He described a curdled version of what it is like to be considered “more American.” “ Your parents must’ve been horrible. “White gay men look at me as a refugee,” said Kenrick Ross, 41, who is Indo-Guyanese and the executive director of the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance. With this urgency to define their own experiences and the beginning of the demise of code-switching, gay Asian-American men are asking questions despite such mixed signals-or perhaps because of them: What does being more American really mean? What is Asian enough? How can queerness reconcile its “no Asians” habit? And, above all, what comes next? Racist tropes are being destabilized, but the question of identity remains murky. This is the same anonymous American public that 42 percent of, when asked in a May survey to name any Asian American, replied with the most popular answer: “I don’t know” (followed by the answers “Jackie Chan” and “Bruce Lee”). That science recirculated among the gay community this year as new light was shed on Asian-American identity amid a national spree of anti-AAPI violence.
Kevin Abstract is Becoming the Role Model He WantsĪ 2019 study-actually a pool of four studies-in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science determined that Asian-American men are seen as “more American” if they are gay.
