Sexualizing Homosexuality
By wchung | 23 Feb, 2025

Let's extend the respect we want as Asians to others who face a similar struggle.

I spent the majority of my life in sunny Los Angeles, where the only trend more fashionable than skinny jeans and the grapefruit diet is opposing prop 8. However, a simple mention of a gay couple in conversation still draws averted eyes and weakly suppressed grimaces. I’ve witnessed this phenomenon many times, amongst equal rights defenders, the nonreligious and especially amongst young Asian men, many of whom claim to oppose prop 8. I didn’t understand this at all. So I asked. And their response?

It’s not that we don’t like gay people. We just don’t like the idea of gay sex.

My response at the time? Guys, typical.

Not long ago, a close girl friend of mine confessed her bisexuality to me over the phone and after a moment of shock, skepticism and eventual acceptance, I found myself blurting – “Wait, so you’re ready to be intimate with a girl?”

She wasn’t. And that’s when I realized what I had done.

At first glance, my response seems like a natural reaction to a nontraditional way of doing things, which is innocent enough, but in reality, my words not only trivialized the sanctity of my friend’s feelings but inserted a sense of straight-man superiority. If she had told me she liked a boy, I wouldn’t have immediately asked her if she was ready to be intimate with him, because I would have assumed her affections were deeper than mere eroticism and that her intentions rose above carnal pursuits. After all, relationships are as emotional as they are sexual and most of the time, for the recently converted — purely emotional. What I did may not have been considered overt discrimination, but I was definitely slipping down a slippery slope.

Maybe it’s growing up as a minority with the mentality that I must overachieve to attain equal consideration as “the white man” simply because I have a “foreigner’s face” or possibly even the yearly buildup of the same sing-song “ching chang chong” ringing in my ears, but it’s hard for me not take every kind of social intolerance personally. Call it communion of the disenfranchised or whatever you want to, but I’ll be the first one to admit it. I was wrong for what I said.

I’m not going to argue whether homosexuality is inborn or imagined nor am I going to fall into the time sink of discussing whether prop 8 is right or wrong, not because it’s not important but because very few of you will have the patience to sit through another Gettysburg address. But regardless of your views on the merits of homosexuality, discrimination against a subgroup because they lead a lifestyle unfamiliar to you is both cowardly and hypocritical. And that’s just what sexualizing homosexuality is — social prejudice, only diluted. Even if you voted against prop 8, if you still feel uneasy about the idea of homosexuality based on self-imposed sexual undertones then you’re no different from someone who says, “Hey I voted to abolish slavery, but it’s ok for me to dislike black people.” This may be a hard pill for some to swallow, but Asian Americans, as hardworking minorities, should know better.