“I think for me, it's about not only the racial diversity, but the genre diversity. “That kind of casual diversity really did affect how my real world tastes began to shape,” he says. When he got to college, stumbling onto videos featuring black and Latino men under tabs like “BDSM,” “Military,” and “Tattoo” helped expand his desire. “It's not exactly a revelation to say that for a while, white with an athletic build and forgettable faces became sort of the baseline for what I was into as my sexual desires began to form,” he says. He was 13 or 14 then, but to this day, the 29-year-old remembers one model named Chip.
Online, the first porn he consumed after “famously dabbling in Pokémon erotica” was from a site called Straight College Men, which mostly featured toned white Adonis types. “I think my tastes were definitely shaped by Baywatch and gay porn in tandem,” he says. Joel grew up in an adopted white family, in a predominately white suburb just outside of Chicago. I didn't specifically seek out Asian porn for a while after that.” “Everyone was wearing gas masks and all the dicks were pixelated. “No shade to my friends who may be into this, but it was so weird,” says the Korean-American comedian and writer. The first time Joel Kim Booster remembers seeing gay Asian men in porn was in college, when an internet search roped him into the esoteric realm of Japanese imports. Gay Asian displays of sexual dominance are so rarified that last year the podcast Nancy dedicated nearly an entire episode to Brandon Lee, porn’s “first Asian top,” who is viewed as a kind of sexual unicorn. (We had dial up then.) But the images of the early aughts have largely endured: gay Asian men exoticized as objects of servitude for the pleasure of mostly white tops. I was a teenager in the early 2000s, a bygone era of pornography. Tumblr’s ban on adult content, effective today, feels particularly devastating-it was one of the few spaces where Asian men could see themselves depicted with any sort of sexual agency, even doing the unimaginable: topping. 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.