By Angela Cheng
The Texas Triangle

People look at my Chinese feet and exclaim, "God, you have the smallest feet!" and I reply, "Oh, it's because they were bound when I was younger" and the parameters of their eyes stretch and they whisper, "No shit?"

I chuckle and say, "No," and laugh at them because they have no idea how ridiculous bound feet are for a girl who was born and raised within the amorphous confines of Houston, Texas. Besides, my feet are perfectly proportionate to the size of my body, which is compact and taut, like a smooth key lime.

Straight people ask me what lesbian sex is like and I say, "Okay, close your eyes and imagine good straight sex" and they close their eyes and imagine good straight sex and then I say, "Now take that and multiply by eight. That's what lesbian sex is like." Then I laugh because I know that eight exceeds the limits of their imaginations. A week ago somebody asked me to describe the Asian-American Queer Experience and I opened my mouth and nothing came out of it. Only a tiny bit of air rife with perplexity escaped through my lips. It's not that I don't have much to say about it. It's that I don't know where to begin.

What does "Asian" mean anyway? I skip the obvious answer that "Asian" is just a semantic device tacked on to other words for purposes of categorization and power and say that "Asian" means anything or anybody from Asia. My very helpful girlfriend has just listed at least sixteen different peoples considered to be Asian.

Thus, to communicate coherently about the Asian-American Queer Experience, I would have to possess intimate knowledge of Indian-American queers, Cambodian-American queers, Pakistani-American queers, Thai-American queers, Sri Lankan-American queers, so on and so forth. You understand the complication.

I also refuse to fall into physical anthropological analysis - it is too much like being a salesperson at The Gap. Yes, we come in all colors, shapes, and patterns, penises, breasts, or both in sizes XL to XS, with or without body hair.

After all of that, what is there left to say? Only that being an Asian-American Queer -- or any racial minority queer, for that matter -- is difficult.

There is little difference between homophobia and racism. There is the fear, insecurity, and discomfort of being the only one in a crowded room full of people.

There is the erasure of history within and without school walls -- instead, our formative years are filled with heroes and heroines not like us, Walt Whitman is straight, and United States is the color of white.

There is the categorical fence that people like to build around us, containing us within boundaries of stereotypes, assumptions, and bias. Meet my friend, The Gay. Meet my friend, the Fill-in-the-Blank-Person-of-Color. Why is it that when we're not straight, or not white, or both, all other personal qualities dissipate behind an unremovable label of sex and skin tone? Worst of all, there is the persistent, tortuous element of self-loathing and heightened self-awareness that seized us during adolescence and carried us all the way to maturity. And even when we finally celebrate our true selves, even when we finally wear our Queerness and Race as a badge of honor, we are still not immune from the embarrassment, shame, and disgust that stems from remarks of hatred from others.

There is little difference between homophobia and racism. It is difficult to deal with both.

During adolescence, just as I sought to immerse myself in absolute heterosexuality, I made myself forget the color of my skin and the conditions of my culture. I sought to be white because that was the skin tone that seemed to gain the most positive results. Even though I had various Asian friends in high school, it took an enormous amount of energy for me to trust them. I scorned them, regarding many of them as silly and inconsequential. At the same time, I would see a butch female classmate stroll down a hall and think, "She's one of us." Then I would feel an onslaught of hot and bitter resentment towards her. I avoided debates around the issues of race or gender or sexuality. I thought I was too cool for that. I mean, for God's sakes, these issues were just tired, whiny discourse. I depoliticized, de-sexualized, and de-colored myself.

Coming out for me was and is not only a mental and spiritual revamping of sexuality, it is a hard, crisp, devastating, and exhilarating look at my racial/ethnic identity for the first time in my life. Along with sexuality, I could finally allow myself to acknowledge how traumatic and isolating it was to function under the steel thumb of homogeneity and all its binding rules. And finally, for the first time, hopelessness and helplessness were not the predominant sentiments that filled my body. I began to celebrate the entrance into a world that made sense.

But even the gay community has tiny, hidden rules that sneak up on me. All of a sudden, I discovered that many non-homophobic people are racist.

Now, I have experienced overt racism before in my life. There was that time at Astroworld when I got into a screaming match with three girls who decided that saying "CHING CHONG CHANG CHANG CHOOONG" in front of my face seemed to be an appropriate thing to do. And there was that other time I engaged in a physical standoff when a girl called me "Chink" in the hallowed halls of middle school. And just less than a year ago, somebody stuck their face out of a moving vehicle and shouted, "In America, honey, green means go."

The racism I have experienced in the gay community is not the overt color of red but the subtle, unwavering tinge of blue. It is the blue in eyes that forget to see you, that sweep over you during a mainstream GLBT function. It is the default belief that gay America is gay white America. It is the lack of concern for you and your issues. It is the blue color of neglect and ignorance.

