I used to equate whiteness with unrestrained homosexuality. I grew up in Vietnam with a murky idea of the West as all white and liberated. I absorbed these reductive ideologies from Western media and porn. My childhood ranged from the 2000s — 2010s when Vietnam had reestablished its relation with the US after the Vietnam war; so typical Vietnamese TVs and the internet enabled access to American representations.<\/p>\n
When my (homo)sexual reckoning occurred in middle school, I was isolated and desperate, in a similar vein as the rural queer narrative evoked by Eli Clare. I believed that Vietnamese culture is inherently homophobic, for homophobia was\/is internalized and reinforced in terms of gender roles within my family and in any aspect of my life. The interesting twist is that it is the Western media, cinema, and porn that affirmed my sexuality around this time. I watched the trend of \u2018coming-out\u2019 videos on youtube (where white people say things like “I’m gay and it gets better”), any American movies, and free-range gay porn (anything other than heteronormative is censored; however, Vietnam fosters a culture of illegal online streaming, so I could find any Western movie for free online). I experienced a shock of existence to see unrestrained flesh and desire on screen. All of them were white. At the same time that occidental media and gay porn affirmed me, offered me a masturbatory outlet, and a lexicon to identify myself, they also let me internalize unwitting racism.<\/p>\n
Vietnam is racially homogenous, so I did not understand race or why it mattered. I thought extremely<\/i> naively of America as white and gay. For the latter half of high school, I secured a scholarship to study in Maine as my family was progressing from middle-class to upper-class in Vietnamese standards and could afford my education abroad. Yes, at the time I was convinced the only solution to my sexuality was moving<\/em> to another country.<\/p>\n I had a very reductive binary idea of racism as well. The racism I experienced in America confused me. A Black man threw racist slurs on me on a subway train; a truck full of white boys drove past me once, hollering \u201cGo back to China\u201d; a Turkish man shouted in my face \u201cCorona\u201d as I walked by on the street. I never questioned these incidents, because I didn\u2019t know how to. I was a teenage foreigner, fresh in a country, which I was still glamourizing, knowing not how to navigate the complexity of America’s racist and multi-phobic bones. To make matters worse, the year I arrived in Maine, Trump was elected and I had shingles (it is rather funny to think of it now).<\/p>\n Then, when I started to have sex, it was only with white men. I tried to assimilate into the script of the model minority and white homosexuality without realizing it. One of my female friends remarked once: \u201cYou only like whiteboys, don\u2019t you;\u201d I defended myself, saying I am attracted to everyone, and it was true, I found myself attracted to different men, but when it came to actual sex, I always chose white men. I was conditioned to whiteness as the ideals from my media introduction to America. I started to distance myself away from any other Asians, hated my skin, wanting to be \u201cnormal,\u201d the way Eli Clare was determined not<\/em> to be one of the \u201cspecial ed\u201d kids (108). Clare calls this \u201chorizontal hostility\u201d because it is easiest to enact oppression within one\u2019s own community (108). Like Cherr\u00ede Moraga, later, I found it \u201cfrightening to acknowledge that I have internalized racism and [homophobia] where the object of oppression is not only someone outside <\/i>my skin, but the someone inside <\/i>my skin\u201d (46). This is not about renouncing whiteness, this is about me. About recognizing myself, recognizing the \u201cprimary source\u201d and understanding \u201cthe meaning of [my] own oppression\u2026 and that [my] oppression of others hurts [me] personally\u201d (Moraga 45, 49).<\/p>\n While the Western media first affirmed my (homo)sexuality, giving me a sense of community, it also conditioned me into racism, which I come to enact within my (homo)sexuality and my racial community. Even while I\u2019m delineating all this, I\u2019m still trying to make sense of my experience, for it contains too many interlocking and competing spheres; it is a diasporic queer racialized reality which I am never finished with. Leaving Vietnam and entering America has disrupted my leaving and entering into any place, physically or psychologically or sexually; I find myself in constant liminality, liminal futurity, though it’s not inherently bad. This post is only a small chaotic contemplation.\u00a0 Recognizing all these maneuvers leaves me to find alternatives to thinking and being, not just assimilating or resisting any script but towards something more ambivalent, liminal, radical, something new.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I used to equate whiteness with unrestrained homosexuality. I grew up in Vietnam with a murky idea of the West as all white and liberated. I absorbed these reductive ideologies from Western media and porn. My childhood ranged from the 2000s — 2010s when Vietnam had reestablished its relation with the US after the Vietnam … Continue reading Queer and Diasporic in Vietnamerica<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3852,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[169398],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2021-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3852"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqhistoryandliterature\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}