Various accounts of the Asian American gay men reveal that Asian American gay men are aware of the existence of other homosexuals in their neighborhood. The awareness is built on the stereotypical images of transvestism. However, they don’t know to what kind of homosexual categorizations they belong. Instead, they only know that their sexual desire can be aroused by intimacy with other gay men during the time before the gay right movements.18 When they are still closeted, in schools, they usually find it hard to communicate with white gay teenagers who are already out of the closet.19 Through the inspection on transvestite sartorial practices of these white gay teenagers, Asian American gay teenagers realize that they might not be alone in terms of sexuality. However, these accounts show that they are not able to
18 Several accounts in The Making of a Gay Asian Community show Asian American gay men’s
“closeted” status. It is this “closeted” status that makes them have doubts on their sexuality.
Ernest Wada recounts that, since he was born in a family with four elder sisters, he had no male role models in his family when he was young. He is effeminate and thought it is natural. After returning from the relocation camp, Wada was living in a Mexican American community. Wada recounts that, Mexican Americans hold a healthy attitude towards sexuality regardless the gender of their sexual partners. Wada’s first sexual intercourse was with this group of Mexican American children in the neighbor (13).
Growing up in a middle-class neighborhood, Doug Chin recounts his first homosexual experience as merely “a play” among children. He didn’t indicate the ethnic origin of his first sexual partner. When he was young, he wasn’t fully aware of homosexuality and would also join his friends to tease other transvestites in his racially mixed neighborhood when he was in high school (14).
Like other teenagers, Tak Yamamoto thinks he should date some girls when he is in high school but realizes the fact that he is not interested in either sex. He recounts his first encounter with
homosexuality: he met a Hispanic transvestite in the shop he worked for and was not able to relate their outfits. However, Yamamoto thinks those homosexual teenagers in his high school are very brave (11-12).
19 Justin Chin, an openly gay Asian American writer, has a similar experience. In Chin’s “Monster”
collected in Q&A: Queer in Asian America, Chin recounts that there are several effeminate teenagers would deploy the chance of acting in the music and drama night to wear feminine attires. Chin also thinks these transvestite teenagers are brave, but Chin chooses to join the sports club and tries to become masculine in order to pass as straight in the public (369).
relate themselves to these white gay teenagers. They are aware of their homosexuality but they choose to ignore it. They concentrate on their studies and do their jobs diligently. Wat, in his The Making of a Gay Asian Community: An Oral History of Pre-Aids Los Angeles (2002), points out that, many Asian American gay men start to develop their homosexual experiences due to the homosocial settings of the military (18).
Existing studies show that Asian American gay men would internalize the white gay men’s images of masculinities as the normalizing images. In The Making of a Gay Asian Community, Wat concludes that, like white gay communities, in Asian
American gay communities, “money can buy you the right look” (61). With money in hand, Asian American gay men can afford certain clothes and accessories. They would also work out in the gym and buy trendy clothes and fashionable accessories (61). In this way, Asian American gay men would demonstrate a body with gay accessories and thus be visible for other gay men to identify. Wat contextualizes these costly sartorial practices in the capitalist society, recognizing these sartorial practices a promotion that would normalize the desire of consumers. This unifies diverse desires from various backgrounds and makes gay men of different origins want to look alike with each other. Wat points out that Asian gay men would internalize the promotion of white gay masculinities and enact such white masculinity on their bodybuilding.
Wat criticizes that in some dominant gay magazines catering for the white gay market, the white gay body is always rendered as the desirable body for people to fantasize. Due to the emasculation of Asian bodies in the United States, Asian bodies are rendered effeminate. Even in some ghettoized Asian gay magazines in the United States, muscular Asian gay models are “invariably boyish, innocent, and pliant” (62)
in their postures.20 Wat concludes that these representations of Asian gay
masculinities “fulfill the superficial criteria of American masculinity and yet retain within the same bodies centuries of colonial fantasies about the Orient” (62).