Let me just start off by saying that everyone is racist. So if you think you're completely not racist, you're wrong. This is something we all have in common.

Just last week I made new friends here in Austin, Texas. They are in the group Trikone-Tejas, a campus Pan-Asian gay-straight alliance that combats cultural-specific issues surrounding sexism and homophobia. The group was formed three years ago in response to the lack of diversity and minority voice within gay organizations on campus. Since then, Trikone-Tejas has fostered a strong community in the Internet environment, forming mailing lists and bringing awareness of cultural events around Austin. In addition, Trikone has built coalitions with other Asian-American queer and straight organizations around the United States. Most importantly, Trikone holds panel or roundtable discussions regarding Asian/Asian-American queer issues, bringing visibility and safe space to a group that once had no voice and no presence in the gay movement.

Last week, I was invited to join Trikone-Tejas in a joint discussions with Safe Space, an organization that seeks to create a safe haven for groups of discrimination. The discussion centered on creating safe space for the Asian-American GLBT community. The main focus was David Ayres' "China Dolls," a beautiful short film on Asian gay males in Australia.

Being pompous as I am, I figured that I knew everything about Asian-American queerness. I would just waltz into the discussion and share a little of my knowledge. Instead, I learned in a two-hour discussion equivalent to many years' worth of revelations.

First of all, to my surprised lesbian libido, the Asian men portrayed in "China Dolls" turned me on. Having hardly ever been attracted to men in general, this discovery baffles me and requires another entire article for exploration.

Second of all, the discussion strengthened my understanding that within the gay world, sexual attraction does not necessarily indicate tolerance.

The issue of Asian exoticism and eroticism - the so-called "Rice Queen/King" or "Curry Queen/King" exoticism of race, such as newspaper advertising a "Slender, Asian Beauty" - is a dangerous phenomenon. Like discriminating against a person based on the color of skin, exoticism sees only color and culture instead of individuality and personal truth. Exoticism perpetuates racial stereotypes and draws a lock box around the person. And since stereotyping is a wonderful tool for social control (i.e., All gay people have AIDS) exoticism also reflects and reinforces a hierarchy of power.

In the meantime, cheekily deemed "Potato Queens/Kings," many Asian-American queers vie for white partners. It is a concept that rides on the other side of exoticism and carries a heavy dosage of internalized racism.

I am guilty of internalized racism. I have been guilty of feeling grateful when someone displays interest in my skin color. I have been guilty of wanting white so that I could be white.

My friend Prateek from Trikone-Tejas taught me something very amazing. He spoke a little on coming out in the South Asian community. He talked of the relative ease with which the South Asian community has accepted him. He talked of the difficulty of finding a niche in the mainstream gay community. As I listened to him speak, I felt something heavy in my stomach. Here I was thinking that the plight of Asian-American queers lied solely in the stringent traditional conservatism of their Asian families. That our double identity crises resulted from our families forcing us to choose between our race and our queerness.

But where is that really coming from? Maybe not only our families, but mainstream whiteness, including the gay community, also pushes us to choose between our identities by keeping the movement predominantly white.

L. Ramki Ramakrishnan, one of the founders of Trikone-Tejas, says that, "When I asked some of the gay organizations on campus why there weren't more racial minorities at their meetings, they quickly replied that it was because those races were more homophobic and less inclined to speak up."

So how does that explain why my mom is ready to take my girlfriend shopping while many white gays and lesbians forget to make eye contact with me? My parents may be different from white parents, but it seems to me that all families - regardless of race - have a hell of a time accepting queerness within the ranks.

"The gay community needs to actively reach out to queer people of color," Ramki says. "They need to include people of color in the planning process and in positions of power so that other minority queers feel welcome and safe."

For years, Asian-Americans have striven to gain visibility. In school, we were the nerds, the ones to copy notes from, the quiet ones. Or we were backwards, easy to pick on, too timid to make noise. Now, we possess changing faces and louder voices. Two weeks ago, "I was Born with Two Tongues" - an Asian-American spoken word/poetry troupe from Chicago brought down the house with grooves and songs and screams. The Drive-By Players, a performance art group of queer/straight people of color performs regularly on and off campus, combating oppression and discrimination via writing, filming, acting, having sex, talking, marching, subverting and loving.

There's got to be something better than an elite group of gay people with a lot of disposable income. There has to be more if the queer movement wants to have a different face from any other movement in history. Why be the same if you're already different? Why not fight the system, smash the conventions of heterosexual white-dom, and build a community where people of color and white gays and lesbians fight for each other and with each other? Something so different and so unique from a mainstream society where power comes in the shape of an upside-down funnel and rights are trampled upon all over the place. I know that I am naïve. But I can't help wishing these things. When and if that kind of community appears, none of us will ever have to answer dumb, ignorant questions from dumb, ignorant people again.