The Mission district of San Francisco is a hard-knocks Latino neighborhood with a reverence for family, low riders and machismo. When ex-con, ex-alcoholic Che (Benjamin Bratt) discovers that his beloved only son spends his evenings topless and oiled up at a gay club, the explosive father-son fight that erupts on the front stoop outs Che’s son to the entire community.
While school presents a daily torture from other boys, a few adult members of the neighborhood begin to accept Jesse for who he is. Che, however, still struggles to come to terms with it, and struggles harder still with his sobriety.
This article appears in Oct 14-20, 2010.