Gay or Asian?

I don’t know if anyone remembers this spread in the magazine Details a while back, but I thought it’d be interesting to bring up, considering our discussion about the Asian male body, and especially the homosexual Asian male.

One interesting thing about this spread (aside from the horrendous stereotypes it employs) is the question “Gay or Asian?”, which implies that Asianness and homosexuality are mutually exclusive, two distinct spheres that cannot overlap. As Chiang’s article suggests, this supports the idea that alternative sexualities are associated with Western cultures and that queer Asians have been somehow influenced (even infected) by the American homosexual, as when Wai-Tung’s mother asks him if Simon “led him astray.”

One implicit rephrasing of the question of the spread is: “Gay, or Just Asian?” It equates characteristics that would, in white men, normally be read as particularly effeminate with those of Asian men (regardless of sexuality). While at first glance this seems to relate back to the representations of Asian men that we discussed a few weeks ago, that body was portrayed as impotent and asexual rather than homosexual. The article uses stylishness as a point of comparison here. Interesting.

I really enjoyed the Wedding Banquet, and especially liked using the varying degrees of specificity to imagine the same story being taken place in other settings. Chiang mentioned how it could have taken place in any city in the world, as there were few specific (and significant) references to Manhattan. I think because the film does follow a fairly standard structure, the arc of the story would have been remained pretty much the same had Wai-Tung’s parents been a conservative couple from another part of the U.S. The Gaos’ Chinese ethnicity is what fills in the details. I don’t think this necessarily downplays the Asian-American theme of The Wedding Banquet; rather, it’s what makes the bulk of the movie, what separates it from every other he’s-marrying-the-wrong-girl comedy (for example, the awful The Wedding Planner). So, in answer to the question raised in class, I would qualify The Wedding Banquet as a gay movie with an Asian twist, and not the other way around.

AIDS: The Uninvited Guest at the Banquet

I was interested in the subtle presence of AIDS in the film. When we first see Simon, he is wearing a Keith Haring t-shirt underneath his white lab coat. Haring, who died of AIDS in 1990 (three years before Wedding Banquet’s release in the US), used his art, money, and time to increase awareness of the disease in both the gay and straight communities. Later in the film, we see that Simon’s choice of garb is more than a fashion statement: it signals that he, too, is an AIDS activist. In one scene, Simon is outdoors sharing info with others as he works at a small table that is draped with a cloth that reads “Silence = Death.” And, finally, when Simon learns that Wai-Tung has inadvertently fathered a child with Wei-wei, his anger is first directed at the fact that Wai-Tung engaged in unsafe sex.

In part Simon’s interests serve to further align him as the “feminine” half of the couple. Simon tends to the domestic front, cooks, and does charitable work in the community. In contrast Wai Tung conforms to the stereotypical “male” role of being consumed with his work and money-making. So, this relationship, despite its alternative sexual dimension, appears to be structured along very conventional, heterosexual norms.

As for Wei-wei, avant-garde artists’ lifestyles have frequently been associated with challenges to the dominant social order. Women artists in particular were seen as deviant because their creative energies were channeled away from baby-making into the “selfish” pursuit of individual expression. Thus, they were castigated as being loose or somehow degraded women.
This was also a time when fear of the foreign body (particularly the Haitian body) as carrier of disease increased.

This forms an interesting undercurrent to what Mark Chiang observes is the re-constitution of the potentially subversive expressions of gender identities into a new patriarchal order. Can the formation of what Chiang calls this new “multicultural, non-heterosexual family” be seen as a symbolic containment of the “promiscuous” gay and artistic lifestyles—lifestyles closely associated with AIDS in the 1980s—and thus containment of the disease through restoration of traditional nuclear family values?