Eastern European Porn, Ronald Regan, and the Asian Effect

Is it an accident that Asian pornography became popular in the post-Regan aftermath? Is it an accident that Eastern European boys became commodified in gay pornography after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

With the rise of the white, gay, gentrification and solidification of a unified queer identity for men, came combat with what Nicholas Radel calls “transnational gayness.” The idea of transnational gayness is a sugary, dogmatic principle that is a “a celebration of gay identity as gay identification with the other.” The men who mouth these political clichés insist that gayness itself can transcend national and geographic distinctions. Have we learned nothing from Gloria Anzaldua? who once said even the term queer erases our differences and marginalizes our individual struggles. Transnational gayness conflates gender, which is plastic, with nationality. Gender can be attached to individual representatives of distinct geographic locations, but unlike nationality, gender can change, mature, regress and implode.

Gay men obviously don’t take the idea of transnational gayness to seriously. Pornography clearly demonstrates the West’s problematic representation of Eastern Europeans as the exotic-white-other, in search of identity, shape and focus, given to them by the gaze of the white westerner. In Out of Athens the protagonist randomly meets a Greek tour guide who cant actually speak English, but who takes him on a tour. Boy (1995), Viz (Tom Kurthy, 1995), and Sauna Paradiso (George DuRoy, 1994) feature young men from the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe and take place in the friendly yet foreign setting of the bathhouse (an originally European locale still foreign to most heterosexual men and indeed many gay men) (we wont even get into how young these boys look either). In My Polish Waiter the protagonist reaches out to a nubile boy from the service staff, who again speaks little English. This exoticism is emphasized by his performing an exotic polish dance (!). Is this transnational gayness? Puh-leese.

Radel suggests that “[gay] sexuality itself, as an epistemological category, needs to be understood as a significant factor in the crisis of representation occasioned by the collapse of communism.” “The films portray these boys as having been there all along, waiting for the Western viewer to find them wanting him. Their space is his space, the space of the transnational gay man.”

The point I want to make here is that the collapse of the iron curtain has lead to the reshaping of gay male desires. In the aftermath of the fall of communism, the U.S. has looked down at Eastern Europe as the locus for chaos and confusion. Sexual dogmatists have used the concept of transnational gayness to ameliorate the relations between east and west and in doing so have simply reified the west’s appetite for a sexual other.

Radel elaborates: “Within a post-Cold War framework… pornography is tremendously recuperative. Nationality, politics, and sexuality combine here to legitimate an economic relationship between East and West… the utopian vision of gay transnationality that energizes these films, a vision that is important to contemporary constructions of same-sex desire, obscures the extent to which the production of gay films about Eastern Europe is part of a larger, capitalist expansion into Eastern Europe in the post-Cold War period.”

But we are here to talk about Asian-Americans, not Eastern-Europeans.

If the obedient, sexually curious woman was the stereotype for Asian women before the Vietnam war, the obedient sexually starved woman was the stereotype after the Vietnam war. During the war the sex industry provided Vietnam with a new source of income. The business carried over to other south Asian territories, particularly Thailand, where they still flourish today. But the Asian American identity would not conform to the obedient prostitute stereotype up until the Regan administration.

In America Asian Americans were used as the puppets for racial politics form the 1960’s. In the light of the civil rights movement, Asian families were seen as ‘model minorities’ that had overcome financial strife. The rhetoric was: if they can do it why can’t you? When in 1965 The Negro Family publication came out it accused black families of experiencing financial subordination due to “a lack of family values.” Asians were the opposite, according to conservative pundits. Asian success sotires popped up in The New York Times Magazine and The U.S. News and World Report.

That was during the Johnson administration. During the Regan administration, innovative technology caused massive job cuts, the conservatives insisted that “a return to traditional values [was] a cure-all for these socioeconomic problems” (Shims 396). “Vietnamese shrimp wholesalers, Korean greengrocers, and Chinese computer whizzes were recognized as the epitome of ‘family values.” Once again conflating good obedient Americans and Asian race identity.

Transnational gayness in Asian pornography has flowered just as much as it had with Eastern European porn. Gay men have created other of the nubile Asian boy as a reaction to the praise they were given.