The Groom Will Keep His Name by Matt Ortile

Author:Matt Ortile [Matt Ortile]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2020-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

READY, WILLING, AND nineteen, I raised my ass into the air. He told me to keep my voice down; his housemates might hear. It hurt. Not in a bad way or a good way. It just hurt. The next day, on the feast of St. Valentine, my friends and I ate heart-shaped pancakes for brunch at the college dining center. I told them I was glad to get it over with.

It wasn’t exactly my first time. In high school, my boyfriend tried to top me, but either he was too soft or I was too tight, or maybe we couldn’t get the right angle. I tried topping—same issues. We might have just been ill-matched, physically and emotionally. I was disappointed; I really wanted to get fucked, to finally have a sure answer to the question: top or bottom?

Though the first time I bottomed was less than porn-perfect, it gave me assurance that the innate bottomhood I had sensed in myself was true, that being the receptive partner was the right fit. As for whether that was something my body told me or something popular media told my body, it’s unclear which came first.

In puberty, I mapped out my sexual future using those prime barometers of the American erotic imagination: internet porn. In the countless videos to be found without ever paying a dime, there was a clear message: Asians get fucked. We were regularly the ones being penetrated, gagged, subdued in the gay porn I found. (I never watched straight porn; I didn’t bother pretending.) A majority of the men were East Asian, primarily Chinese or Japanese. The only porn I could find with Filipinos were clips so pixelated, they were probably recorded with a flip phone.

At Vassar, a friend taught me how to download porn on a torrent site. What a torrent it was. There were more videos to choose from, but it was more of the same. White men got to be jocks and twinks and daddies and bears and all the overlaps therein. When black men or oft-searched “Latin papis” were given chances to shine, they were often cast as hypermasculine tops, another manifestation of racialized typecasting. (BBC does not stand for British Broadcasting Corporation.) And even in those waves of smut, the majority of videos that featured Asian men still cast them as bottoms.

There are exceptions that prove the rule, of course—most notably the Asian American porn star Brandon Lee. Just as the name evokes a pan-Asian quality, so do his looks. His face is a transmutable brown canvas on which a viewer might project their fantasies of the exotic Asian. His birth name? Michael Hernandez—he’s Filipino. And he’s been very successful, crossing over from niche Asian-only porn productions to more mainstream studios, where he would top white men.

I’ve seen Brandon Lee’s work. He’s inspiring to watch, in possession of a leading-man quality without the requisite cheese-grater cheekbones. Lee is dominant without being violent. In some videos, he even plays the all-American male—no playing up an accent or language barrier as in most porn with Asian players.

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