[Vol. 26] “No Asians, Sorry”
The gay community didn't fire the gun, but did its racist rhetoric help load it?
Welcome back to That’s Gay, a candidly queer newsletter for a candidly queer world (cheers to that 😉 🥂), written by me, Till Kaeslin.
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You couldn’t have logged into any social media over the past few days without seeing “#stopasianhate” somewhere – that or some iteration of it, sparked by yet another anti-Asian hate crime in America.
Except this time, it was a shooting spree.
As I’m sure you know by now, a 21-year-old white gunman entered three different spas in the Atlanta area Tuesday evening, slaying 8 people total, 6 of which were women of Asian descent.
As tragic as this event was, unfortunately it follows a trend. After examining hate crimes in 16 of America’s largest cities (via local police department data), the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, found that anti-Asian hate crimes have increased by 149% over the last year. According to their findings, the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism reports the first spike in this trend occurred in March and April, “amidst a rise in COVID cases and negative stereotyping of Asians relating to the pandemic.”
But that figure was just an average of the 16 cities. It looks worse, if you can believe it, depending on where you look. New York City, for example, has seen an 833% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in 2020.
So, what does this tragic news and worrying trend have to do with the gays?
A lot more than you’d think, I think.
When we talk about “who done it” – what person, group of people, or community that’s at fault for some hateful act – I think we often forget that hate can only survive if the whole ecosystem allows it.
So we blame the guy who fired the gun and we move on – obviously he’s to blame, don’t get me wrong, but he’s not the only one. We don’t like to think of these things as systemic issues because then the problem becomes insurmountable; we pick out the bad apples over inspecting the entire orchard because the process of removing “a few bad apples” makes us feel less at fault.
Most of all, we don’t like to point the finger at other minority groups because, just like inspecting the whole orchard, it’s awfully uncomfortable.
But that’s life – amidst all the good times, life is a series of uncomfortable things you just have to do as an adult. No one wants to go grocery shopping on a busy Sunday, or carry their heavy-ass, overflowing laundry hamper to the janky laundry mat down the street on a Tuesday evening, but sometimes you just need an onion for that recipe or a pair of clean underwear to wear on that date.
So let’s get uncomfy.
The LGBTQ+ part of the apple orchard is festering with anti-Asian hate, and it’s been allowed to fester for far too long.
There it is.
I think that whether we talk about it openly or not, we’re all sizing ourselves up when we enter a bar (ooh, throwback!) or open a dating app.
We do mental calculations of who we can approach without the fear of rejection and who’s “out of our league” almost automatically. We know who – if they decided to shoot us a message – we’d respond to and who we probably wouldn’t.
As much as we don’t like to talk about these things, I think we all know them. Case and point: No one has to teach you how to swipe on an app like Tinder. Sure, you might be a little rusty with your lefts and rights when it’s all shiny and new, but you know when and how to say yes and no.
We especially don’t like to talk about these things when it comes to race.
And yes, race still plays a role here.
Unlike so many of my LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters, “queer” is my only minority identity. I’m not at a minority intersection, and so I’ve been deemed more desirable in – and move more freely through – the mainstream, white gay world that has copied its social ladder from the greater world it exists within: a world in which white male-passing people can have their cake and eat it too.
Yes, this is obviously changing (and thank god for it) but not as fast or as organically as some people might think.
The fact that I can look back at my own experience on dating apps and remember seeing bios to the likes of “no fats, no fems, no Asians” written under profile pictures of obviously-flexing-too-hard, muscle-y gay white men is evidence enough. It was as if they were setting the standard of what was acceptable without ever questioning their power to set a standard at all.
As is written in an article I found in The Guardian, No Asians, no black people. Why do gay people tolerate blatant racism?, “The rainbow flag is whiter than it appears.”
If our social ladder was pulled from the greater cis, straight society’s handbook, then the fate for Asian-descended gays is easy to assume: they’ve been, and continue to be, desexualized.
As usual, Hollywood is a prime example.
There’s just no way to avoid these issues when you throw em’ up on the big screen.
