Intimography, Peopleography, Pornography

Astrology
If you ever catch me reading on the internet for hours on end, I'm probably something about astrology. I never get bored of it. Honestly, I don't think I have the mathematical ability to ever be a full fledged economist, but if I ever were one, I'd love to say something along the lines of "Pluto is square with Mercury, indicating increased corruption in the financial sector during the first quarter. This influence, combined with blahblahblah..something about policy lags in monetary policy... indicates rocky times ahead! " on national television. I'd do it just once though, to save my credibility. Okay, maybe twice.

In any case, one day I was looking through a particularly interesting "kinky astrology" website. Complete with its yahoo! geocities address and midi format background music (how 1994!) it was decidedly amateurish. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it greatly. Especially that part about Libran men being porn addicts, with their curious minds that think about sex a lot but don't spend half the time actually doing anything about it.

Now I'll also openly admit to a love of pornography. Aside from astrological analyses, it's the other thing that'll get me spending hours on end surfing the internetz. Thankfully I definitely haven't hit "guru" or "addict" status, but I do know where to get my daily stash.

You could say that I'm part of the "internet generation" of gays.

At age seven, with my father's instruction, I was writing easy programs in Qbasic. (Truth be told, I wanted to be like Natalya Siminova from Goldeneye. She was damn cool, and she was the first Bond girl I saw that had some real brains. And she had a cool Russian accent). I got my first America Online account in 1997. Oh and how my fascination with the world grew.

I was around 9 when the 4th grade girls in my elementary school in Plano, TX got the opportunity to see the now-infamous "pancake video". All the boys were sent outside for a second recess lasting about 45 minutes, and we were told that we weren't "mature" enough to see the video. I fumed for almost all of the 45 minutes, saying "Hey, I'm pretty mature!".
And indeed I was. At the time I was lucky enough to have overcome the (first) bulk of the racism and the elementary-school bullying I recieved when I first moved to Texas. I was fairly well-liked by my classmates, and I was happy. I quietly did my homework right when I came home, performed well in class, and I was my homeroom teacher's favorite.

Being told that I wasn't "mature" enough thus started a long-standing rebellion against the "prohibition of access". I never relented, instead using my powers of gossip and small-talk (still worthy weapons today) to wheedle the information out all the girls. By age 12, I was well prepared to watch our version of the video. And so began a life-long love of information, dirty words and drawings of the male body.

Suddenly a part of my body that had been mostly ignored (except on trips to the washroom) became the subject of study, of fascination, of mystery. Eventually internet searches on "puberty" became searches on "penises", "penises" became "masturbation", "masturbation" became "jacking off". Eventually I hit up on things like homosexuality. And then, I moved on to full-fledged hardcore pornography. Though at the time I honestly think I was just fascinated by my own body rather than the bodies of others, these experiences played a pivotal role in my sexual development.
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Pornography

I'll venture to say that the majority of gay men of the internet generation grew up in a very similar way.

Gay Porn was like the fire of Prometheus, exposing us to carnal, manly, man-oriented knowledge, to beauty beyond our wildest dreams. It was like looking at a dance that we too were destined to eventually dance when we came of age and became part of "the tribe". This dance of flesh, moaning and strange embraces was a delight to watch, but having never belonged to the tribe of "real men", it was at the same time excruciatingly painful, even while we masturbated for the sake of own own bodily pleasures. For with the knowledge of this dance came the sagacity of solitude and the wisdom of waiting.

Pornography and pop-culture has stolen the place of the Greek Gods. No longer do we worship and exemplify faraway, impossibly perfect marble statues of Hercules and Achilles, nor do we partake in the simple fun of schadenfreude when a foolish mortal woman falls to the ruses of Zeus or Pan. Instead, we have taken to creating gods out of humans through the power of media and mob psychology. We have a long-list of porn stars from sites like Randy Blue along with new workouts that promise us the affection and adoration of thousands. And as for schadenfreude, we have Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

As for me, there are days when I worry that I have embraced an artificial sexuality, one that is even more intensely ugly just because it is the manufactured imitation of something natural.
For a very long time, Pornography formed the basis of my attraction to men as well as the ideals that I strived for. For a short time during my early teenage years, I succumed to bulimia and manoxeria, losing a total of 50 pounds in a period of 3 months. All I wanted was to be loved.

I said, "If not for my brains, my charms, my smile, my kindness, oh please god, let me be loved for my beautiful body. And sometimes, my life would become a porn shoot.

There are still days when I pose in front of the mirror, checking and critiquing. First I will criticize my hair, then my face, then my butt, then my stomach, then my chest. I'll yell at myself, saying that all the muscle boys have all the fun. And then I'll just feel empty, realizing that I can never live up to the "white standard" of gay sexuality in its current state. That even if I work out every day of the week and have the most perfect body with the most beautiful dick, there will still be men with personal ads that say "No Fats, No Fems, no Asians".

"NO FATS, NO FEMS, NO ASIANS" is a double whammy for me, akin to the likes of "NO CHINESE AND DOGS ALLOWED" or "WE ARE NOT JAPS" signs in 1940s San Francisco Chinatown. I have two major qualms about this specific "motto" that at in 2000, gained notoriety in Australian newspapers due to its overwhelming presence in the personal section one freely distributed gay weekly. In one specific issue, an entire half-page of personals had this same motto at the end of every ad.

(Now, I don't think anyone in the world today could get away with "No Blacks and No Jews", but apparently many gay men think it's perfectly fine to say "No Asians" if they say "Sorry, it's just a preference". To an Asian-American, this kind of behavior is akin to burning someone's parents alive and turning them into meat chili, serving it to them, and then saying "Gotcha!". Or, on a less brutal note, it's exactly like when a bully punches you and says "Just kidding!" or "stop hurting yourself!")

