As a young man, as a Korean-American in a brilliantly white town at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, I often wanted to step out of my own skin.
"No, but where were you born?" my classmates asked me.
"Where are you originally from?"
"Idaho," he insisted through gritted teeth.
At times like this, I wanted a second skin that I could change for mine.
Like other queer people of color, I soon began to face the double burden of queer aversion and racism.
At school, I wondered: what does love look like for someone like me, probablythe only gay Asian in town?
In seventh grade, after another streak of sleepless nights, I thought I'd be better off dead.
Wiping away my tears, I looked up at the sky and prayed:
"Make me straight or make me white. Choose one."
I longed to have the privileges of being straight or white because I wasn't just gay and Asian; He was also a fetishist.
In me were stirred strange desires that were repugnant, perverse and unnameable, far beyond the more well-known indecencies that were condemned from the pulpits of my hometown in Colorado.
That's why I begged for help from a God I had long since stopped believing in.
If I were straight or white, I could come out of that fetish—a "second" closet—and find a way.
It would be "acceptable" in one of the crucial ways to be acceptable in the United States.
But my status as a triple minority seemed to me a joke in bad taste, a death sentence.
After all, on gay dating apps, East Asians routinely face a dehumanization that reduces us in the eyes of others to nothing more than featureless clones.
Either we receive racist treatment from people who warn that they "don't want Asians" or "rice growers," or we get sycophantic treatment, which can be worse:
Yellow fever, the dreaded Asian fetish.
"Fetish" is a rare word.
We use it to refer to the benign passion people feel for leather or lingerie, feet or earlobes, love for certain inanimate objects or body parts.
But we also use it in the context of racial fetishism, that empty adulation that turns people of color into curiosities and turns us into trophies, making it hard for us to trust people's affection.
An example:
"I love Chinese food," whispered a handsome white man after we kissed in a Manhattan gay bar.
I pulled away and escaped home, too tired to explain why.
"I've never been with an Asian," said another as I pulled toward him.
I reddened with rage imagining him posting a photo of us with a sushi emoticon next to my username, as I had once seen a white man do with a hapless Asian on Twitter.
Others were more subtle.
I chatted with a witty conversationalist who looked like a good match, also white, before I stumbled upon his Instagram and found nothing but shirtless selfies with East Asian men on his profile.
Again deceived.
In the novel "Disorientation" by Elaine Hsieh Chou, the protagonist, an American with Taiwanese ancestry, begins to wonder if her white fiancé really loves her after discovering that all her previous partners were Asian.
"The sad thing is, Ingrid," says her Korean-American friend, "you'll never know for sure."
I was lucky that the gods of sexuality, by coining a queer Asian fetishist, anointed me with a fetish funny enough to give me an escape from the cruelty of this racist reality.
Latex fetishism is a predilection for tight, shiny, slippery, elusive and sensual rubber clothing.
Available in every color imaginable, latex has captured the imagination of fashion celebrities and cyberpunk cinema.
But most of the uninitiated have a hard time understanding why we would wear something that doesn't allow the skin to breathe... Not at all.
It's hard to express the electrifying sensation of a finger skating on the taut surface of latex, or the warm grip of a rubber hand on the back.
Many "gomistas", as we call ourselves, prefer the enveloping stimulus of whole-body compression, sometimes with hoods and gloves, changing porous and marked skin for immaculate and feigned skin.
However, latex's allure also comes from the mischievous nirvana of consensual dehumanization:
The desire to become featureless and faceless, to fade into the bliss of the tight embrace of latex.
It offers the opportunity to become, for a moment, someone different, something different.
A second skin.
There were times in my 20s, when I ventured into the sordid depths of the gay fetish world, when I wished I could disappear into that second skin forever.
"You can't call yourself an American," a white man at a fetish club in Berlin told me, grabbing me by the shoulders and pushing me so hard it took my breath away.
"You have to call yourself Chinese or Japanese."
Little did I realize then that some still considered me so inhuman that I didn't even deserve to be called "Chinese" or "Japanese."
"You can't be in this elevator with us," commented a drunken white man in a cheap harness at one of America's biggest gay fetish events, pushing me to the ground.
I didn't realize then that this is what they call a hate crime.
"I just wanted to see if the stereotype was true," an older white man told me at a leather bar in New England after bending down to pat my rubber-covered groin.
Then I didn't realize that's what they call sexual assault.
Over time, whether the indignities occurred in a schoolyard, in a gay bar, or in a fetish club, they were mixed into a toxic stew, and it wasn't long before I avoided dating altogether, as so many queer people of color do to avoid racial fetishism or hatred.
I started looking for men I already knew in my social circles.
I'm not sure if it's because of my experiences with racism or despite them that I can only feel physical attraction to someone after feeling an emotional connection.
My first boyfriend and I were close friends before we started flirting and then dating.
He didn't like latex.
I stayed with him because he never asked me where I was from... originally. And I never asked him, a biracial black man, any of that either.
I like to think that's why he stayed with me too.
My second boyfriend, a fellow rubber bandist, was the kind of lover who would comb my hair with his hands and adjust my latex to make sure I looked my best before I went out.
The only photo of us, long lost, shows us in latex suits of contrasting colors (he in a white surf suit; me in a dark blue and green body) and our arms on each other's shoulders.
I stayed with him because he never asked me those questions either.
But I was constantly worried about being enough like her partner, which actually meant being enough like her Asian partner.
I started thinking in circles:
Does he, a Latino man, find me really attractive, or is it just a ruse to test an Asian?
Have you ever asked me about my ethnicity because you are hiding your fetishism for Asians?
Would people think I'm just a case of sympathy?
Would they think I was paying him?
At some point, my paranoia not only ended our relationship, but overwhelmed my own love of latex to the point that I didn't wear it for an entire year.
During our last online chat, I told him that I was taking away more than I could give him, that he was hopelessly broken.
All for being Asian.
"I've never seen you like this," he wrote.
"I don't care that you're Asian. I love you for who you are, and nothing more."
Soon after, we broke up. I can't blame him.
I had tied my own worth to the contempt others felt for my skin, and I was letting it suffocate me.
Although I couldn't fix society, I could get out of my own way.
With help, I healed the injuries to my self-esteem.
I looked for art and media in which I could see myself, and I started creating my own.
I forged a community with other queer people of color and fetishists.
I practiced seeing my skin as dignified, visible and perfect.
I recovered my sexuality and my sensuality.
After a year of shunning latex, I now wear it again almost every day, but only for myself, not as a substitute skin, but as a glowing continuation of my skin, something I can celebrate and love.
I no longer want to wrap myself in a second rubber skin to hide my original skin.
I pride myself on both:
Biodegradable, sensual and essential to who I am.
That's the best gift of all, plus another brightly colored latex suit, of course.
Although I have my favorites, I am trying a new color.
This time, I choose yellow.
c.2023 The New York Times Company
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