Track Mangoes

How the political climate has constructed the gay male object of desire.

Is it an accident that Asian pornography became popular in the post-Regan aftermath? Is it an accident that Eastern European boys became commodified in gay pornography after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

With white-gays skyrocketing into strata of gentry and the solidification of a unified queer identity for men, came what Nicholas Radel calls “transnational gayness"--a sugary, dogmatic principle that is a “a celebration of gay identity as gay identification with the other.” The men who mouth these political clichés insist that gayness itself can transcend national and geographic distinctions. That gay man over there is the same as this one here because they both have anal sex.

Have we learned nothing from Gloria Anzaldua? who once said even the term "queer" erases our differences and marginalizes our individual struggle. And that's precisely what "Transnational Gayness" does: it conflates gender, which is plastic, with nationality, which is imagined.

Gay men obviously don’t take the idea of transnational gayness too seriously. Pornography demonstrates the West’s representation of Eastern Europeans as the exotic-white-other, in search of identity, shape and focus, given to them by the jolly white westerner--nothing, I'm sure, you haven't heard before. It can escape you, particularly in moments when watching something like the infamous Bel Ami production Out of Athens. Here, the protagonist, quite randomly, meets a Greek tour guide who cant actually speak English, but who takes him on a tour. Ah Yes! The Greek pan leading whiteys through the maze of architectural ruins so he can have his COCK SUCKED. And there are more. Boy (1995), Viz (Tom Kurthy, 1995), and Sauna Paradiso (George DuRoy, 1994) all feature young men from the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe and take place in the friendly yet foreign setting of the bathhouse (an originally European locale still foreign to most heterosexual men and indeed many gay men). In My Polish Waiter the protagonist reaches out to a nubile boy from the service staff, who again speaks little English. This veiled desire is emphasized and emblematized by a pivotal scene in which the waiter performs an exotic polish dance.

Gay sexuality itself, as an epistemological category, needs to be understood as a significant factor in the crisis of representation occasioned by the collapse of communism. The films aforementioned portray desire-objects (twinky, economically disenfranchised, nearly mute, slightly depressed Europeans) as having been there all along, waiting found in wanting. Their space becomes his space, the space of the transnational gay man.

The collapse of the Iron Curtain has lead to the reshaping of gay male desires. In the aftermath of the fall of communism, the U.S. has looked down at Eastern Europe as the locus for chaos and confusion. Within a post-Cold War framework pornography is tremendously recuperative. Nationality, politics, and sexuality maunder in order to keep the wires of culture smoothly functioning. The utopian vision of gay transnationality (might I add, a Leftist fantasy?) that energizes these films, a vision that is important to contemporary constructions of same-sex desire, obscures the extent to which the production of gay films about Eastern Europe is part of a larger, capitalist expansion into Eastern Europe in the post-Cold War period.

This reading of transnational gayness as being intimately connected to the political climate carries over quite nicely to other objects-of-desire as well. Take the mysterious Asian-effect: the phenomenon of some white men to only date and fuck Asian boys. Can we draw some connection between the Asian effect and political aftermath?

Yes. If the obedient, sexually curious woman was the trope before the Vietnam war, the obedient sexually starved woman was the stereotype after the Vietnam war. During the war the sex industry provided Vietnam with a new source of income. The business carried over to other south Asian territories, particularly Thailand, where they still flourish today. But the Asian American identity would not conform to the obedient prostitute stereotype up until the Regan administration. Asian Americans in America were used as the puppets for racial politics form the 1960’s in the dying flames of the civil rights movement, particularly on the West Coast. We throw around terms like ‘model minority’ today as if it had always been in place, but truth be told the american-asian object of desire didn't become such a model until this time. The Asian American was held up as a punching bag for resentment: When in 1965 The Negro Family publication came out, it accused black families of experiencing financial subordination due to “a lack of family values.” Asians were the opposite, according to conservative pundits. Asian success stories popped up in The New York Times Magazine and The U.S. News and World Report as "proof" of minority families pulling themselves up by the imagined bootstraps. If they can do then why can't you? seemed to be the tenor of these pieces.

The rhetoric seemed to carry over into my middle school too, where Asians were actually taunted for being good at things. Go figure. That particular brand of racism didn't do Asian slackers, such as myself, much good. For then the question became: Gosh, they're good at math, so why aren't you?

Of course in middle school I had no idea that my fate had long been determined during the Johnson administration. During the Regan administration, innovative technology caused massive job cuts, the conservatives insisted that a return to traditional values was a cure-all for these socioeconomic problems. Vietnamese shrimp wholesalers, Korean greengrocers, and Chinese computer whizzes were recognized as the epitome of ‘family values.'

The white-bourgeois-gay-male American identity cannot construct itself outside a framework of entitlement. Gay men have often had to sacrifice much of their personal lives in order to bare the burden of being able to sleep with whomever they want. Does this, and this is the question that boggles me, excuse them from proclivities such as the Asian effect? I have had to loose so much to be able to sleep with men that it's okay if I'm a little picky. After Millet, we know that the way we have sex is political, but for gay men it's a different game, particularly when removed from the discussion of Birth Control. As the Gay American Man stands on the edge of a cultural abyss, looking down into a pit of normalness, Transnational Gayness points to something rotten in the state of faggotry.