I. A Night on the Wall
Men line up against a back wall that some have taken to calling China Alley. A derogatory term, really. One not-so-cleverly coined by muscle-bound white queens to mark the area where some of the “less desirable” men gather. In this particular case, it’s a place for a third of those who the muscle queens mark as being undesirable when they drunkenly type “no fats, femmes, or Asians need reply” in their personal ads. It’s not racist, they say, just “preference.” But any personal ad that begins with, “I don’t mean to offend anyone,” does specifically just that.
There are names, to be sure, for where the other two thirds go. By now, I’ve heard them all – fat farm, fairy village, take your pick. Sometimes, we joke about them, if only because laughter seems to be the appropriate response to the absurdity of it all. Yet, the mere existence of these dark corners, to where gay men who don’t quite fit the new image of what it means to be gay and male are forced to retreat, betrays the rigid hierarchy of desire that has come to exist in the gay “community.” Men who are pushed into these corners are told, time and again, that they somehow don’t measure up. Once relegated to these margins, they are not free to roam gay spaces. Instead, they must wait patiently on the sidelines, hoping somebody will play sexual tourist.
From their vantage point, in the back of the dimly lit nightclub, they can watch the night’s events unfolding but don’t really take part in them. Instead, these men wait, like cattle at a show, with hopes of winning a prize. They line up in their Sunday best, trying to look nonchalant. They sip slowly from plastic cups filled with watered down liquor, trying to make it last as long as possible. There’s nothing worse than standing alone, doing nothing. At least with a drink in your hand, you’re doing something. If you drink and smoke, you can keep both hands occupied. Sometimes, muscle queens walk by and sneer or laugh. But mostly – and perhaps this is the most degrading of all – they don’t even notice. It’s as if the mere existence of non-white, non-muscular, non-masculine, and non-young men is an inconvenience to be tolerated rather than a rich diversity to be embraced.
Nonetheless, the men on the wall – along with other undesirable men – wait. For most of them, the “prize” is predictable. Not free to choose the most desirable of men, they wait to be chosen. More specifically, they want to be chosen by what every self-respecting gay man is told that they should desire. Some will get lucky, even if it’s only for one night. But most will go home, empty handed, yet again. Hidden in these dark corners, these men are constantly reminded that they are not desirable while those who are deemed worthy of gay desires are constantly put on display to remind them exactly what is.
II. Cartographies of Desire
At first blush, the required props are an odd assortment of thrown together objects. But by now, they have become so ingrained in our collective gay consciousness that they barely register a whisper of curiosity. There, in the middle of the dance floor, long, hard poles jut proudly out of K-Mart variety kiddie-pools while naked torsos gyrate to ear numbing music and uncontrolled spasms of light. As odd as this set-up might seem to outsiders, to those in the know, the props are instantly recognized as the make-shift stage required for the most stable of gay-bar entertainments, the wet underwear contest.
The contestants, too, are an easily recognized bunch. Young, muscular, and overwhelmingly white, they mirror the images found on gay billboards, advertisements, and magazine covers. While the visual image of the contestants represent what is physically desired in the gay community, their actions represent what is desired behaviorally. Contestants flex their muscles, saunter across the stage, thrust into the pole, and proudly display their manhood for the audience to see. The more vivid the masculine display, the bigger the cheers. Here, like in so many other arenas of gay life, masculinity is rewarded while femininity is punished with outright disdain. Masculinity is desired while femininity is not. Sometime between Stonewall and Will and Grace, the gay “community” has become very very butch.
The most cursory glance through gay personal ads makes the emphasis on masculinity blatantly clear. “Straight acting,” is proudly displayed as a marketing tactic while “no femmes” is an equally striking warning to potential suitors that femininity is not desired. In contemporary gay life, men are to be men. In one sweeping swivel of the hips, with a magic flip of the wrist, gay men became the “manliest of men.”
