“I’ve never had an Asian,” said another as he pulled me toward him. I pulled away and fled home, too tired to explain why. But we also use it in the context of racial fetishism, that empty flattery that casts people of color as curiosities and turns us into trophies, making it tough for us to trust anyone’s affection.Ĭase in point: “I love Chinese food,” whispered a beautiful white man after we had made out at a Manhattan gay bar. We use it to refer to the benign passion people have for leather or lingerie, feet or earlobes, a love for certain inanimate objects or body parts. We either get the racist “no Asians” or “no rice” cold shoulder, or we get fawning treatment that can feel worse - yellow fever, the dreaded Asian fetish. But my status as a triple minority felt like a sick joke, a death sentence.Īfter all, on gay dating apps, East Asians routinely face dehumanization that reduces us to nothing more than featureless clones in the eyes of others. I would be “acceptable” in one of the crucial ways of being acceptable in America. If I were heterosexual or white, I could come out of the kinky closet - a “second” closet - and find a way. That’s why I begged a God I had long stopped believing in for help. Foreign desires stirred in me that felt icky, perverse and unmentionable, far beyond the pale of the better-known indecencies that were condemned from the pulpits of my Colorado hometown.
I yearned to have the privileges of being either heterosexual or white because I wasn’t just gay and Asian I was kinky too.
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