Inspo*—
“Lilo: People treat me different.
Nani: They just don’t know what to say.”
—Lilo & Stitch
“I wanted to tell him, you see, I am lost in someone else. You are too. We kept company in each other’s reminiscences for the nights we spent together. There’s nothing more for this.” —Alexander Chee, Edinburgh
“Vayamos sin compromiso
Veremos qué es lo que pasa
Ron ron ron ronroneo” —Mon Laferte, Ronroneo
I get asked to explain what I am a lot. People ask me all the time about my ethnic background or my racial makeup or where I’m from. White people ask me, and just as often black and brown people ask me. Some people ask up front, some wait for it to come up, and somehow it eventually does. Tricks ask me, trade asks me, lovers ask me— although lovers wait longer. Friends ask, even though I’ve told them, they just forgot, like they didn’t hear it right the first time, like it didn’t answer their question.
It’s frustrating, but it’s also fine. There are far worse racial grievances than being asked which ones you should have. With my white name and my white mom and my white friends, I hesitate to claim what mine might be. Perhaps it’s a privilege to be allowed to name what I am, as if the whole matter had the lightness of sharing my star sign. People have their suspicions when they ask, but nobody ever says “Oh, I see that” after I answer, like I’m part of another planet’s sky.
Disrobed, the question is this: Why do you look the way you do, and where would I find more?
Escort sites offer the option “Mixed,” but I do not find that the gesture helps my business. Men filter and refine their search for providers by race, perhaps not always thinking much about it, and “Mixed” simply does not fit into any schema of sexual types. It evades the question, it indicates nothing. Sometimes this works, but a marketplace presents an opportunity— maybe even an imperative— to profit from racial fantasies, fetishes, and “preferences.” Especially for white sex workers, whether they intend to or not. But for all that good liberal people adore the post-racial promise of multiracial children, or shrug tolerantly at precisely what constitutes those multi-races, there is not a pornographic imagination of “Mixed.”
This leaves me three options for how to advertise:
White— Partially true. Visibly suspect. Highest likelihood of being seen in a search. Does not deter being asked for more detail.
Asian— Partially true. Visibly suspect. Not the type rice queens look for. High likelihood of exclusion.
Latino— Untrue, thus unethical. Low likelihood of exclusion. Most common assumption, confusion and disappointment when revealed to be wrong. Sorry, I guess.
One of my first scenes was titled “Macho Bromantico” long after we’d filmed it, presumably because my scene partner and I both look Latino. I still cringe over it, but I also have to laugh. I am almost always indexed by rogue porn blogs and streaming sites this way, even though I’ve never indicated anywhere that this is accurate. I’ve never been contacted by any Latin-only studios or asked to play explicitly Latino roles, and would politely decline if I were. But after all the white dick I’ve peddled, flattered, and framed with my own body, it’s still unclear how eligible I am for that upper echelon of desirability, whiteness, and for the preference it guarantees.
At times I am vulnerable to the glimmering vice of comparison, and wonder if my career has moved along more slowly than my peers because of my race. This crosses my mind, but feels dubious, and crosses back, and forth again. I do well for myself, but have never been offered an exclusive contract with any studios, and never felt like I was in high enough demand to negotiate convincingly for better pay and working conditions. Certain studios became bored by me quicker than I expected, and other major ones still have yet to give me a chance. Art and fashion people do not fawn over me, or really notice me at all.
I consider all my other shortcomings or reasons I might not suit somebody’s taste, and this is my least favorite part of sex work, belonging to a catalog of bodies alongside my friends and lovers and fellow hustlers. They insist that the grass is just as brown on their side and remind me about my own successes, but the possibility still paces its way through my mind, whether things would be different if I were just a bit less ethnic looking, a bit more convincingly a boy next door. They don’t ever have to wonder this.
I never needed to explain myself like this until I came to New York. I don’t remember it being so difficult to answer, but until then, my unrepentant faggotry was the greatest difference anybody acknowledged between me and my surroundings. Although white supremacy and anti-blackness stay constant, I think that the rest of the racial schema may vary regionally. Some places, like the Southwest or the Pacific coast, can put me in a familiar pattern of bodies better than others, like the Northeast or the South.
Where I come from everything jumbles and mashes together, and nobody cares long enough to put it into any real order. You see it on the map, housing developments that sprawl across the valley in labyrinths of middle class taste bought by service sector incomes. People live here and leave and live here again, and sometimes they start a family premised not on the school system or the natural beauty but on just how darn cheap it is to have a big house and an easy winter. I grew up with plenty of people who looked like me in Las Vegas— they even call it the Ninth Island. I grew up with a lot of Mormons, too, and maybe that’s why I didn’t date a white guy until after I left.
I started piecing together the Type I was when I took notice of the lovers that white men took after me. With exceptions afforded by light skin and defined muscles, I tend to get fucked by guys who are into small brown boys. Some of them even say so. Why does this lacerate me? These men don’t play fetishistic games with me, don’t fixate upon race-play roles, at least not any that they ever tell me about. They do what has been asked of them all along, branch away from desiring more white men and dignify men of color as desirable. But when I learn this about somebody, it’s hard to feel sexier because of it. Instead, I want to transcend it, to somehow become the universal Type. I feel the vile twitch of competition with other brown boys in the room. Perhaps desire fails to dignify. Perhaps there is still much of me, the white parts, that are still in denial.
I could say I’m Pacific Islander, a Census term that summons a void and maybe some distant drums in the American racial imagination. Or I could say I’m Polynesian, a word that satisfies people as much as it prompts them to look at me as marvelously exotic. I could say I’m Hawaiian, but to the colonized ear— most ears— this sounds not like an ancestry, but a hometown, when it has been far away from me my whole life.
To console myself, I take pleasure in being a rarity, an outlier with better stories than explanations. I look the way I do because of colonialism and militarism, because of wannabe playboys and almost showgirls, because of a birthmark and a circumcision. I am hapa Kanaka, I am mixed, I am mongrelized mutt, but I am not what you think you see. I cannot flatten this, and this is at once a privilege and a problem. You cannot find more of me, and eventually, neither can I.
XO
TY
*PS— I want to clarify that these epigraphs have very simply represented what I have been recently reading, watching, and listening to. They do not necessarily relate to the entry in any direct way except that I consumed the work around the time of writing. They are ambience, as well as light recommendations. This is a book club, after all.