> [!cite] > Ayres, Tony. ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, *Journal of Homosexuality*, vol. 36, no. 3/4 (1999), pp. 87–97. [https://doi.org/10.1300/J082v36n03_05](https://doi.org/10.1300/J082v36n03_05). > [!abstract] > This article is a stylized blend of personal history and polemical essay which investigates the relationship between race and sexuality. What starts out as a history of the narrator’s experience of being a ‘‘banana’’--yellow (Chinese) on the outside and white (Caucasian) on the inside--becomes a complex exploration of the various ways in which male homosexual desire is constructed and how race is both included and excluded from western constructions of homosexuality. --- ‘Gay bars are places where you are what you look like, even if that is at odds with how you feel about yourself.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 89)]] ‘As it turned out, being Chinese in a gay bar was one of the worst things you could be. At least that was my experience when I came out in the early 1980s.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 89)]] ‘I started to see Chinese people through Caucasian eyes--a small, oily race with noisy table manners. I had an obvious blindspot (i.e., the mirror), but then I kept telling myself I wasn’t Chinese. I shunned the other Asian kids at school. I grew tall on Australian food. I forgot how to speak Mandarin, my first language. I became a ‘‘banana.’’ Yellow on the outside, white on the inside.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 88)]] ‘It was in a gay bar that I learnt, contrary to my university demagogy, that being gay did not give a person privileged insight or an ideological commonality with other lives and oppressions. ‘‘Gay’’ describes our sexual practices, not our attitudes, and certainly not our prejudices.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 89)]] ‘Over the years, I have experienced three typical responses on the gay scene. First, there is overt belligerence: the drunk queens who shout in my face, ‘‘Go back to your own country’’; the tag line at the end of gay personal classifieds--‘‘No Fats, Femmes or Asians’’; the guys who hissed at me in the back room, ‘‘I’m not into Asians.’’ Still, these incidents are rare and easily dealt with. It is racism, fair and square. I shrug my shoulders, put up a barrier of condescension. It is they who have the problem, not me.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 89)]] ‘The second response is the exact opposite of this racist antagonism. It is an attraction to me because of my Asianness, my otherness. Again, this has nothing to do with who I think I am, my individual qualities as a person, or even as an object of desire. It is the fact that I conveniently fit into someone else’s fantasy. Frankly, I would not mind this except that the guys who want me for these reasons tend to be well on the way to their first superannuation cheque.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 89)]] ‘And they expect me to be so flattered by the attention of a white man that I will automatically bend over and grab my ankles. Out of pure contrariness, I refuse to comply … unless, of course, it’s really late and I’m really drunk.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 89)]] ‘For the most part, though, my experience in the gay scene has been characterized by neither outrageous abuse nor outrageous attention. Instead, it has involved a wearing, subtle, almost imperceptible feeling of exclusion.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 89)]] ‘It is the demoralising feeling that I am, in the eyes of the majority of the gay male population, as undesirable as a woman. What is so difficult about this form of exclusion is its elusiveness. I think, ‘‘Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m being paranoid.’’ After all, everyone has to deal with rejection. What makes mine worse than anyone else’s?’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 90)]] ‘This explains why I feel so ill at ease in the gay bar. It is an environment where being physically desirable is closely related to being socially desirable.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 90)]] ‘But it is often the case that not being considered physically desirable also means that you are not deemed worth talking to.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 90)]] ‘My second assumption is that the objects of our desire are not fixed or given but are interactions between personal history and the artifacts of culture. By personal history, I mean the little accidents and events which make up our sexual lives. By artifacts of culture, I mean all the pictures, magazines, porno videos, books, movies, television programs, and so on which are the cultural representations of homosexuality by which we have learnt what ‘‘homosexuality’’ is.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 90)]] ‘Sexuality, as far as I understand it, is fluid. In my case, when I first became conscious of being gay, there was not a particular kind of male body I was attracted to. To be honest, anything with a dick would have done. However, as I became a participant in the gay world, I found myself increasingly influenced by the imagery which determined what was desirable.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 91)]] ‘There is no single Ideal Body. Advertisements are variously filled with blondes, brunettes, latinos, chunky men, lean men. But the closer you look at what is considered ‘‘sexy,’’ ‘‘hunky,’’ ‘‘desirable,’’ the more you realize that there is a limited range of parts which make up Ideal Bodies. The recurring themes are youth, masculinity and race.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 91)]] ‘The act of making the Ideal Body concrete by giving it physical expression—whether through photographs, films or live shows—is a political act.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 91)]] ‘If our sexual fantasies, at least in part, are populated by endlessly renewable Ideal Bodies, how can we Asian men see ourselves as desirable? This is true not only for Asian men, but for all excluded categories: old men, fat men, short men, Aboriginal men.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 91)]] ‘The sexually marginalized Asian man who has grown up in the West or is western in his thinking is often invisible in his own fantasies. Our sexual daydreams are populated by handsome Caucasian men with lean, hard Caucasian bodies. This creates the phenomenon of the Asian man who does not find other Asian men attractive.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 91)]] ‘When I am out cruising, I do not look other Asian men in the eye. And they do not look at me. It is a mutual acknowledgment and a mutual elision of desirability: ‘‘I’m not interested in you, you’re not interested in me.’’ Often in these cruising situations in bars or saunas, there’s a sense of competition between us. We are competing for the attention of the limited number of Caucasian men who desire Asian men. Intellectually I know that this inability to feel attracted to other Asian men is a form of internalized racism. I know that at some basic psychic level I am unable to come to terms with my own body. But I have never known what to do about this. My dick has a mind of its own, and it does not subscribe to politically correct views.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 91–92)]] ‘But you cannot point a finger and say, ‘‘This man is a racist because he doesn’t want to sleep with me.’’ I don’t think people consciously choose their desires.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 92)]] ‘This is not surprising in a country like Australia with a long history of institutionalized racism. From the early 1900s when the first legislative act of the newly formed Federal Parliament of Australia was an immigration policy which actively excluded all racial/ethnic groups other than Caucasians, the Chinese in Australia have been marginalized and demonized.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 92)]] ‘Large numbers of Chinese, most from the southern province of Guanghzou, had come to Australia in the middle decades of the nineteenth century to work on the Australian gold fields.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 92)]] ‘After the Korean War, the general perception of the Chinese was equally negative. They were the ‘‘Yellow Peril,’’ on the verge of storming the vast underpopulated Australian continent from the north. Australia was a European outpost precariously perched in the underbelly of the world. Asians in Australia, no matter how long they had lived in the country, were viewed with suspicion, to the extent of being investigated by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation during the anti-communist era of the government of Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies in the 1950s. ‘‘Made in Taiwan’’ and ‘‘Made in China’’ were symbols of an inferior product.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 93)]] ‘Inevitably, these deep-seated socially engineered prejudices against Asians have had their corollary on a psycho-sexual level.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 93)]] ‘An attempt to promote a desirable Asian Body was made in December 1991 by the Sydney-based gay lifestyle magazine *Campaign*. For the first time in its 20-year history *Campaign*’s editor placed an Asian model on the cover.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 93)]] ‘One of the peculiarities of race relations in Australian, as distinct from race relations in the United States and Europe, is a lack of identification between minority racial groups, e.g., between Aboriginal and Asian groups.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 94)]] ‘I am not familiar with all of OG’s output over the past few years and the following comments are based upon issues that I purchased in 1993. What struck me about the representation of Asian men in these issues was how ‘‘feminine’’ they were.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 94)]] ‘In gay media photos of Caucasian men the focus of attention is often the man’s erect penis, the most aggressive symbol of masculinity. In contrast, the focus in photos of Asian men is the curve of the body, a typically feminine emphasis. This representation shows the Asian male as passive and subservient. Mirroring this feminine image is the stereotypical Asian/Caucasian relationship. In this the western man is older, the Asian man is younger. The western man is wealthy, the Asian man is poor. The western man is sexually active, the Asian man is sexually passive.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 94)]] ‘Older gay Caucasian men would frequent the sexual meccas of Bangkok and Manila to buy sexual favors from younger, financially destitute boys. Not all of them are the ‘‘sexual predators’’ and ‘‘pederasts’’ that the scare-mongers among the straight press would have us believe them to be. Many have come out late in life. Coming onto the youth-oriented gay scene in their forties or fifties, they find that there is little place for them. It is often easier for them to have relationships with younger Asian men. They feel that they have something to offer these younger men.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 94–95)]] ‘Caucasian men primarily attracted to Asians are called ‘‘rice queens.’’’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 95)]] ‘Because of the lowly status of the Asian within the gay community, the term ‘‘rice queen’’ is a term of disparagement. The implication is that ‘‘rice queens’’ are not desirable enough to cut the mustard in the mainstream scene so they have to resort to having sex with Asians.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 95)]] ‘But in reality no relationship is equal. Men are not equal to women; men from different classes within the same society are not equal to each other; and neither are men from different cultures and societies equal. There are exchanges of power in all relationships.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 95)]] ‘In many economic and cultural ways, Australia is becoming a part of Asia and the gay scene in this country is following that trend.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 95)]] ‘In Australian gay venues it is now increasingly common to see young Asian men with young Caucasian men, something which was almost unheard of as little as five years ago, or Asian men with other Asian men (called ‘‘sticky rice’’), equally unheard of in the recent past. Young gay Asian men are forging new spaces in which to explore their identity and sexuality.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 96)]] ‘Last year I went back to China for the first time as an adult to do some research on a television miniseries I was working on for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about the Chinese in Australia. The great irony of that journey was that, having decided to at last embrace my country of origin after years of denial, no-one in China thought of me as Chinese.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 96)]] ‘I had sex with a Chinese man for the first time in my life. It was in a gay sauna in Hong Kong called ‘‘Game Boy.’’ All I ever found out about him was that his name was Robert. He was tall and solid--a physical type I like. Touching him was a foreign sensation. I am used to the touch of Caucasian skin--hairier. Chinese skin is smooth, yet there is also a hardness to it, a polished ivory muscularity. I found myself giving way to it, being swept away by a desire which I had never experienced before.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 96)]] ‘It was desire which had nothing to do with politics. He did not want me because I was Chinese. I did not reject him because he was Chinese. We just wanted each other. It was simple. For a brief moment I felt that for the first time in my life I understood what desire was about. And in that understanding, there was the most exquisite feeling of liberation.’ [[Ayres, ‘China Doll–The Experience of Being a Gay Chinese Australian’, 1999|(Ayres 1999, 96–97)]]