promotion

Even in our thoroughly pornified culture, the idea of an Asian-American professor turned erotic-film auteur might raise an eyebrow. But Darrell Hamamoto is not discouraged by the deficiencies of your imagination. As he'd be the first to tell you, his incongruous identity as an Asian-American studies professor (at the University of California-Davis) and a porn peddler is one of the reasons why he decided to become the next Larry Flynt: mainstream culture has featured so few images of Asian American male sexuality that Western audiences can't picture an Asian man doing the nasty, let alone filming it.
    Hamamoto decided to fight back, guerrilla-style, recruiting a veteran Cambodian-Thai American porn actress, Leyla Lei, and a neophyte Korean American man, Chun Lee, to make Skin on Skin, possibly the first U.S. porno to feature an Asian American woman paired with an Asian-American man.
    "As Marvin Gaye said, we need sexual healing, and I'm the doctor," Hamamoto declares. "I'm trying to do it in the most direct, visible way possible."
    In correspondence, Hamamoto has a fondness for creative spelling and enthusiastic capitalization that's reminiscent of '60s-era radical activism – his universe is populated by "Yella womenz" and agents of "White Supremacist America." "Darrell is creating change and transformation by putting academic theory into practice," says James Hou, a former Hamomoto student who directed Masters of the Pillow, a documentary about the making of Skin on Skin. "He's going back to the spirit of the '60s."
    In conversation, Hamamoto is an equal-opportunity provocateur. No one is safe, including me. During our interview, the professor offers dating advice with his trademark braggadocio and warm, knowing camp: "Don't settle for a pink White man who has more hair on his back than on his head," he advises.
    But some serious arguments lie under that in-your-face facade. The idea for Skin on Skin emerged after Hamamoto asked his Asian American students whom they fantasized about – and learned that white faces and bodies dominated their erotic imaginations. The possible solution to such "psychosexual alienation"? As he wrote in "The Joy Fuck Club," an essay published in a political-science journal, "A Yellow porno practice can help recuperate [an Asian American] sexuality that has been distorted [by] an oppressive system of white racial supremacy."
    Although Asian and Asian American porn actresses like Asia Carrera and Annabel Chong have made their mark in the adult-film industry, Hamamoto points out, their male counterparts are nowhere to be seen. His film is a bit of erotic affirmative action for the Asian American man, overrepresented by sexless movie nerds and chopsocky

Darrell Hamamoto

action heroes: the ludicrous Long Duk Dong of Sixteen Candles, the Jet Li or Jackie Chan action hero who never gets the girl, the Internet nerds, Chinese restaurant dishwashers, Triad members who are too busy making an illegal buck to fuck, even the indolent Chinese lover of Marguerite Duras' The Lover. "I'm not trying to present a ‘strong' image of Asian American men," says Hamamoto. "That's what we are. We know how to fuck. Look how many Asian motherfuckers there are around the world. We outnumber everyone."
    Underlying those stereotypes is a six-inch subtext, of course: are Asian and Asian American men really smaller? This question has irritated many, including the partners of Asian American men who are often interrogated by non-Asian friends as to the heft and skill set of the Asian penis. Asian American men are just as unsettled. In the independent film The Quest for Length, the Asian-American protagonist makes a mold of his erection, then asks passers-by what they think of its size. L.T. Goto, author of the essay The Long and Short of It, conducted an informal poll and found that Asian American men fall solidly in the average range. Asian American poetry-slam performer Beau Sia has made perhaps the loudest statement on this issue. One of his poems, delivered in a hundred-decibel howl, is titled "Asian Men are Hung Like Horses." The Asian American women who consulted on Skin on Skin actually "insisted first and foremost that the male lead have a decent-sized wang," says Hamamoto, "because they were sick of White men trying to entice them with their mythologically monstrous wackers while stating that Asians didn't have the necessary mass to carry the day."
    While he’s done a nice job of tackling the perceived inadequacies of Asian American men, Hamamoto’s less on target in addressing the stereotype of Asian American women as hypersexualized blow-up dolls. "In his focus on Asian men and their oppression, what is he saying about Asian women?" sociologist Laura Grindstaff, a colleague of Hamamoto's, told the Asian Sex Gazette. "Doesn't this feed into stereotypes of her as the sex-kitten prostitute? Maybe pornography is not the best way to address those stereotypes."
    Hamamoto doesn't seem perturbed by the Whoriental myth — he even seems to embrace it. "A strong Asian American woman's sexuality would be what you describe as 'hypersexual,'" he says, "but I consider 'healthy' and free of the strictures placed upon her by the dominant society." An Asian American woman's hyperhot image may grant her a certain amount of sexual cachet, it also is a source of profound irritation, as evidenced by websites like www.bigbadchinesemama.com.
    But Hamamoto seems less willing to topple that stereotype. He even reserves special ire for Asians who