In any case, as someone with a love of poetry and a knowledge of computer science in his heart, my first qualm is the mathematical formulas that erupt from the particular word ordering of this mantra. The first equation is (Fat=Ugly) = (Effeminacy = Ugly) = (Asian = Ugly). The second equation is that (Fat = Effeminacy) = (Effeminacy = Asian).

This is where the hideous, second face of gay pornography and gay culture rears its head. This is my second qualm--through the same weapons of ignoring and invisibility tactics that were launched against homosexuality throughout most of modern history, the mainstream gay media has perpetrated a cycle of violence through silence, and this time racial minorities and the other "uglies" are the unfortunate whipping boys.

Where are my mainstream Indian-American and Asian-American Gay porn stars and underwear models, where are my portly but handsome gay movie stars? Where are my sexy, limp-wristed boys with hearts of gold who are as seductive as they are fierce?

The sad truth is that these things are not popping up in the "primary sexual education" that young gay men are currently recieving through pornography. I personally believe that if we are to solve the problem of gay sexual racism and body discrimination we can either revolutionize gay sexual education in its public, official forms (which doesn't even really exist, and is highly unlikely anytime soon), or we can change the way sexual imagery and gay pornography is done today.
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Fight the Male State! Our Secret Weapon: Activist Porn

As for critical analysis of my outrage as well as solutions to the problem, I now turn to the work of Richard Fung, the Carribean-Chinese video artist whose groundbreaking "Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn" blew my mind and made me seriously think about what I was downloading every week.

(Side note: I might even be related/have family friends that know this guy, since he's Carribean Chinese like me. Strange!).

What I most strongly remember from this particular piece are the scenes he describes of a certain 1994 video (whose name I don't remember, but is mentioned in the article), which I will describe as "Martial Arts Manlove and Dojo Dick Drilling Gone Wrong". Oh how I do want to see this, though.

The movie starts out in a dojo, where the all-white cast is in full karate gear, just finishing their practice. Fast forward, and you enter the beginnings of an orgy scene. Johnny, the main character of this movie, is having his dick sucked by another white guy. Soon, Johnny puts on a white hachimaki headband with the Imperial Japanese Sun (think Ryu from Street Fighter, or the Karate kid if you wish), and before you can say "presto!", a cloud of smoke appears and he turns into an Asian man! Johnny, now imbued "the spirit of Asia" is now plundered up the ass and services his white comrades, all without getting much attention down there for himself. Once he takes off the hachimaki, however, he reverts to being white and fucks another guy on the dojo floor.

All throughout the movie, Johnny is never allowed to transgress this barrier between submissive, feminine Asian and dominant, masculine European in a some kind of gay porn version of Orientalism and the Opium War. The sad thing is that despite the age of this video, things really haven't changed in the land of gay porn, gay media, gay advertising, or Hollywood for that matter.

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The overwhelming result of this continuing trend in porn however, is that people are actually buying into this false, almost manichean binary as a result of this "Bad Education". Too many gay men still believe that the average Asian penis is 4 inches (2 inches below average), that we all are hungry bottoms, and that while we are young, we make very happy houseboys.

I strongly believe that our "erotic vocabulary" is developed in youth. If we do not grow up with real-life exposure to other ethnicities, for example, we can jump to three extremes when we eroticize them:
1) We can turn them into exotic objects of beauty (the worst kind of Rice Queens)
2) We can lump them into a whole and disregard them (the kind of person that says NO ASIANS)
3) We can rely completely on pornography to develop our sexual understanding of another race (which is just completely ridiculous, but still happens anyways)

All three extremes showed up in the first month I came to Montreal and went to the village.

-I got a strange invitation on the street on the first day I went there.
"Tu es Japonais? Tu veux manger du sushi avec moi? Je payerai tout."

-The first time I went to Unity, I thought someone was cute and I smiled. Instead, I got a bitchy glare along with a "stop sign hand" straight out of a Diana Ross Song, along with "Pas d'asiatiques, no small dick for me, Sorry".

-And one time in a bar, I had the "pleasure" of an older, rather piggish man whispering into my ear "I want to stick my sushi roll up your ass".

I couldn't help but think that pornography had to do something with this, so I looked to Richard Fung for some answers. And indeed, he suggested the idea of "minority-directed porn, based on the recent trends of feminist straight and lesbian porn".
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Indeed, I have a history of looking to women warriors as my inspiration. Characters and people like Geum-Ja from Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Amelie Poulain from Amelie and my professor, Adrienne Carey Hurley all remind me of the power of a "nuturing revolution". For me, they are my Judy Garlands, beacons of hope that keep me fighting with smiles and acts of love for the sake of getting over the current "rainbow" and making it my own damn rainbow, too.

The silly dream is that:
One day, I will participate in my own self-directed, self-acted pornography with a multi-ethnic casts young and old, transfolk and all, with human, not homosexual or heterosexual intimacy as its centerpiece. Actors will be real-life lovers with real bodies, and much fun will be had. We will make enough money to at least take everyone out for a wonderful dinner, and watchers will feel "Wow, the variety of the world is wonderful". It will become a cult classic, and everyone will get photoshoot model contracts for that gay adult empire Priape, and finally, finally someone who's not white will become a Priape gay pinup model.

It's a dream, but it's not impossible. Hell, the great thing about internet pornography is that it's close to perfect competition! Low barriers to entry, low start-up costs. Extremely difficult to get your product out in the long run, but you can get your message out. And maybe that's all that counts.

Alright, I'm a little bit tuckered out right now, but I'll have my conclusion out sometime soon. Stay Tuned for more ramblings.