Lee Doud, a gay, half-Chinese, half-Caucasian (mostly German) actor, shed light on this for me in an op-ed he wrote for The Advocate in 2018 titled, The Gay Community's Fear and Loathing of Asian Men Must End.
^ The headline was on point.
“I believe that sexual racism exists,” Doud wrote. “Those who are writing “not into Asians” on their profiles aren’t necessarily mistreating Asians in their day-to-day lives, but there must be something else that lies beneath the surface, subconscious and dormant. Again, I’m not telling you that you can’t have a type, but I want to question where this “type” stems from.”
^ The content of the article was also on point.
Disinterest, penis size, and fetishization.
In his op-ed, Doud highlighted everything I (and I’d say most gay guys) were already aware of on gay, highly-hook-up-driven dating apps like Grindr.
He would read “no Asians” in guys’ bios before even talking to them. He was asked about which half of his body was Asian and which half was white – AKA, “how big’s your penis?”. He’s been told “you’re the first Asian guy I’ve ever been attracted to”, which, as he wrote, “ … stings in ways that most can’t comprehend. As if I’m supposed to feel honored and grateful that I’ve somehow become the exception to an unspoken rule.”
The saddest part of it all is, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was still getting these messages today.
No, the gay community’s “sexual racism” against gay Asian men didn’t fire that gun on Tuesday; it didn’t kill those 6 Asian-descended women just doing their jobs.
But are the two entirely unconnected? I don’t think so.
Doud may have called it “sexual racism” in his op-ed, but he makes no illusions of this subcategory of racism being any different than the tree it fell from.
“Excluding an entire group of people by calling out a specific race is the absolute definition of racism. Plain and simple,” Doud wrote.
Sexual racism is racism, and racism is born of disrespect; of loathing; of hate.
Hate, when it reaches its boiling point – when it’s allowed to reach its boiling point – inevitably leads to violence.
So no, I don’t think the shooting in Atlanta this week or the rise in hate crimes against Asian-descended people in this country over the last year can be entirely separated from the decades of Asian discrimination in the gay community. There’s just no way to make a clean cut there.
Hate is a virus.
There’s been a post going around recently (or several, I should say) of Asian people of color holding signs that read something to the effect of, “hate is a virus,” equating their discrimination to the Coronavirus that Asian people are being unjustly blamed and attacked for.
If hate is a virus, then why don’t we treat it like one?
Why don’t we check in with ourselves, on a regular basis, just to make sure we haven’t been infected; that we’re not passing it onto our loved ones and inadvertently killing those who we don’t even know?
I know it sounds cheesy, but it makes sense, no? If we don’t have a vaccine or mask-wearing protocol for the kind of virus we’re talking about here, then we owe it to ourselves and our communities to do regular introspection and call out the people that aren’t.
Full disclosure: I ended up stalking Doud on social media.
I know, sounds creepy but he’s a cute gay guy and sometimes I can’t help but do a little digging (blame the journalist in me, or the gay in me – either works).
Anyways, long story short I found his twitter and his last retweet really got to me. I figured there’s no better way to end this article then with that tweet because really, it says it all.
Today’s discussion Q:
How can we best check ourselves for our own biases and hate?
I’ll answer my own question below. Let me know what you think! As always, I’ll be reading/responding to all.
And that was That’s Gay, Volume 26. See you in Volume 27, folks!
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I wanted to post this question – challenging as it is to answer – because I feel like articles like these often end with "we need to do something!" without any clear to do.
Then you go to write an article like this and realize that a clear to do doesn't exist. If it did, we'd surely all be doing it.
So instead, I open it up to discussion. No it's not as clear, but maybe that's the point.
I think we need to keep talking about hate in our communities, whichever communities you consider yourself a part of. We have to share the experiences that make our friends pause and say, "... wait ... that's fucked up." The more we do this, I think, the more we rewire the brains of ours that learned to accept that disrespect and hate were just things we had to deal with – and deal with silently.
Having these conversations also checks our own biases too. Doud, for example, telling me in his article to consider why I have the preferences I say I have has been one in a series of moments that have poked and prodded me to really reevaluate why I swipe, date, and talk about guys the way I do.
If you think you're exempt, you're not. It's time to discuss.