It’s not just that gay men are becoming increasingly attracted to “masculine” men but they are becoming increasingly hostile toward “feminine” men. Websites such as straightacting.com that promotes itself as a site for “guys that like sports, change their own car’s oil, or just don’t fit the effeminate stereotypes,” and Lance Bass’ recent claim of being a “straight acting” gay man, are increasingly becoming more common. It’s not just that these guys feel like they don’t fit the “stereotype” – although it might come as a surprise to them that the vast majority of us don’t – but that they are actively denigrating it as something so completely unacceptable to them that they truly believe that somehow, being “straight acting” makes them better than the rest of us. From a blatantly heterosexist perspective, if you can’t be one, at least you can act like one. Bass may not be straight, but he plays one on Broadway.
But masculinity never exists in a vacuum. Nor is it simply a state of being. Rather, one is only defined as masculine if others are defined as feminine. More importantly, claiming masculinity is a process. It must be defined, developed, then claimed. But claiming masculinity when you’re having sex with other men is a tricky task. Within the larger social imagery of what it means to be gay, what it means to be a gay man, is immediately equated with men who have failed to make the masculine claim. Gay characters on mainstream television shows are routinely mocked and ridiculed as having somehow failed at being “real” men. No matter how “straight acting” some gay men might think they are, they will never be accepted as “real” men by the mainstream that they so apparently want to embrace.
If gay men are truly to be masculine, what they really need is a feminine “other.” And they don’t have to go far to find one.
III. They Became Men and I Became…
According to social theorist Edward Said, “the orient was almost a European invention, and has been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic being, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences…” But rather than just a way of describing the “Orient,” orientalist discourse also acted as a political vision meant to promote the superiority of the west against all that was east. Perpetuating this mirage of western superiority, orientalist discourse took on a distinctively gendered tone. Hinging on masculine domination of the Orient, Asian bodies, both male and female, were painted with feminine brushstrokes.
Because Asian men have been so thoroughly feminized in the Western imagination, it becomes easy to mark gay Asian men as being the feminine other to the “masculine” white man within the gay community. When presented at all by the supposedly inclusive gay press, gay Asian men are uniformly portrayed as being more feminine than gay white men. Not only are they portrayed as more feminine, they are routinely presented as counter to masculine gay white men. In the briefly aired sitcom Some of My Best Friend, the role of Vern, played by Alec Mapa existed only as a contrast the masculine, and thus supposedly normal, Warren played by Jason Bateman. Likewise, a recent ad by Servicemembers Legal Defense Network urges the U.S. government to “let him serve.” He, of course, is a brave white soldier while his Asian partner can do nothing but offer emotional support. Rather than portrayed as individuals, gay Asian men are presented only as adornments for gay white men who virtually always take the superior position. Within the gay imagination, gay Asian men exist only to validate the masculinity of gay white men.
No where is this more prominent than gay porn. Despite the snickers associated with it, porn has a unique place in gay identity development. For many, if not most, of us, gay porn is the first place where we see ourselves, where we see our desires get validated and expressed. Borrowing a phrase from Stuart Hall, “it is the place we go to discover who we are.” Long before we venture into our first gay club or meet our first gay friends, many of us surreptitiously turn to gay porn. Between the covers, or within the frames, we learn gay desire. And we learn that gay desire is very very white.
It is the white man who is centered. Asian characters, if presented at all, are only included to fulfill white male domination fantasies. Unfortunately, gay Asian men are told that our worth is based almost entirely on our ability to be receptacles for gay white men’s masculine thrusts into our bodies.
The feminization of gay Asian men, and by contrast the masculinization of gay white men, is intimately tied to the growing need, perhaps hunger, for acceptance within some quarters of the gay community by the heterosexual majority. It is part and parcel of the cleansing of the gay community of all that does not mirror the heterosexual norm. Gay publications harp on incessantly about our purchasing power, gay activists push for marriage recognition as if the goal of all gay men (and women) should be to mimic heterosexuals and their institutions. The face of gay America, one so intimately cultivated by too many gay activists, is one of heterosexual normality – with one minor exception. Somehow, we went from demanding recognition for our differences to begging for tolerance. According to this new strategy of gaining acceptance, “they” (the rarely blamed, but often alluded to, heterosexuals) should, pretty please, accept us because “we” (the rarely named, but often alluded to, “straight-acting” gays) are just like them. To show just how much we are like them, we, the collective we, support legislation that exclude those of us that they find shameful or embarrassing. We tell them that we, again the collective, need to make sacrifices for the larger goal. Why should the larger goal be for some of us to have equality but not others? More importantly, why should only some of us make these sacrifices? Interestingly enough, those of us making sacrifices are always those of us who have adamantly opposed the “mainstreaming” of the gay community. For some of us, the opposition is due to the rapidly declining visibility of the gay community. Others simply can not fit the heterosexual mold.
