By, Eric
Wat
Reprinted with Permission by the author.
A few years ago when I was working on a book , I spent a lot of time at home alone. To break up the monotony of academic hermitdom, I started to do some Internet dating. It was online that I met this Vietnamese guy whom we'll call Kevin. He was between jobs, and, like me, had a lot of free time during the day. Kevin came over one afternoon, and I took him to lunch at Sanamluang, a Thai restaurant in Hollywood where many gay Asian men had been hanging out for years after hours. (It was across the street from Ming's Dynasty, another landmark--and one of the few surviving ones--of local gay Asian history.)
Kevin revealed many things in the course of eating. He and his friends--mostly other first-generation Vietnamese immigrants--attended Micky's bar in West Hollywood religiously on Saturday nights, when it was sort of the unofficial "Asian" nights there at the time. He preferred white men and hadn't been with "too many" Asian men, which I took to mean none at all. And he had taken out the personal ad, the same one that I replied to, once before. The first time, he said, he hadn't written back to any respondents. He'd only wanted to see how "marketable" he might be.
Everything seemed to be indicating that nothing but a cold shower would be awaiting me at home. I was pulling up to the curb outside of my apartment, just grateful for an hour of company, when he asked, "Should I come up?"
"Sure," I said, trying not to get my hopes up.
We made out on the couch for five minutes before he asked to see my bed.
We continued to see each other in the next two months. Perhaps as an index of comfort with me, he started dropping Cantonese words here and there in our conversations, since he knew I both spoke and understood it. The second time he came over, after we had sex and were lying on my bed, he told me that I should not tell anyone about us. I thought he meant "anyone" in his family, since I would call him sometimes at home to make arrangements for our rendezvous.
"No, I mean anyone," he stressed.
"Who would I tell?" I was a little surprised because he was not a closet case. A few people in his family even knew he was gay. He gave me an example: "If you run into me at Micky's with my friends, you can't say anything about this to them. They can't know I'm sleeping with you."
If I were prone to self-pitying, I would think this had something to do with me. Certainly, his friends would not think any less of him if they found out he was sleeping with another guy. But sleeping with another Asian guy, I realized, was another story. He had a reputation to maintain.
The next time we got together, he asked me if I had any racial preference. Not really, I said, though I preferred to date men of color. Still, he suggested that I give this friend of his, a white man in his 40s, a try. I didn't take him seriously, but he insisted on setting up a blind date for us. His eagerness made me feel as if he was unloading an old couch on me. I said yes so that we could move onto the business at hand. In a silly way, I thought I could keep seeing Kevin if I agreed to go on this date with his friend, and the bored, pathetic part of me wanted to keep seeing him. Besides, blind dates always intrigue me. It is the one time I don't have to explain my awkwardness. In fact, with the expectations that people on blind dates should be awkward, I tend to be much more relaxed and charming.
Then he warned me, "But you can't tell him we've been sleeping together."
On the date, the white guy asked me how I knew our mutual friend. I lied and said we met at Micky's. We ate at a sushi joint and talked about ourselves. He was a nice enough guy, though it was apparent (to me) that we had no chemistry. The whole thing felt like a job interview. He did buy dinner, though, which despite my effort to go dutch, set up the possibility of a subsequent date.
The next day, I got a call from Kevin, which was what I wanted. He asked about the date and tried to convince me to go out with his friend again. I declined. So he came over instead.
Coincidentally, my relationship with Kevin was unfolding as I continued to work on my book about the history of the gay Asian community in Los Angeles, a subject I'd been interested in for some time.
I came out in my late teens in East Los Angeles among Latino friends. Then, in my last years of college, I became active with the queer Asian Pacific student group on campus. Still, I knew nothing of queer Asian Pacific Islander heritage. There had to be gay Asian men before my generation who were out and proud, right?
I had always been very critical of the images that were fed to us in the gay community. I thought that if I could "dig up" the stories of API gay men, they could then be used as historical evidence to the monolithic cloning of the gay community, and expose the illusion of male beauty as invariably white.
It is in this spirit that I started looking for these gay Asian pioneers and their stories, which turned out not to be as vexing an archeological exercise as I thought. In the process of interviewing these men, the issue of relationships came up. Before the 1980s, many of them said, two Asian men dating each other was a rare occurrence. If they had an Asian partner at the time, both of them would be derided as "lesbians." Two gay Asian men getting together, they said, was just like two women having sex: Who would do the penetrating?
This, to me, was a legacy of years of "racial profiling," so to speak, in the bar scene, leading up to generations of self-fulfilling prophecies. Asian-Asian love is not natural, the corollary of which was that every Asian man needs a white man.
I am not a prude. I believe in free love. And I am not so militant to think that every white-Asian relationship is problematic. I am troubled, though, by the limited options prescribed for us Asians. (I mean, shouldn't I reject on principles alone any philosophy that shrinks my already small dating pool?)
All the gay Asian men I talked to who had subscribed to this racial hierarchy remembered a time in their childhood or adolescence when they were infatuated with or attracted to other Asian men. This was not surprising. Some of them were immigrants who came from countries where Asians made up the majority, and others were born here but had lived in racially segregated neighborhoods.
Interestingly, it seemed to me that the memories of this attraction were cleanly erased only after they became active in the gay community. If you look at the kind of men we continue to celebrate (white and muscular), you get a sense of why the problem persists.
Less than a decade ago, the Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team started a safer-sex campaign called "Love Your Asian Body." The images they used were of Asian-Asian eroticism. These representations were validating to some of us, and shocking to others. In the most visible way ever, this campaign countered years of assumptions that Asians who love other Asians are the exceptions, the freaks (and not in a good way).
Clearly, this was the case with Kevin. Although he enjoyed the company of other Asian men, this reality had to be denied in public. To accommodate Kevin, I had been devious and gone so far as dating another man for his sake. I didn't feel good about what I had done.
As for Kevin, our encounter was fleeting because he didn't think our intimacy could be possible or lasting.
The idea of two Asians in that kind of intimate relationship was just too weird to him. We were the exceptions, the "freaks," even though there is a vast history that connects him and me.
Every year, Los Angeles proclaims May as Asian Pacific American Heritage
Month, but heritage should be more than just a celebration of the past. Just
as the "Love Your Asian Body" campaign unearthed a bold freedom to love as
we want, heritage should be our anchor for imagination, for a vision of what
is possible in our lives to come.
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