On Cultural Experiences and Perspectives

A hallmark of the gay youth experience is downloading Grindr, a hookup app used mostly by gay men. At a young age, gay men have been taught to reduce each other to numbers and statistics and pictures on Grindr: for instance, checking the app right now, I know that there's a 5'8 white "stocky" "otter" that's one mile away from me. This, in and of itself, provided an avenue for insecurity and hyper-sexualization at a young age. 

But what happens when you factor race into it? The gay male experience is uniquely nuanced: on one hand, our civil rights movement seems to be transitioning to the mainstream; on the other, our community is often torn apart and segregated by race and pertinent issues of gender expression— a common mantra on dating and hookup apps is "no fats, no femmes, no Asians." As a queer person of color, my experiences on dating and hookup apps have provided me with a unique cultural mindset with which to analyze how race and sexuality often conflict in their intersections with sexual desire and fetishization.

It's tiring, honestly: when I swipe through my Tinder deck, I see superlikes from predominantly white men with obvious Asian fetishes; in their bio somewhere, they indicate some vague interest in Asians, either through expressing their infatuation with anime, boba or some other facet of Asian culture. In the gay community, race is a polarizing issue, more so than it is on straight dating apps. While BIPOC representation in media has augmented in the past few years, QTPOC representation stalls: the most representation we get on television is white, heteronormative ideas of queerness— Ellen Degeneres, Neil Patrick Harris, Billy Eichner. So it's through these haphazard encounters with fetishization that I've learned 1.) the unique, objectifying aspects of dating as a gay man and 2.) the emotionally draining, uniquely layered experiences of dating as a gay, Asian-American man. 

I've been able to see these intersections with a great clarity, allowing me to analyze society through the lens of intersectionality: how do queer people of color code-switch in their cultural spaces, or how do women of color experience greater levels of dehumanization in media than white women? Because of these dating app horror stories, I've come to see our identities as layers that overlap and mesh with each other more often than not. The Asian gay experience is distinctly separate from the white gay experience, and it's important to recognize that gap. I've been forced to recognize how communities are torn apart by these incremental identity gaps— for better or for worse. We can all acknowledge how different our experiences are; if you're a white woman, yes, you experience the pitfalls of misogyny, but you also hold immense privilege and power— think about the Karen trope. We've all had experiences that bring into question how our identities intersect, and I think those are valuable and insightful experiences that we can all learn from.