My critique is not that we are making sacrifices for the larger goal. Certainly, victories come in spurts and fits. My issue is that those who are becoming more “acceptable” to heterosexual America, and therefore appear to be gaining more ground, are doing so at the expense of the rest of us.
IV. The Fallout
None of this would be problematic if the gay community didn’t idealize and objectify masculinity while simultaneously denigrating femininity. Nor would it be problematic if “straight acting” gay men weren’t using their supposed masculinity to draw distinctions between those of us who, according to them, are “normal” and those of us who they believe are not.
People can prefer whatever damn thing they want to, that is, after all, well within their rights. Not being sexually attracted to women doesn’t make me a sexist. And not being attracted to Asian men doesn’t make a gay white man a racist. But blanket statements and widely held beliefs about Asian men being undesirable sexual partners depend on racist notions of superiority and inferiority. Also, the marginalization of gay Asian men within the larger gay community is intimately tied to the objectification of masculinity and placing it in a supposedly superior position to femininity. For gay white men, claiming masculinity requires an ability to shift femininity onto someone else. Doing so comes at the expense of gay Asian men. Using gay Asian men to make gay white men more masculine, while simultaneously reinforcing the notion that all things masculine are superior to all things feminine, is a racist practice.
The problem is that gay white men have become “men” at my expense. In their quest to prove themselves to be masculine in order to acquire some semblance of heterosexual privilege, they’ve actively denigrated men who look like me. In doing so, they push me – and other gay Asian men – to the very distant most margins of the gay community, to places like China Alley where we are told that our role is to wait to be chosen by a white man. Rather than participants, we become spectators to gay life.
For gay Asian men, there are larger psychological consequences. For them, sexual desire almost always revolves around masculine, “straight-acting” white men. Sadly, we strive for the attention of the very same white men who mark us as being completely void of value. Rather than joining together, we see ourselves as competitors for the few “rice queens” who further marginalize us. Like white men, we marginalize other gay Asian men. Our own fantasies and our own desires are also wrapped up in the images that the gay community feeds us as being the only appropriate and acceptable images. Standing in China Alley, we look outward for potential sexual partners rather than looking inward at the other men on the wall.
Gay men – white, black, Latino, Asian and otherwise – aren’t the only ones to blame for this, of course. Masculinity is the mechanism by which straight white men maintain both racial and gender domination. But as gay men, as men who are marginalized and denigrated by others, shouldn’t we rise above this? Gay white men who promote the “straight-acting” narrative would be wise to recognize that they are simply feeding into the hierarchy of masculine domination, the very same hierarchy that defines heterosexuality as normal and homosexuality as anything but. Rather than win acceptance for themselves by cloaking themselves in masculine posturing, they are simply propping the hierarchy that relegates them to second-class status in the first place.
For gay Asian men, the struggle may be different. We, as both racial and sexual minorities, may have little power to change the social arrangements that continue to mark us as inferior. Yet at the same time, have we completely given up? When we look at other Asian men and think that they are not attractive, what are we thinking of our own reflections? After accepting ourselves as gay men, are we so eager to displace our race? We can begin to look inward rather than outward and begin by expanding our own sexual narratives to include each other in our sexual and emotional fantasies. Only when we find value within ourselves and among ourselves will we be able to demand that others see what we are worth.
After all this time, after being bombarded with images that tell us that we don’t quite measure up, it will be difficult to pull ourselves off the wall. That first step is the hardest.
