Adding the discourse of sexual racism—though this piece never uses this term—is this interview with The Henry, a self-described “hairy Asian muscle panda,” at theyreallsobeautiful.com.

In addressing the prevalent, “No fats, no femmes, no Asians” on online profiles, The Henry connects the problem with identifying racial preferences in the historical context of racial discrimination. He says:

Baby Asian gays see this sort of “no Asian” stuff on gay profiles so early in their unsure gay lives… how do they feel as they get into their gay adult lives? Fucked up! So you’re not responsible for racism because it’s a physical “preference,” but to state it in a way that makes baby Asian gays feel bad about themselves is awful.  White people during the Civil Rights Era did not “want” black people in their businesses. Did that make it ok to put up signs that said “No Blacks”?  It’s just a preference right?  People would post those signs. Signs that make young black kids feel unacceptable to your place of business.  Fine for those people to feel that way about black people but you don’t have a right to put up that sign. It is “racist” yes, but the real problem is in how it affects the victims of something under the auspices of preference.  So your stated “preference” on your gay profile makes it so you get what you want, but it may as well be a “no blacks allowed” sign as far as baby gay Asians are concerned.  Whether it’s racist or not? I don’t really care. It bothers me that it makes baby Asian gays feel undesirable because of their ethnicity. That’s just criminal.

Read more of the interview here and to revisit my piece on sexual racism in MetroWeekly, check it out here.

South China Morning Post reports that parents of over 100 Chinese gays and lesbians have written an open letter to the National People’s Congress demanding marriage equality for the nation’s gays and lesbians. 

Below is the letter (in Simplified Chinese):

百余位同性恋者的父母致信全国人大代表

      呼吁同性婚姻立法的公开信

尊敬的全国人大代表您好！

   

    我们来自五湖四海，我们的孩子是同性恋者，我们被称为“同志父母”，我们的孩子因为同性倾向原因，无法与相爱的人合法组成家庭，结为“夫夫或妇妇”，给生活和就医等诸多方面带来不便。

 

    按照社会学常识，同性恋者约占总人口的3-5%，照此推算，中国约有6000万同性恋者，他们因为现行的《婚姻法》规定只能一男一女结合，而被排斥在婚姻殿堂之外。我们的孩子有些跟同性伴侣已生活了近10年，他们相互照应，相亲相爱，却不能在另一伴生病需要手术时合法签字。身为同性恋者的家长，我们时常感到焦虑，因为不能合法结婚，我们孩子在领养下一代、生病手术签字、继承伴侣财产、甚至买房等各方面都受到不同程度的影响。

    匪夷所思的是，我们的同性恋孩子尽管不爱异性，却拥有合法与异性结婚的权利。众所周知，同性恋与异性结婚，造成“同妻”、“同夫”等严重的社会问题，也让更多的人生活不幸福。难道我们的法律是要鼓励同性恋与异性结婚吗？

 

    另外，同性恋并不违反任何现行的中国法律，同性恋者是具有各项权利的中华人民共和国公民，同性恋者的结婚权利不能长期被剥夺。

 

    我们恳请全国人大代表和政协委员们给予关注，倾听1.2亿“同志家长”的心声，体恤6000万同性恋者对平等和尊严的渴盼，呼吁尽早修改《婚姻法》，让中国6000万同性恋公民拥有平等的婚姻权。

 

    感谢您在百忙之中关注此事，并祝工作愉快，身体健康！

 

    此致

 

    敬礼！                          

                          同性恋亲友会家长群部分家长

                                   2013年2月25日

“The Pink Choice”

“The Pink Choice” is a photo series by photographer Maika Elan who captured the lives of homosexual couples in Vietnam. She states on her website:

More noteworthy are those many (both gay and lesbians) who choose to live together openly as couples. Thereon poses questions about their private lives: How do they live together? How do they express their emotions towards each other? What is interesting about their lives? Those questions, however, have remained great taboos. People avoid asking them, avoid investigating them, and even be scared of the possible answers… Starting from my own curiosity, my own confusion and my own motivation, as well as my insights into homosexuals’ lives that I myself had a chance to witness, I wholeheartedly carried out this project: a photography document about homosexual couples’ daily activities and their private moments (called THE PINK CHOICE). I want to tell the story by going into the great depth of love and intimacy. I want to avoid stereotypes of homosexuality. I also want to avoid the tabloid/shocking news style. I want to show simply how they care and love each other in daily activities. More strongly, I want to show that their loving and caring for each other is nothing deviant. They are all normal and natural behaviors, attitudes, thoughts and emotions. Love is beautiful, and we can only claim ourselves supportive of homosexuality when we accept their love - and see it beautiful as it naturally is!

