My name is Cory Quach and I’m from Houston, Texas. The story that I want to talk about isn’t so much a specific story, it’s more about my experience as an Asian-American male, growing up in the U.S. and my experience in the gay community and dating in general.
On a lot of occasions, I get a lot of backhanded compliments of how cute I am for an Asian guy. Or I have to be part white or mixed race or something like that, you know, because of the way that I look.
There was this one time I was on a gay dating site, if you can call it dating, but I kind of did this social experiment. I created a profile and I posted my photos and a bio, and in the ethnicity section I put that I was Asian. I did that for about a week and monitored the number of hits I got. And after that I changed that ethnicity section to read “other” or “mixed race” or whatever it was and I noticed there was a remarkable increase in the number of hits I received. The reason that I wanted to do that was because of the experience that I’ve had being a person of color in the gay community, especially in a community that’s used to facing discrimination. You go to online sites like that and there are people out there who outright will say that they do not date Asian guys or they do not date black guys or whatever it is. And I understand preference and that people have certain preferences but when it comes to race, race is such a huge qualifier, that how can you possibly determine what a group of people look like or what you’re attracted to in a group of people, when in reality you haven’t met the whole population in that group.
Living in the society we live in today and being gay and having to face that level of discrimination, and then having to face that discrimination again within the community, it’s just one of those things where you think that, it’s 2009 and something like that doesn’t happen anymore, but it definitely does.
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