Guy Talk

A. Magazine
March/April 1997

Round up six diverse, dynamic, and talkative Asian American men on a cold December day. Lock them into a conference room for three hours with a list of provocative questions, a tape recorder, and just enough liquor to get the answers out quicker. The topics? Self-image, stereotypes, relationships, family, and -- oh, did we forget sex? What do you get? Bold, courageous, and sometimes outrageous talk about what makes Asian American men tick today. Here is a (very edited) record of their discussion.

The men:

STEVE 23, gay Chinese/German American computer consultant

VICTOR 35, straight, divorced, Indian/Trinidadian American schoolteacher and diversity trainer

GREG 23, straight Chinese/Cambodian American dancer

RICHARD 24, straight Filipino American performance artist

ANDREW 26, straight Chinese American reporter

CHIRS 26, gay Korean American graduate student and teacher

CHRIS: I have to say that this is not a common thing for me, to be sitting around, chatting about Asian male issues with other Asian males. Much of the milieu I find myself in now, be it in in my academic discipline, which is political science, or my activism around gay issues, most of the faces are white. So this is somewhat of a new experience.

VICTOR: I find myself hungering for the experience of being around Asian men. It's not typical for me, since I came to the U.S. without my family to go to college, I've been in relative isolation from Asian communities. Being around Asian men and exploring issues of identity together has helped me find a way back to a part of myself I don't think I consciously acknowledged before two or three years ago. It's changed my thinking, the way I do things, the people I seek out for friends, the kinds of decisions I make at work.

STEVE: You mentioned having a racial identity with your family. My mom is white and my dad is Asian, so I can't really look to my parents for that kind of identity. When I was in college, joining the Asian Student Union, they'd all be walking around talking in Mandarin and Cantonese, and they wouldn't talk to me. I can't speak it, because my dad never spoke it to my mom, so they never spoke it to me, and I never learned it.

RICHARD: Do you think yourself to be more Asian or American, or do you even think about it like that?

STEVE: I feel like I didn't have the option of choosing one or the other, although growing up, I felt the desire to be less Asian and to run away from Asian identity. Until I was in the seventh grade, when I heard my friends, who were all white, talking about a "chink factor." They turned to me, saying, "Oh, I didn't mean to offend you. Your mom is Korean, right?" I thought, "What are you talking about?"

ANDREW: I was born here, and growing up, there were some Asians I knew and was friends with. But I think in the overall scheme of things, I probably feel more comfortable with mixed company, actually, with people from different backgrounds. When I'm with a lot of other Asians, I feel a little bit uncomfortable. If I go to one of those big Asian parties, I feel like that's not who I am.

VICTOR: I too, am highly assimilated by virtue of language, cultural style. I've adapted to the dominant culture and to what the messages have been in terms of how to be, what you need to do to be successful. After college, I married a white woman. We're divorced now, but I can certainly say that I was in love with her. But what I see now, in retrospect, is that I was not fully me. It was sort of a chameleon act, taking on an identity that made me palatable, culturally, to her family. Religion was a big issue between us. She was Christian and I had always resisted Christianity, because I always felt that Christianity and colonization had gone together. I don't regret the experience. I love the child from our marriage, and I am raising him together with her. But trying to make that work, living with a European American woman again, I'm not sure I would be able to make that choice.

STEVE: People talk about the gay closet, but a lot of us had to deal with accepting and identifying as Asian. I went through it myself, wanting to be white and demolish all aspects of my being half-Asian. And for me, having a not so great relationship with my Dad, who is Asian, and just rejecting him and all he represents. And going into college and saying I don't want to be part of a ghettoized Asian Students Union. I was on the crew team for a while, and it was all white. But at some point I realized I couldn't be all white. I tried to, and it didn't work. What helped me, coming out of the Asian closet, was coming out of the gay closet. From my upbringing, I'm only attracted to white people. I went to San Francisco and then I heard about "rice queens," people who are only attracted to Asians. Seeing that there are people out there who solely look for Asians, and reevaluating myself along with my gay identity, I came to terms with part of my Asian identity. I think that's important when it comes to your identity, to come to terms with who you are attracted to.

ANDREW: It seems like attraction is something you can't control at all. But a real turning point for me was when I spent a semester in Hong Kong with my mother's family. Before that, I had mostly gone out with Caucasian women and a few Asian women when I got to college. But in Hong Kong, all the images, the advertising, the media, it's 99 percent Asian. And all the ideals of beauty and femininity, it's Asian. Without even thinking about it, when I came back to school, I became a lot more attracted to Asian women and since then I've almost exclusively dated Asian.

CHRIS: I am attracted to who I am attracted to, and that is nothing I have control over. In the gay male community, Asian males are either non-existent or exoticized and very submissive. The amount of self-hatred I can now retrospectively see I was exhibiting, in terms of having a very viscerally uncomfortable reaction to other gay Asian males, or being approached by, or hit on, by other Asian men, only just recently, the last three or four years, have I begun to understand that much of this aversion was culturally conditioned. I think in terms of what I now find attractive, it has changed a little bit.

VICTOR: I am actually sort of in a bizarre period of my life where I am no longer finding white people beautiful. It's the strangest thing. I'm on the subway or the bus, walking on the street, and saying, these people are so ugly. It's not coming from my head; it's coming from somewhere else. I'mlooking at East Asian women, South Asian women, black women, and I'm discovering a whole repertoire of beauty that either I was blind to or no one taught me about or it was just beaten out of me.

