Posted on this website in Jan 2002
Book Review: Remember the Entire Community of Gay Asian Pacific Americans in Los Angeles.

In this unique book of oral history, The Making of a Gay Asian Community: An Oral History of Pre-AIDS Los Angeles, gay Asian Americans talk frankly about their struggle for self-determination and independence. For the first time, in their own words, pioneers in the Los Angeles movement discuss the gay scene in Southern California and the development of a distinctly Asian American identity. Despite its size, until recently the gay Asian American community in Los Angeles was fragmented and marginalized. Gay Asian men separated into their own ethnic cliques and preferred whites as sexual partners.

Eric C Wat convincingly demonstrates that these patterns are legacies of both a racialized hierarchy of desire and racial exclusion from the mainstream gay community. Using a cultural studies lens to interpret the rich oral narratives he collected, Wat shows how a dominant sexual ideology can influence our desires and contradict our memories. He follows the development of "specialty" bars that at once reinforced this dominant ideology and highlighted its contradictions. By documenting the founding of the first gay Asian organization in Southern California (Asian/Pacific Lesbians and Gays, A/PLG, now Asian Pacific Gays and Friends, A/PGF), the author powerfully portrays the ways gay Asian men confronted these contradictions publicly and struggled to reconcile them as they fashioned a coherent identity and community based on both their race and sexuality.

Wat's analysis returns gay Asian men to the center of their lives and celebrates the power of individuals working collectively to define their desires and to change what is unjust around them. As living history, their voices are valuable and overdue.

Eric C Wat received his M.A. in American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. He lives and writes in Los Angeles.

Table Of Contents

• Introduction
• Before the Beginning
• Caution and Abandonment on the L.A. Nightscape
• A Fascism of Desire
• The Call from Morris Kight
• Old Scars on a New Body
• The Next Generation
• Afterword

Paperback 2002	ISBN: 0-7425-1110-3	$24.95
Cloth 2002	ISBN: 0-7425-1106-X	$70.00

Excerpts from the book:
•  Interview with L Joslin
•  Interview with C Chang
Reprinted with written permissions from Patricia Zline of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers