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.
