Dani Buzman | Who Raised You? / 2025

the families who disappeared

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dani Guzman (screenwriter and director) Who Raised You? / 2025 [10 minutes]

 

This is a story about death. First, and perhaps most importantly, the death of the gay man Robert’s (Nick Salem) lover Raul (Lawrence Murphy III).

     It is the AIDS crisis of the 1980s when Robert meets Raul and the two become lovers. No space in this film is given over to the disease, the suffering, or the death. The two meet up and their relationship is simply over, as it was for so many loving couples of that period whose lovers were suddenly infected with HIV and soon after contracted AIDS, dying in those endless years of gay death.

    Gay Chicano writer Dani Guzman himself expresses the situation quite nicely:

 

“Created as my final thesis at NYU Tisch, I sought a humanistic, personal lens to do justice to the agony and ecstasy endured by lovers whose stories were affected by the AIDS epidemic. As a Queer Chicano, I have experience with the delicate act of concealing myself in “polite” spaces, aware of the repercussions of living in open opposition to the deeply-held prejudices of others. When the people you have to hide from are the same people meant to love and nurture you, it can damage you in ways that bleed into your interpersonal relationships and motivate you to separate from them entirely. In the era of sexual liberation beyond the Stonewall riots, the mass exodus of Queer people fleeing their hometowns to “gay ghettos” made the imminent arrival of AIDS all-the-more traumatic and personal. As people lost members of their newly-formed families, many had already severed connections to their once familiar homes. My fascination with the emotional journeys of our Queer community superseded any urge to dramatize the traumatic magnitude of the period, instead highlighting a single story of desire to represent infinite like it. Who Raised You? is a love story told posthumously, following a character whose commitment to feel his late lover’s presence once more brings him to the same family his partner ran away from.”

 

Robert shows up at the doorstep of his dead lover’s family at an unfortunate moment, the death of the mother. He meets Raoul’s sister Belinda (Destiny Leilani Brow) smoking the side of the house as other family members celebrate at the “celebration of her life” in the back yard. Recognizing him, without having even met him, she leads him on as he has brought with him a floral arrangement for the mother, attempting to reconnect with Raoul’s family. Belinda leads him into the room where his mother is, he discovering her in bed, dead.

     He has come at the wrong time. Still he persists, sitting down with her for a short while, attempting to explain who he is, and trying to find the words to explain his presence.

     For a moment, she is cruel, bluntly asking “Did you get what you wanted?” after explaining that her beloved brother left her when she was eight years of age, bitter perhaps that this stranger has gotten to know her brother far better than she has.

    Yet, life has gone on, as her young daughter interrupts their conversation, and Robert prepares to leave, embarrassed now for his attempt to connect up with a family that has suffered two deaths.

     But, at the last moment, she does hug her brother’s lover close, assuring him that he can call her at any time just to talk.

   Robert leaves, rather heart-broken yet again over his desperate attempt to make contact with Raoul’s family.

    Yet the film ends with a vision of the two men in bed, as lovers. Robert has those memories, while the family, prejudiced against even those they loved, have nothing to face but the empty canvas of death.

    As for the question of the title, it is apparent, that Raoul was forced to raise himself, although with the love he found in the gay community of the day, which tragically also meant his early death. The irony and pain of this small work is evident. Both families have failed this beautiful individual, although he has, finally, found a man with whom he could share love.

     Meanwhile, Robert is left without his lover, and without the connection to his family, reliant now on a fractured community being unintentionally destroyed from within.

 

Los Angeles, May 12, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).

    

 

 

David Moreton | Edge of Seventeen / 1998

searching for love in all the wrong places

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Moreton and Todd Stephens (writers), David Moreton (director) Edge of Seventeen / 1998

 

17-year-old Eric Hunter (Chris Stafford) and his friend Maggie (Tina Holmes) have just finished their junior year of high school and are looking forward to working for the summer at the local amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio. The year is 1984, and their brown-checkered costumes are hideous. Their jobs, working in the park’s restaurant is just as unpleasant. The only joy, for the seemingly clueless Eric, is a fellow workmate, Rod (Andersen Gabrych), who, one year older, is attending Ohio State University nearby.

 

     Although it becomes apparent to all quite quickly that their manager, Angie (Lea DeLaria) is lesbian and that Rod is gay, Eric seems unfazed about his own attraction to Rod, and Rod has soon cornered him the kitchen for a kiss, and, a few days later, beds him.

      As any young man or woman discovering love for the first time, Eric develops an immediate crush on Rod, and is a bit confused when Rod suddenly moves back to Ohio State, and, living in the gay dorm hall, tells Eric not to call him again. Eric confides to Maggie that he is gay, and she, at first hurt since he had previously expressed some attentions to her, soon accepts the situation, giving Eric a new haircut, and, later, taking it a step further by dying the top of his hair blond. For a school dance, Eric even puts on a bit of her eyeliner, making him even more attractive to all the women. But watching the dancers, it is clear that he feels completely isolated and confused by his personal feelings.

      To seek out others who might feel like him, he visits a local gay bar, The Universal, owned by his amusement park manager, Angie, who welcomes him openly and introduces him to some of the bar’s patrons for protection. At the bar he meets up with another handsome Ohio State student, Jonathan (Jeff Fryer) with whom he quickly finds himself having backseat car sex, experiencing his first rim-job. But when they are finished, and he attempts to share addresses, it is clear that Jonathan has little interest, making it another one-time fling, the fact of which troubles the boy.

       Taking Maggie to the bar doesn’t help, as she’s openly described as his “fag-hag,” and angrily storms out, deeply hurt by the implications. And things at home become even more problematic when his loving mother, who has become increasingly disturbed by his changing appearance, queries him about his behavior: “People are getting the wrong idea about you.”

       In loneliness and some desperation, he drives to Ohio State hoping to meet up again with Jonathan, instead running into Rod, who this time—with Rod’s current boyfriend sleeping in the next bed—gives the boy his first anal experience. Realizing that there no real love there, Eric returns home, only to find that his mother has found a pair of matches from the gay club in his coat pocket. Eric denies he’s ever been there and runs off. When he returns home to find his mother playing the piano—who had given up her musical career for marriage and children (and music also plays a large part in her son’s life)—he admits to her that he is gay. He returns to the bar where Angie is singing, welcomed back into its small gay community. The next year, it is implied, will take him to New York where he will surely be able to live a more fulfilling gay life.

     Director David Moreton’s tender film of teen gay love and angst is open and forthright about gay sex, even while it often uses some of the stereotypes of less intelligent movies portraying gays. Yet writer and director poignantly capture the difficulties of a young teen of that period living in a smaller community, where choices for relationships are limited and restrictions are many. The fortunate thing about Moreton’s movie is that even as types, his characters are basically loving and well-meaning, even if sometimes callous—particularly the young boys whom Eric meets—and lacking the proper empathy that Eric needs. Only Angie offers him the open friendship that allows for him to eventually come to terms with his life, insisting that he simply needs to give himself some time. Unsaid in this film, however, is that the young Eric was coming out at the very moment when AIDS was for first beginning to be recognized as a crisis.

     For all that, the film’s beautiful young hero seems, as in Patrick Wilde’s Get Real, made the very same year, quite well-adjusted, despite his personal fears. Indeed, all the teens in the films about young gay love that I have reviewed here, are far more excepting of their sexuality than I was at that age. But the early 1960s were simply less forgiving, with opportunities to meet others—even had I been able to except my own sexuality—almost nonexistent. As I’ve written elsewhere, I never knew Cedar Rapids even had a gay bar until decades later. Perhaps there wasn’t even one in my days.

      Sad to say, this film no longer seems to be available on DVD; I was forced to buy a used copy. A fascinating coincidence is that Stafford, just like Ben Silverstone, the teen lead of Get Real, after a short acting career, became a lawyer.

 

Los Angeles, June 15, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2016).