Washington highlights their racialized experiences (e.g., microaggressions they receive from white men) and portrays Mike’s experience with fatness and Benson’s experience with HIV with sensitivity and care. Benson is a Black, HIV positive day care teacher who is more on the timid side though he too also bottles up how his family trauma affects him. Mike is a fat Japanese American chef who has a lot of sex instead of confronting his internal issues. Beyond the importance of featuring both a queer Asian man and a queer Black man, Bryan Washington imbues these characters with depth. I so loved the representation of queer men of color in Memorial. Memorial is a funny and profound story about family in all its strange forms, joyful and hard-won vulnerability, becoming who you're supposed to be, and the limits of love.
And just maybe they'll all be okay in the end. Without Mike's immediate pull, Benson begins to push outwards, realizing he might just know what he wants out of life and have the goods to get it.īoth men will change in ways that will either make them stronger together, or fracture everything they've ever known. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted. In Japan he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past. There's the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other.īut when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson's a Black day care teacher, and they've been together for a few years - good years - but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. A funny, sexy, profound dramedy about two young people at a crossroads in their relationship and the limits of love.īenson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston.
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