Above: Hung chooses music on his computer while Ngan, his boyfriend of six years, relaxes on the bed.

Photo Credit: Maika Elan/MoST

+ images here

gaysianproblems:

Looking for gaysian role models who aren’t comedians…

Let us not neglect that fact that gaysian role models don’t have to be ones you see on telly or the comedy club. Nor do excellent role models need to be gay. We have family, friends, teachers, etc. who live their lives in a dignified way that we gaysians should aspire to. That said, let us also not be passive in find great gaysian role models. There gaysians in all manner of professions who can mentor you as your navigate this world.

So for my young gaysian brothers and sisters, don’t be afraid to reach out, even to me if you like. 

Sexy Japanese Safer Sex Video parodies “Little Drummer Boy”

Little Taiko Boy combines Western holiday traditions, Shinto mythology and Japanese gay culture to advocate a very different way of wrapping gifts for a loved one.

Little Taiko Boy’s soundtrack is a safer-sex parody of the American Christmas carol “The Little Drummer Boy” interspersed with the slow rumble of a traditional Japanese taiko drum that sounds like a massive throbbing heart beat. Against this backdrop, several men meet in Tokyo’s bathhouses, love hotels and cruising spots for intimate encounters, watched over by a glamorous drag version of Amaterasu Omikami, the Shinto goddess of the Sun played by Japanese activist and artist MADAME BONJOUR JOHNJ. Like a queer Santa Claus, the goddess leaves each couple a condom in a bejeweled wrapper as a gift and blessing for the night.

+ here

by Daniel W.K. Lee

Another version of this essay was published in the September 23, 2010 issue of MetroWeekly under the title “Don’t Ask, Just Tell.” Below is the complete version.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the gay community’s commitment to New Left principles (that was the soil from which the Gay Liberation movement emerged) would splinter as gays became more mainstream—or perhaps more specifically—became visible in mass media and a coveted consumer market. As a whole, we gays have come to take our politics for granted: by and large, no longer are we street protesters and meeting organizers; instead, we do our activism through consumerism (buy this to support this and that cause), or use the Internet as a gay rights echo chamber (tweet one’s way to the “activist” moniker). Moreover, the gay political battlefield has never looked more strange than it does now with not just the usual Left forces and the Log Cabin Republicans, but also those stranger-than-strange gay teapartiers and über-Conservatives like those at GOProud, who openly embraced the racial scapegoating, classism, patriarchy, war-mongering, (basically all the things gay liberationists set out to end), and their pundits (Ann Coulter for one). But gay Conservatives aren’t the only ones who have internalized and then externalized the racism, misogyny, and militarism antithetical to our movement’s New Left roots; the “gay mainstream” has done so too in two very different ways.

First, it might be surprising to some, or many, to see our fight against “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”—which once repealed, would give LGB (no “T” here because nowhere do we talk about transgender people in the military in discussions regarding DADT) the ability to serve in the military openly has the same-sex-lovin’ homos and bisexuals that they are—would probably not have been of much interest in our political forefathers of the late Sixties and early Seventies. To them, DADT would have been a short-sighted battle for a right that supports militarism. We cannot fool ourselves into thinking that letting LGB’s openly serve will transform the military as a site of contempt for the feminine in men and the masculine in women. Serving openly won’t transform gender in the military anymore than out gays and lesbians have revolutionized in Western civil society; that is to say, gender deviation is still gender deviation, and not a socially acceptable expression of one’s place on the gender continuum. On the contrary, traditional gender norms are further legitimized with our rubber stamp in our current battle for our right to kill with fatigues on. Which leads to another reason why repeal of DADT isn’t as progressive as we’d like to think: anti-war, peace-loving progressive impulses must somehow be reconciled with the liberty to participate in the military-industrial complex and war machine and the occupation of foreign lands, military abuses and war crimes, and the billions of dollars funneled into “defense” at the expense of building a better American society.

Second, and perhaps more insidious, is how gays, specifically gay men, have unapologetically become sexual racists, gender purists, and enforcers of a gay male body culture (that is on par with the oppressive beauty myth that women have had to deal with for decades) as manifested in the phrase, “No fats, No femmes, No Asians.” We gay men have seen it, or used it (or a variation of it) in endless personal profiles, but nonetheless, the disqualifying mantra is the un-critical acceptance of racial, gender, and body-biases often “naturalized” or rationalized with the subsequent phrase, “Just a preference.”

