Twenty.

Neither Gaysian nor rice queen, but a secret third thing.

This past June, Nymphia Wind—winner of the most recent season of MTV’s RuPaul’s Drag Race—was interviewed by Joel Kim Booster for Gay Times. In their conversation, they discuss the trappings of being celebrities of Asian descent in the West, such as dating while Asian. Nymphia is succinct in her summation of the accompanying discourse: “Being Asian, you have to realize that you are…a type.”

It’s for similar reasons why I’ve come to disdain the “Gaysian” label. A portmanteau of “gay” and “Asian,” it’s a term I know to be broadly applied to any and all non-heterosexual people of (East) Asian descent. I don’t accept the necessity of the label, but I do begrudgingly accept that the label may be applied to me by people who know me only by my phenotype. However, let it be known: I may be gay, I may be Asian, but I am not a “Gaysian.” I am not a type.

This is manifested partly due to a disdain for "rice queens," as Nymphia and Joel call them. It is true that there is a subset of men who are not of Asian descent themselves but exclusively seek out Asian partners, and I've more or less spent the entirety of my dating career avoiding them. Being fetishized makes me uncomfortable.

I’ve often wondered whether this hyper-awareness is a problem of my own creation. In college, under the umbrella topics of scientific racism and capitalism, I sought to mold my undergraduate thesis as a rumination on the limitations imposed by such systems upon individual agency. I devised and read my own syllabus, seeking to put my assertions into conversation with Amy Tan, Franz Kafka, and Edward Said. Throughout this process, I ran into one singular idea, expressed by innumerable luminaries, over and over again: otherness. To be othered is to be ostracized; to be othered is to be misunderstood.

I understand why these classifications exist. I can even find use for social stratification, to convey information about groups of people strung together by even the flimsiest of commonalities, hopefully for a noble purpose. Nonetheless, when it comes to dating in particular, I resent being defined by my identity. I want to be wanted for who I am, not what I am. I know that this is a common complaint shared by many, and not just by those who look like me. It's not a novel concept.

Somewhat ironically, I realized that I was doing it too. When I tried using Hinge and other apps of the sort, I thought it would make dating easier if I gravitated primarily towards the men of my demographic. I assumed that our similar backgrounds would make for fertile common ground, shared experiences from which we might have drawn corresponding conclusions that would be precursory to having real chemistry between us. Although I didn't entirely write off going on dates with non-Asian men, the ones I did end up dating longer term were (not so) coincidentally of Asian descent: Malay Singaporean, Filipino American, Korean American, etc. None of them were rice queens and, for the most part, it sort of worked. I felt understood at a baseline level, and any real problems that did appear throughout those relationships came as a result of deeper-rooted issues.

I did wonder whether I precluded non-Asian partners out of fear that they would fetishize me just because they did not share my cultural background, but I did go on dates with them, too—I was willing to be an equal opportunist when it came to finding a partner. I thought that I needed to come to terms with the very real possibility that the love of my life may not be of Asian descent. Statistically speaking, it’s not an implausible outcome. I’m a resident of New York, a city not infamous for its lack of racial diversity, and it would be unrealistic to assume that I would never in my life date someone outside of my own demographic checkbox…unless I were actively preempting that possibility. So, I did it. I met some nice people, too, but those didn't work out either.

Somewhere along the way, when I interrogated my motives to determine the genesis of my fear of being misunderstood, I pinpointed an argument I’d had with Jun, my third boyfriend, during which he’d derided me for being “too Asian." In the three years that I gave him, he thought that I didn't show him enough affection, like a stereotypical Asian partner. Himself being of mixed White and Asian heritage, Jun was, in comparison, the “better” Asian, the enlightened one who gave away love for free because he supposedly wasn’t held back by the same assumptions that stunted me. 

In contrast, Henry, my fourth boyfriend and the man that succeeded Jun, never had that complaint. Although I was born in North America and Henry was born in Asia, we at least had in common the ways in which we were affectionate. We never overly gushed about each other, but we never felt the need to do so because it was a truth universally comprehended. Like Jun, Henry was also of mixed White and Asian heritage, but I thought he understood me better than Jun ever did, and I accredited that to him being more “Asian” by virtue of having spent most of his life on that side of the world, amongst the people there. I thought I related to him more because I’d spent half of my upbringing there, too.

In the aftermath of my breakup with Henry, I realized that I mainly searched for Asian partners because I wanted to avoid the same dust-ups that I’d had with Jun. I wanted the same easygoing partnership that I thought I’d had with Henry because it had felt more natural to me in comparison. I realized that I, like so many others, had allowed the trauma of my (very ugly) breakups seep into my subsequent relationships; I had felt that those relationships ended because I was misunderstood, because the men didn’t know me for who I truly am. Yet, while I attempted to circumvent being defined by my identity, being wanted because I was a type, I projected an assumption onto these other men: that they could not know me because they were not like me. But, in truth, my relationship with Henry had ended because I thought that he too echoed the stereotype of Asian men being unable, or unwilling, to express their emotional self. Disagreements with him often came about because I begged us to communicate better. Perhaps I was simply too American.

There's no happy ending here. Maybe I was too preoccupied with identity; love is as fickle as it is elusive, and all the more so when it is subject to all sorts of qualifiers. Thus, when my year without water came to a close, I found myself in a roundabout way starting back at square one: at a gay club watching Nymphia Wind perform, and catching a glimpse of Henry amongst the crowd of gay Asian men. If he saw me, I never knew—I pretended not to see him.