Men line up against a back wall that some have taken to calling China Alley. A derogatory term, really. One not-so-cleverly coined by muscle-bound white queens to mark the area where some of the “less desirable” men gather. In this particular case, it’s a place for a third of those who the muscle queens mark as being undesirable when they drunkenly type “no fats, femmes, or Asians need reply” in their personal ads. It’s not racist, they say, just “preference.” But any personal ad that begins with, “I don’t mean to offend anyone,” does specifically just that.
There are names, to be sure, for where the other two thirds go. By now, I’ve heard them all – fat farm, fairy village, take your pick. Sometimes, we joke about them, if only because laughter seems to be the appropriate response to the absurdity of it all. Yet, the mere existence of these dark corners, to where gay men who don’t quite fit the new image of what it means to be gay and male are forced to retreat, betrays the rigid hierarchy of desire that has come to exist in the gay “community.” Men who are pushed into these corners are told, time and again, that they somehow don’t measure up. Once relegated to these margins, they are not free to roam gay spaces. Instead, they must wait patiently on the sidelines, hoping somebody will play sexual tourist.
From their vantage point, in the back of the dimly lit nightclub, they can watch the night’s events unfolding but don’t really take part in them. Instead, these men wait, like cattle at a show, with hopes of winning a prize. They line up in their Sunday best, trying to look nonchalant. They sip slowly from plastic cups filled with watered down liquor, trying to make it last as long as possible. There’s nothing worse than standing alone, doing nothing. At least with a drink in your hand, you’re doing something. If you drink and smoke, you can keep both hands occupied. Sometimes, muscle queens walk by and sneer or laugh. But mostly – and perhaps this is the most degrading of all – they don’t even notice. It’s as if the mere existence of non-white, non-muscular, non-masculine, and non-young men is an inconvenience to be tolerated rather than a rich diversity to be embraced.
Nonetheless, the men on the wall – along with other undesirable men – wait. For most of them, the “prize” is predictable. Not free to choose the most desirable of men, they wait to be chosen. More specifically, they want to be chosen by what every self-respecting gay man is told that they should desire. Some will get lucky, even if it’s only for one night. But most will go home, empty handed, yet again. Hidden in these dark corners, these men are constantly reminded that they are not desirable while those who are deemed worthy of gay desires are constantly put on display to remind them exactly what is.
II. Cartographies of Desire
At first blush, the required props are an odd assortment of thrown together objects. But by now, they have become so ingrained in our collective gay consciousness that they barely register a whisper of curiosity. There, in the middle of the dance floor, long, hard poles jut proudly out of K-Mart variety kiddie-pools while naked torsos gyrate to ear numbing music and uncontrolled spasms of light. As odd as this set-up might seem to outsiders, to those in the know, the props are instantly recognized as the make-shift stage required for the most stable of gay-bar entertainments, the wet underwear contest.
The contestants, too, are an easily recognized bunch. Young, muscular, and overwhelmingly white, they mirror the images found on gay billboards, advertisements, and magazine covers. While the visual image of the contestants represent what is physically desired in the gay community, their actions represent what is desired behaviorally. Contestants flex their muscles, saunter across the stage, thrust into the pole, and proudly display their manhood for the audience to see. The more vivid the masculine display, the bigger the cheers. Here, like in so many other arenas of gay life, masculinity is rewarded while femininity is punished with outright disdain. Masculinity is desired while femininity is not. Sometime between Stonewall and Will and Grace, the gay “community” has become very very butch.
The most cursory glance through gay personal ads makes the emphasis on masculinity blatantly clear. “Straight acting,” is proudly displayed as a marketing tactic while “no femmes” is an equally striking warning to potential suitors that femininity is not desired. In contemporary gay life, men are to be men. In one sweeping swivel of the hips, with a magic flip of the wrist, gay men became the “manliest of men.”