Since many Asian American gay men are emasculated in white gay communities, many white gay men would pay visits to these Asian American gay bars for gay cruising. Many gay bars in the 1970s in Los Angeles are exclusively for white gay communities with River Cub as an exception. According to sociological and historical studies in The Making of a Gay Asian Community, many Asian gay men started to aggregate in Los Angeles since the mid-1970s. White gay men who are interested in dating Asian American gay men would visit River Club. This kind of gay bars with the majority of Asian American clients is called “rice bars”, and the River Club is one of its kind. Wat considers white gay men’s visits to these rice bars are acts of “ethnic tourism”, as white gay men render these places into “a stimulant to sexuality” (86), and commodify these places into the slum area for privileged white gay men (86-87).
According to Andre Ting’s interview, rice bars offer chances for casual sex for Asian gay men (90).
Asian American gay men usually don’t date among each other before the 1970s because they render each other as competitors in pursuing interracial romance with white gay men. In the River Club in downtown Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, some Asian American gay men would divide themselves into different ethnic groups and compete with each other (67). According to one interview with Dean Goishi in The
20 According to Paul EeNam Park Hagland’s “‘Undressing the Oriental Boy’: The Gay Asian in the Social Imaginary of the Gay White Male”, there are three magazines of this kind. Oriental Guys and Male Club are two magazines published in Sydney and are internationally distributed in Australia, Asia, and the United States. Passport: Crossing Cultures and Borders is published in San Francisco and is also internationally distributed in the United States, Canada, England and in Asia. (Park Hagland 278). Paul EeNam Park Hagland. “‘Undressing the Oriental Boy’: The Gay Asian in the Social
Imaginary of the Gay White Male” Looking Queer: Body Image and Identity in Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay and Transgender Communities. Dawn Atkins Ed. New York: Harrington Press, 1998. 277-293.
Making of a Gay Asian Community, ethnically speaking “the American-born [Asian gay men] tended to mix much better” (71), while “many first generation [immigrants]
tend to stay in their ethnic groups” (71). Goishi does not date with Asian gay men because Asian gay men are “family” (71). However, in retrospect, Goishi thinks that it is racism because he does not find Asian gay men attractive (71).
In the account of Paul Chen from The Making of a Gay Asian Community, there are some Asian gay clones21 that want to join the white clone communities. These Asian gay clones dress themselves with sartorial accessories to look similar to white gay men. One of the Asian gay clones would wear dark glasses and get a perm. In this Asian gay clone’s view, according to Paul Chen’s account, Asian gay men are “quiet, passive,” and having “less power” (70).
The “Americanized” Asian American gay men are more attractive to those Asian immigrants who just arrived in the United States. One account in The Making of a Gay Asian Community by Virgil Vang indicates how American-born Asian American gay men are more attractive for Asian immigrants. Vang considers that his Asian American identity might be helpful for him to date Asian immigrants, even though Asian-Asian relationship is not common in the 1970s.22 Virgil Vang recounts that he would wear a common Levi’s jeans and an ordinary shirt when visiting the River Club (78). I think Levi’s jeans and the shirt Vang was wearing are all American brands and are popular commodities in American culture. They all carry codified meaning and add meaning to the body: wearing these American brands represents one’s ness. In Virgil Vang’s accounts, masculinity derives from his
American-born-21 “Clone” refers to a subculture that celebrates hyper-masculine costumes in gay communities. These gay men adopt bikers’ leather jackets as their outfit when cruising in gay spaces. Clones like to have short crew cuts and wear leather clothes. These sartorial practices are borrowed from bikers and working-class men. It is a practice popular among white gay men.
22 According to Leo Joslin’s accounts, white gay men would render the unusual Asian gay couple a lesbian act in the 1970s (58).
ness makes his relationships with Asian gay men easier (78), so he never finds it trouble to date Asian guys. Vang considers that he “wasn’t quite as Oriental” and was not an “Asian Asian” (78, emphasis in the original). He claims that the majority of Asian gay men he dates are all tourists or students from Asia (78).