From: (defensio libertatis)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.asian.american
Subject: Fetish="Rice Queen" (was Re: Inter-racial dating
Date: 15 Dec 1992 23:43:30 GMT
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: train.ebay.sun.com

Carole E. Mah writes:

>    Yeah, there are a lot of "Rice Queens" just as there are a lot of
> white men who are way into black men because they believe this myth
> about black=bigger. or whatever (?!).
>   But there are also white guys who date asian (& etc) guys because they
> are tired of a lot of the posturing and backbiting among
> the gay white community. 

Carole,

Good point. A gay white guy who dates Asian guys exclusively ("Rice Queen") should
be differentiated IMMEDIATELY from gay white guys who date all kinds of men
and who happen to date an Asian guy.

Personally, I avoid "Rice Queens" for a number of reasons. Many tend to have
over-idealized views of Asian men (e.g. "Asian guys are smooth, sleek, boyish,
exotic, can't get enough of older white men, [blah, blah, blah]" --well you get my drift, sound familiar?) Many tend to look for younger "boys", often recent
emigres or aliens from Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia...I don't want to give
the impression these "Rice Queens" are creeps on the order of being "Mail Order
Daddies" but I just see their reasons for seeking out Asian men as an indication 
of their personal insecurity. I intimidated a few "Rice Queens" --I think they 
thought I was too mainstream and threateningly intelligent for them to deal with--I ceased to be a fantasy and became a complicated human being. 

Many of the relationships I have seen between "Rice Queens" and Asian guys I would 
find too confining--the Asian guy always seems to be the more "feminine", emotionally, culturally disadvantaged (e.g. language barrier, less educated) of the two and more likely to be the one hurt if the "marriage" breaks up. Don't get me wrong. I'm sure many Rice Queen/Rice Boy relationships are "happy" in the basic, traditional sense that both partners get what they need out of the relationship. But man does not live on bread alone...

The white guys I've enjoyed spending time with usually had a history of dating
different kinds of men and shared class similarities with me (e.g. similar 
educational level--college graduate or post-graduate, middle to high income) if that
lends credence to Carole's Class->dating correlation. 

>   We did have this community forum one year where the white folks
> were supposedly going to be honest about fetishizing people of color,
> but all they did was sit around and say "yeah, I know I am supposed
> to be all liberal and understanding about racial stuff cuz i am gay,
> but I am not, I am really racist" but no one at this forum
> seemed to be able to get past the guilt in order to do some
> constructive thinking about how to alleviate racism in the
> gay white community. It was kinda weird.

Yes. Just because people are gay and presumably rejected by straight society
doesn't make them automatically more tolerant of others' skin color.
 
>   Overall, yes, at least here, there is also  a markedly disproportionate
> number of AAM/WM couples.  Probably the same (unexplainable ?)
> phenomenon as the huge number of AAF/WM couples.

I disagree. I don't think the AAM/CM relationship is accorded by whites the same 
degree of status as AAF/CM relationships. In fact, many gay white guys also have
negative stereotypes about Asian men--e.g. nerdy, geeky--though many white guys
still prefer to date Asian men over black men and many asian men are happy to
accomodate them. (By the way, Asian men who date only white men are called
"potato queens" and gay men who like only black men are called "chocolate queens".
Make sense? Kinda cute or maybe not! You decide.)

> Carole
> --- Thelma and Louise in '92! ---
> carole elaine mah
> st701852@brownvm.bitnet
> st701852@brownvm.brown.edu
> Carole_Mah@brown.edu
> ---------------------------------

Thanks for sharing.

-M. Aurelius Insularum

=================================================
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 das war doch klar; hab'n die Wolken nicht gesehn, am
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