By Eric Wat
From InformAsian, GAPSN Monthly Newsletter, April, 2000

An UCLA student came up to me recently in my class and said he wanted to do some research on West Hollywood and why some Asians felt alienated in it. Being a Filipino and a WeHo resident, he recalled being followed by cops (and stopped once) the first few months when he moved into the city a couple years ago. The cops in West Hollywood should have plenty of experience interacting with gay men, and the student's being gay was probably not why the police was following him. Otherwise, we would all be escorted once we passed Fairfax on Santa Monica. So when the student was stopped, he felt as if the cops couldn't handle the fact that an Asian could be gay, too.

That was troubling to me. Even though I know many Asians have shied away from West Hollywood because of racism and its superficiality, there have been significantly more spaces in the city that specifically catered to Asians. Granted, some of them have failed or are failing. But depending on which night, you can see a sizable number of Asians hanging out in Mickey's or the Abbey. These are popular places.

That was not the case before the 1980s. Some of the bigger clubs or bathhouses actually tried, in various ways, to deter Asian from patronizing them. Perhaps what the UCLA student encountered was a presistant vestige of that racism.

Remember, more than twenty years ago, there were no gay Asian spaces, like the Buddha Lounge, in West Hollywood, and the Asian population in Los Angeles has not exploded into what we know today. Of course, gay Asians have been frequenting bars for decades, but before 1980, their presence was scattered and they seldom traveled in groups of even just two. In most cases, lacking a community and organization of their own, they were introduced to the gay scene by their non-Asian co-workers or friends.

A lot of gay Asians who were socially active at that time would comment on how rare it was to find another gay Asian man in a gay establishment. And Asians were not considered an object of sexual desire by many. Charles C., a Chinese American, said, "Very rarely, though, would I get asked or picked up. That made me feel like, well, people don't like Asians. I don't know if you can call that discrimination." Nevertheless, as a result of this negative reinforcement, for a long time, Charles "never saw myself as a sexual being."

Ernest W., a Japanese American, had a similar observation. He said, "The selective process in the bar scene was just deadly because the whites were going for other whites at the time, and Asian types were not a commodity. The whites at that time, I feel, viewed us as more of the subservient types, a geisha type. And then as soon as we opened our mouths and started talking, they discovered we were just as Americanized at them. Then they felt intimidated. Or they came off condescending or patronizing. I mean, you didn't have a chance if you were an Asian."

Some bars even enacted a policy that Asians (and women and other people of color) needed to show three pieces of identification to get in. Even if they passed that hurdle, they might encounter indifference and even insults from the staff or other patrons. As Harry P., a Korean American, recalls, "I've seen people give dirty looks to someone whey they walked in because of their race. I've heard snide remarks, just bitchy remarks. 'What's that nigger doing here? How come that chink is here?' Dirty looks. Facial expressions. Turning their backs. You name it. It was there."

One of the reasons why minorities were discouraged from admission was because we were not considered sexually desirable in a community that largely subscribed to a white masculine beauty myth. In another word, we were bad for business. Sure, there are more welcoming spaces for Asians nowadays, but stories like this have not gone extinct.

I've heard stories from my friends, who are in their mid-twenties, about The Zone, a sex club that has closed for a couple years now. They were either denied membership or, if they had membership, denied entrance because the staff said the club was full (even as people were leaving) or because they had received complaints about my friend in another instance. (I mean, it's an anonymous sex space. How do you make a complaint? And what kind of complaints would one make in a sex club, anyway? What? He didn't give a good blowjob?)

Experiences like these are why gay Asian community organizations were created in Los Angeles in 1980. And also why we still need them today.