-to-be-furious response, but “Big Bev,” as Emily has called her, is not to be quieted. Tommy explains that Tanner came to one of his shows and asked his father to teach him how to perform in drag. “What was I supposed to say?” Beverly’s first response is predictable, “I don’t know, how about I’m not gonna let my child dress up like a freak to perform for a bunch of drunk old men?”

      “Look, I’m good at baseball, right. Well, I’m good at this too,” Tanner intercedes.

      Eventually Bev admits that she does want to support her son. She just doesn’t want to lose him as she lost his father.

      Tanner reassures his mother that she won’t lose him and he loves her—a lot.

      “Make ‘em gag, sweetie,” she wishes well.

      Tommy adds, “You know, Bev, you’re the only woman I would’ve married.”

      Bev pauses for a moment before responding: “Ditto.”

    So the show goes on as the new Father-son duo dance to “Can’t Keep a Secret” as performed by Jacinta.

      This is the kind of story where everyone is so sexually and gender fluid we no longer care to pin them down to being one thing or another.

 

Los Angeles, September 11, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).