It’s not just that gay men are becoming increasingly attracted to “masculine” men but they are becoming increasingly hostile toward “feminine” men. Websites such as straightacting.com that promotes itself as a site for “guys that like sports, change their own car’s oil, or just don’t fit the effeminate stereotypes,” and Lance Bass’ recent claim of being a “straight acting” gay man, are increasingly becoming more common. It’s not just that these guys feel like they don’t fit the “stereotype” – although it might come as a surprise to them that the vast majority of us don’t – but that they are actively denigrating it as something so completely unacceptable to them that they truly believe that somehow, being “straight acting” makes them better than the rest of us. From a blatantly heterosexist perspective, if you can’t be one, at least you can act like one. Bass may not be straight, but he plays one on Broadway.
But masculinity never exists in a vacuum. Nor is it simply a state of being. Rather, one is only defined as masculine if others are defined as feminine. More importantly, claiming masculinity is a process. It must be defined, developed, then claimed. But claiming masculinity when you’re having sex with other men is a tricky task. Within the larger social imagery of what it means to be gay, what it means to be a gay man, is immediately equated with men who have failed to make the masculine claim. Gay characters on mainstream television shows are routinely mocked and ridiculed as having somehow failed at being “real” men. No matter how “straight acting” some gay men might think they are, they will never be accepted as “real” men by the mainstream that they so apparently want to embrace.
If gay men are truly to be masculine, what they really need is a feminine “other.” And they don’t have to go far to find one.
III. They Became Men and I Became…
According to social theorist Edward Said, “the orient was almost a European invention, and has been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic being, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences…” But rather than just a way of describing the “Orient,” orientalist discourse also acted as a political vision meant to promote the superiority of the west against all that was east. Perpetuating this mirage of western superiority, orientalist discourse took on a distinctively gendered tone. Hinging on masculine domination of the Orient, Asian bodies, both male and female, were painted with feminine brushstrokes.
Because Asian men have been so thoroughly feminized in the Western imagination, it becomes easy to mark gay Asian men as being the feminine other to the “masculine” white man within the gay community. When presented at all by the supposedly inclusive gay press, gay Asian men are uniformly portrayed as being more feminine than gay white men. Not only are they portrayed as more feminine, they are routinely presented as counter to masculine gay white men. In the briefly aired sitcom Some of My Best Friend, the role of Vern, played by Alec Mapa existed only as a contrast the masculine, and thus supposedly normal, Warren played by Jason Bateman. Likewise, a recent ad by Servicemembers Legal Defense Network urges the U.S. government to “let him serve.” He, of course, is a brave white soldier while his Asian partner can do nothing but offer emotional support. Rather than portrayed as individuals, gay Asian men are presented only as adornments for gay white men who virtually always take the superior position. Within the gay imagination, gay Asian men exist only to validate the masculinity of gay white men.
No where is this more prominent than gay porn. Despite the snickers associated with it, porn has a unique place in gay identity development. For many, if not most, of us, gay porn is the first place where we see ourselves, where we see our desires get validated and expressed. Borrowing a phrase from Stuart Hall, “it is the place we go to discover who we are.” Long before we venture into our first gay club or meet our first gay friends, many of us surreptitiously turn to gay porn. Between the covers, or within the frames, we learn gay desire. And we learn that gay desire is very very white.
It is the white man who is centered. Asian characters, if presented at all, are only included to fulfill white male domination fantasies. Unfortunately, gay Asian men are told that our worth is based almost entirely on our ability to be receptacles for gay white men’s masculine thrusts into our bodies.
The feminization of gay Asian men, and by contrast the masculinization of gay white men, is intimately tied to the growing need, perhaps hunger, for acceptance within some quarters of the gay community by the heterosexual majority. It is part and parcel of the cleansing of the gay community of all that does not mirror the heterosexual norm. Gay publications harp on incessantly about our purchasing power, gay activists push for marriage recognition as if the goal of all gay men (and women) should be to mimic heterosexuals and their institutions. The face of gay America, one so intimately cultivated by too many gay activists, is one of heterosexual normality – with one minor exception. Somehow, we went from demanding recognition for our differences to begging for tolerance. According to this new strategy of gaining acceptance, “they” (the rarely blamed, but often alluded to, heterosexuals) should, pretty please, accept us because “we” (the rarely named, but often alluded to, “straight-acting” gays) are just like them. To show just how much we are like them, we, the collective we, support legislation that exclude those of us that they find shameful or embarrassing. We tell them that we, again the collective, need to make sacrifices for the larger goal. Why should the larger goal be for some of us to have equality but not others? More importantly, why should only some of us make these sacrifices? Interestingly enough, those of us making sacrifices are always those of us who have adamantly opposed the “mainstreaming” of the gay community. For some of us, the opposition is due to the rapidly declining visibility of the gay community. Others simply can not fit the heterosexual mold.
