My intrinsic bottomhood, though, was most evident in the only depictions of gay Asian men available to me at the time: the dizzying, electrifying, and often dismal galaxy of online porn. Of course this was coded in nearly every form of popular culture, that East Asian men, even the straight ones, are failed men. A fact as American as apple pie: I was neutered both sexually and socially. I didn’t learn the joke so much as absorb it like osmosis through the pores of my skin. The person I was talking to was white, by the way, and looking back I suspect I was also looking for his approval, positioning myself as someone who, with a self-incriminating wink, was in on the joke. But my intended point was a conviction I casually perpetuated as an irrefutable fact: that all gay Asian men are bottoms.Īt the time, it didn’t matter that I lacked any of the sexual experiences necessary to determine whether or not I even liked getting fucked. This line came with a horrifying cliff of subtext - the reducing of queer female desire, the presumption that my roommate was a bottom (he’s not), the conflation of sexual roles and the function of relationships.
But ten years later it’s something I think about. It was a stupid throwaway line - self-hatred masquerading as gay party banter. One time, at a party in college, someone asked me if I was dating my roommate, a close friend who happened to be, like me, Asian.
