Jesse Monteagudo: Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance author and gay book lover who lives in South Florida with his domestic partner. He can be reached at jessemonteagudo@aol.com online. This abstract was originally published in Gay Today (Vol. VI, Issue 234). It is reprinted with permission from www.gaytoday.badpuppy.com online.
The last few years have witnessed a renaissance of fiction and nonfiction books by and about gay Asian men in the United States and Canada, ranging from “Calendar Boy” by Andy Quan and “Letters to Montgomery Clift” by Noel Alumit to the irrepressible Justin Chin and the stories in “Queer PAPI Porn.”
“The Making of a Gay Asian Community” is Eric C. Wat's oral history of gay Asians in pre-AIDS Los Angeles. Like other minority gays, gay Asians had to deal with both homohobia on the part of their birth cultures and racism on the part of the white, gay community. The emergence of a gay Asian community, at least in California, was intimately connected to the larger culture, as many gay Asians chose Caucasian sex partners over other Asian men. Even the groundbreaking organization Asian/Pacific Lesbians and Gays (A/PLG), whose early history is the focal point of this study, was full of white gay “rice queens” in search of Asian men. In “The Making of a Gay Asian Community,” Wat relates how a often-ignored, often-misunderstood minority community found its way through all of these difficulties in order to stand on its own two feet.
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