First Post

The rice queen identity category has received widespread notice and acceptance, even among mainstream heterosexuals. My earliest mental image of gay white-asian couple features the wedding planners in the movie Father of the Bride , a movie about as mainstream as it gets. From memory, the white guy was a hysterical queen, while the asian guy nodded a lot and didn’t say much. But a more dramatic example of its popular acceptance only recently came to my attention.

In 1991, residents in Milwaukee found a young asian male, wandering naked and bleeding in the street, highly distressed and unable to speak coherently. Police attend the scene, and speak with an attractive young blond man. The man tells them the boy is his 19yo boyfriend, who is drunk and upset after a domestic argument, and the police escort the boy back to the man’s apartment. In their report, they wrote: “Intoxicated Asian, naked male. Was returned to his sober boyfriend.” Asked by a resident what had been done about the “child”, one of the officers responded, “It wasn’t a child, it was an adult . . . It is all taken care of . . . It’s a boyfriend-boyfriend thing” ( Time , 12 Aug 1991).

The man is Jeffrey Dahmer. He is already known to police as a convicted child molester, but the attending officers never checked. He will be caught when another of his intended victims flees the apartment under identical circumstances; opening the bedroom and closet doors, police will find eleven bodies in various states of decomposition, including the body of 14-year old Konerak Sinthasomphone. The first-attending officers’ failure to perceive the danger to the young boy when they returned him to the custody of a serial killer requires, to put it lightly, some explanation.

I believe two layers of difference, race and sexuality, overlaid the situation in the minds of the police officers, and operated to normalise a scene that should have rung every alarm bell in their professional training. The victim looked very young: well, Asians never look their age. The victim didn’t say anything: well, Asians are quiet and submissive. The victim was disoriented: well, Asians can’t handle their alcohol. There was an attractive, articulate young white man apologising for the inconvenience and explaining it was a relationship dispute: well, then, it’s a private matter. Nothing to see here.

Admittedly, this case study is drawn from the extreme end of the spectrum. My point isn’t that rice queens are like Jeffrey Dahmer. But gay white-asian relationships fit into a popular stereotype that already includes a power differential in favour of the white partner, and the case study illustrates exactly much power the stereotype conducts: it persuaded police officers, people who are suspicious for a living, to overlook a situation that, in hindsight, screamed out for further investigation.

It also shows how the site of the power relation is the privileged capacity of the white partner for speech. Nothing to see here, officer. I draw from it two conclusions, conveniently, the key issues for this new blog – one concerns the need to be suspicious (critically aware) of what rice queens have to say about asian men; the second measures both the importance and difficulty of finding equality between the partners in a cross-cultural relationship.

Source: A Prud’Homme. “Milwaukee Murders: Did they all have to die?” Time 12 Aug 1991.

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