But it isn’t “just a preference,” because why one is attracted to what one is attracted to wasn’t written into his DNA, nor has he lived in a social vacuum since the day of his birth. We come to our desires because of a profound socialization process. People are taught to value one thing over another throughout our early lives. When parents say things like, “Boys don’t cry,” “Good is in the light, and evil in the dark,” or when you are habitually exposed to certain kinds of bodies deemed attractive, the messages a person receives from those cues are internalized. How our brain negotiates those messages is part of the process of forming our “preferences.” A “preference” for “straight-acting” men is not like Athena bursting out of Zeus’s brain: it emerges in part because of how you evaluated femininity – its meanings, its associations and how one has eroticized and associated body-types and behaviors with masculinity or “straight-acting-ness.” Likewise, racial preferences aren’t in-born. They are formed and entangled with associations about gender, body-type, and behaviors that have been racialized and evaluated.

I once challenged a guy who told me he wasn’t into Asian men. I asked him why was that? He said was more into beefier men. I said, there are many beefy Asian and especially Pacific Islander men. He said he liked hairy men. Certainly a bit more difficult to find, but there are hairier Asian men out there who are also beefy. So why make a blanket disqualifying statement like “I’m not attracted to Asian men” based on racialized assumptions on Asian male bodies when more accurately, his preference is toward hairy and beefy men. To say, “No Asians” would foreclose the possibility of finding a hairy, beefy, Asian man that one could really find attractive.  The absolute refusal to deconstruct those racial biases and to declare “No Asians,” “No Blacks,” or whomever is sexual racism, and so many gays looking for love or a hook up aren’t even embarrassed about it.

Gaysian men ourselves are not impervious to the self-contempt that would allow us also write, “No Asians. I’m not sticky*” on our profiles. I have heard so many gay Asian men express total mortification to the idea of dating or having sex with another Asian man, and also declare their almost exclusive desire for white men is “just a preference.” Again, it isn’t and it’s to our own detriment to not question why one has dismissed entire racial groups from romantic and sexual possibilities. We gaysians cannot bemoan our exclusion from the territories of “hot gayness” if we practice the same kinds of sexual-racial exclusions.

Our sexuality and our sexual desires are not static. Someone who claims to only be into “butch” men could very well find himself unbearably attracted to a more effeminate man. Perhaps not as feasible, but not impossible. And that’s the point: it isn’t impossible, so why go shutting out the possibilities with inane, broad stroke disqualifiers?

Above all though, this is a call to re-align our politics and our personal lives.  It is hypocritical to say one is totally against racial or gender discrimination meanwhile your Manhunt profile says, “Be a man. If I wanted to be with a woman, I’d be with a real woman” or “No Black men. Just a preference.” But if you’re an unabashed racist, a femininity-hater, or a body fascist, then be my guest and declare all your prohibitions. Just don’t be shocked if you’re called out for being an asshole.


*“sticky” refers to the term “sticky rice,” which is when two queer Asian men get together.

(Above, Gay Power graffiti in Washington Square Park, 1970. Photo credit: Ellen Shumsky)

From 50 to 1,500: Korea Queer Culture Festival turns 10

Margaret Cho once joked about how her mother would say there were gay people everywhere in the world - except for Korea. Well, it’s been at least 10 years that South Koreans have been celebrated Queer Korean culture on the streets of Seoul. Fridae.com’s Matt Kelley reports on the 10th anniversary of the Korea Queer Culture Festival this past weekend, showing how the vibrant community flourishes in conservative South Korea.

On Saturday, an estimated 1,500 people marched along the Cheonggye Stream in downtown Seoul. The main event of the 10th annual Korea Queer Culture Festival (KQCF) marked South Korea’s largest-ever celebration of homosexuality. The procession was led by a troupe of pungmul folk musicians and three trucks outfitted with rainbow flags, dance platforms and speakers playing Korean pop. Locals wearing “God made Queer” buttons marched with foreign English teachers and teen boys donning mouse ears and pleated skirts.

The 15-day event kicked off on May 30 with a photo exhibition and an event organised by the queer youth group, Rateen. From June 3-7, the Seoul LGBT Film Festival (SeLFF) screened 29 feature films, documentaries and short films at the Seoul Art Cinema. Following Saturday’s parade, an after party at Club Pulse in Itaewon lasted well into Sunday morning.