My critique is not that we are making sacrifices for the larger goal. Certainly, victories come in spurts and fits. My issue is that those who are becoming more “acceptable” to heterosexual America, and therefore appear to be gaining more ground, are doing so at the expense of the rest of us.
IV. The Fallout
None of this would be problematic if the gay community didn’t idealize and objectify masculinity while simultaneously denigrating femininity. Nor would it be problematic if “straight acting” gay men weren’t using their supposed masculinity to draw distinctions between those of us who, according to them, are “normal” and those of us who they believe are not.
People can prefer whatever damn thing they want to, that is, after all, well within their rights. Not being sexually attracted to women doesn’t make me a sexist. And not being attracted to Asian men doesn’t make a gay white man a racist. But blanket statements and widely held beliefs about Asian men being undesirable sexual partners depend on racist notions of superiority and inferiority. Also, the marginalization of gay Asian men within the larger gay community is intimately tied to the objectification of masculinity and placing it in a supposedly superior position to femininity. For gay white men, claiming masculinity requires an ability to shift femininity onto someone else. Doing so comes at the expense of gay Asian men. Using gay Asian men to make gay white men more masculine, while simultaneously reinforcing the notion that all things masculine are superior to all things feminine, is a racist practice.
The problem is that gay white men have become “men” at my expense. In their quest to prove themselves to be masculine in order to acquire some semblance of heterosexual privilege, they’ve actively denigrated men who look like me. In doing so, they push me – and other gay Asian men – to the very distant most margins of the gay community, to places like China Alley where we are told that our role is to wait to be chosen by a white man. Rather than participants, we become spectators to gay life.
For gay Asian men, there are larger psychological consequences. For them, sexual desire almost always revolves around masculine, “straight-acting” white men. Sadly, we strive for the attention of the very same white men who mark us as being completely void of value. Rather than joining together, we see ourselves as competitors for the few “rice queens” who further marginalize us. Like white men, we marginalize other gay Asian men. Our own fantasies and our own desires are also wrapped up in the images that the gay community feeds us as being the only appropriate and acceptable images. Standing in China Alley, we look outward for potential sexual partners rather than looking inward at the other men on the wall.
Gay men – white, black, Latino, Asian and otherwise – aren’t the only ones to blame for this, of course. Masculinity is the mechanism by which straight white men maintain both racial and gender domination. But as gay men, as men who are marginalized and denigrated by others, shouldn’t we rise above this? Gay white men who promote the “straight-acting” narrative would be wise to recognize that they are simply feeding into the hierarchy of masculine domination, the very same hierarchy that defines heterosexuality as normal and homosexuality as anything but. Rather than win acceptance for themselves by cloaking themselves in masculine posturing, they are simply propping the hierarchy that relegates them to second-class status in the first place.
For gay Asian men, the struggle may be different. We, as both racial and sexual minorities, may have little power to change the social arrangements that continue to mark us as inferior. Yet at the same time, have we completely given up? When we look at other Asian men and think that they are not attractive, what are we thinking of our own reflections? After accepting ourselves as gay men, are we so eager to displace our race? We can begin to look inward rather than outward and begin by expanding our own sexual narratives to include each other in our sexual and emotional fantasies. Only when we find value within ourselves and among ourselves will we be able to demand that others see what we are worth.
After all this time, after being bombarded with images that tell us that we don’t quite measure up, it will be difficult to pull ourselves off the wall. That first step is the hardest.