Scenes from Skin on Skin

have sex with whites. Asian American women form a statistically higher number of this group — they marry outside of their ethnic groups far more than Asian American men do. "You are what you fuck," says Hamamoto. "And if you're an Asian American who fucks White people, that's in essence what you are despite physical appearances . . . There is no color-blind anything, even at the level of the emotions."
    For some of the Asian American notables interviewed in Hou's documentary, Hamamoto's formulation is suspect. "It's not working to have Asian men say they are betrayed," said Eric Byler, the Asian-Caucasian director of Charlotte Sometimes. "That's just another bullshit political doctrine where men are telling women what to do."
    Hamamoto’s work often seems trapped in the shifting tectonic plates of societal systems, where sex is dominated by identity politics and not by the actions of two individuals. In the "political" cut of Skin on Skin, Hamamoto runs a CNN-style crawl of Western atrocities in Asia underneath shots of his stars screwing. Instead of the usual blissful moaning is a soundtrack of screams and crying. Asian American sex, Hamamoto seems to indicate, is a powerful defiance of centuries of Western imperialism.
    While Hamamoto makes his point, these issues are more enjoyably raised by Asian Pride Porn, a sharp and funny three-minute film directed by Greg Pak, creator of Robot Stories. A fake infomercial hawking sex scenarios between "smart Asian women" and "sexually empowered Asian men," the short addresses the ways Asians are affected by mainstream sexual imagery with faux-steamy footage of its protagonists rubbing Chinese mustard over each other.
    As Pak explained to the website Goldsea.com, "I've complained for years about the emasculation of the Asian male in American media, but got tired of hearing myself yap about it. Asian Pride Porn is a tongue-in-cheek way of ranting about the problem in a ridiculous way — basically asking if our last resort is to make pornography to get mainstream audiences to see Asian American males on screen in sexually potent roles."
    For Hamamoto, porn really is the answer, despite evidence that Asian American sex may finally be breaking into theaters (See Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, the Asian American-directed Better Luck Tomorrow, Charlotte Sometimes and Robot Stories.) As for the professor's quixotic battle with the no-yellows-allowed porn industry — "My first instinct wouldn't be to attribute [the lack of Asian American male performers] to any preconception that Asian men are asexual," says Pete Warren, associate editor of Adult Video News. After all, the men in porn are almost beside the point. "It's all about the girls," says Warren. "Basically, if a guy can maintain himself throughout the scene and not totally repulse the viewer, and if he's got chemistry with the girl, I don't think anyone would care what the color of his skin is."
    That said, Hamamoto has fulfilled some of his objectives: he has provoked a dialogue and created a markedly different product from Asian porn. As Hamamoto says, "We have a different sexual style than the different Asian groups. You've noticed this, haven't you?" I have. In the (admittedly few) films I've seen, an orange-tanned Japanese man grunts over a plastically prone woman, who is either squeaking out iya (that hurts or is unpleasant) or iie (no). "The girls have these high-pitched, Kewpie-doll voices," Warren says. "It's like they're squeeze toys." After a few viewings, it became more pleasurable for me to stalk through the porno section of my local video store in Tokyo (which was neatly filed according to fetish: "Giant Boobs" or "Rori-con" for Lolita-complex) in order to freak out the male patrons than to pick anything out for myself. While Hamamoto gives some recent Japanese porn a thumbs-up, he criticizes the overemphasis on boring sex-toy play and then baldly concludes, "I need to see my people fuck in English."
    And that's a porn revolution right there. Watching the amiable stars of his film flirt on a couch, play video games, and then get down and nasty, big ol' Lucite heels in the air — is pretty thrilling. Hamamoto's porn might not be the cure-all for Asian American ills, which Hamamoto himself recognizes, but at least it's a provocative start. As he wrote to me, "We need music, literature, dance, food, politics, comix, architecture, pottery, technology, fashion, industrial design, fabrics, and bedding. And did I mention liberating multi-orgasmic Asian American sex?" As much as I have disagreed with this raunchy ronin, I couldn't help liking him and his brash and often right-on observations, and laughed out loud as I read his prescriptive for a Yellow Revolution. In that, we are in full agreement.  n°

©2004 Noy Thrupkaew & Nerve.com