STEVE: It's funny. I find that same process, looking at women. I'm not sexually attracted to women. But at this point in my life, I really see different types of beauty, whereas before I was totally driven by the media conception that only white, full-breasted, skinny women are beautiful or should be in magazines.

GREG: I'm not sure exactly when, but I also began to rethink what and whom I found attractive. On the other hand, I also feel frustrated as an Asian man, because I feel like it's not reciprocated. I feel that Asian women, in this society, are privileged above Asian men; there's a mainstream acceptance of Asian women in the media that men don't have. I feel that a lot of Asian women are not sensitive to that. My sister once said to me that she would not date an Asian man because they are either geeks or assholes. I think that's a cover for denial, self-loathing, for the desire to assimilate, not to face the pain of being Asian. On the other hand, it's a valid cry against the heritage of sexism that is in Asian families and that a lot of Asian men don't have to deal with.

ANDREW: Chris, do you date Asian men?

CHRIS: I've only dated white men. I can only speak as an observer, but the vast majority of gay Asian men I have seen primarily like white men. I think the highly attractive, most eligible gay Asian men, are not looking for another gay Asian man, but rather are hoping or waiting or searching for their white prince to come.

STEVE: From what I see, most gay people are white, so it's a little harder to find partners of your own race.

RICHARD: Do you find Asian men attractive?

STEVE: There's a difference between what I could see as attractive or what I'm attracted to. I've never dated or had any relations with anyone who is Asian, but I've found something interesting. I think all the guys whom I have had relationships with have never before dated an Asian guy, but after me, dated an Asian guy.

ANDREW: So you kind of break them in. It's funny, because I've always wished that there were white women who want to objectify Asian men. But on the flip side, it really wrangles me when I see Asian women who only go out with Caucasian men. On a personal level, it feels like a rejection, and it's deflating, because it's something that you want, but it also raises some of those issues about self-hatred. And it's hard to separate your own feelings from judging women and saying that they are not in touch with their feelings.

STEVE: There's such a heavy influence of media, in print and advertising, the acceptance of Asian women and the lack of acceptance of Asian men, just sticking us more into closets and desexualizing us. It seem like we are kind of getting into the range of accepting Asian males. We have one Asian male model who we see in those magazines. But also, there are some Asian descended men out there like Keanu Reeves and Dean Cain, but they are very white-looking, and they don't identify at all with their Asian culture. They are accepted as sex symbols, but not at all for being Asian. People don't even know.

ANDREW: It seems like some of the ideas of masculinity are getting a little flexible. But I think overall, the thrust for a long time has been to feminize Asian men. That's something I always had a chip on my shoulder about. I felt like I had to overcompensate, to prove that I could be assertive and play sports and be a ladies' man. That's something I am coming to terms with, but something that I overcompensated for for a long time.

CHRIS: Just being conscious of the fact that I was overcompensating, I began to think that perhaps it was not really necessary. I didn't have to prove anything to the partners I was with. I can't be held accountable for the rest of the white world's preconceived, heinous stereotypes. I have to look at individuals and trust that they are interested in relationships based on reciprocity and equality.

VICTOR: I've compensated by trying to develop in such a way that I'd be valued for my skill, because I couldn't be valued for my might. I hated the locker room, and I still hate it. I think it has to do with being in a culture where big is better. I think big is better, but less is more. Automatically, if you walk into the locker room and have a smaller penis than the guy next to you, you are inferior. I don't get it.

STEVE: Just being Asian and being in the lockerroom, people see you're Asian and then look to see if that's true. It's one thing we all have to deal with.

GREG: I know that with the last woman who I dated, I was very conscious of being a good lover, sensitive, always listening. It was important to me that she always had an orgasm when we had sex. I felt like there was something to be proven of Asian men. Her previous relationship was with a white man, and I felt, like, I've always been tempted to ask her to compare us. Going back to what you brought up, I feel like in a sense it is true that Asian men probably have smaller penises than black men. So, is the point to argue against that? We shouldn't let it be the thing that breaks us. There needs to be a redefinition of what masculinity is. I remember a performance I did in the nude, which was about beauty, physical beauty as a human being. I realize that when I go out there, some people who come to the performance with the belief that Asian men have small penises will look at me and say, "It's true." I don't know what to do with that. I just kind of held my breath and went on.

VICTOR: I'm sometimes in the locker room. I go in there and I change and shower. And I, like you said, hold my breath. I know that I'm challenging myself every time I do it, to overcome a certain sense of inferiority. Part of me believes it's a myth, that I need not have it. But somehow it's in me. It got put there, and I don't exactly know where it came from.

CHRIS: It has struck me, in some ways, that Asian American men, both gay and straight, are natural allies. They would want to, in terms of interests, act in concert in a movement for sexual liberation, in terms of what we can do to transform masculinity. It seems a lot of what is psychically oppressive to Asian men, namely the whole sexual hierarchy, is based upon very rigid gender roles.

STEVE: I think what's important for the future is our representation in the media. I think with just being out there, people like Michael Chang or Keanu Reeves, acknowledging that they're Asian or of Asian heritage. Having more people in that scene. People seeing Asian men as normal and attractive is extremely important. We have to force ourselves not to accept the passivity we've been accustomed to.

Response to the roundtable was so enthusiastic, we decided to do it again. This time we wanted to delve even deeper than the last three hours allowed. Holiday-season obligations, unfortunately, kept Chris and Andrew from participating in Round Two. But Steve, Greg, Victor and Richard were joined by a newcomer, Dave, 27, a straight, Chinese American advertising creative director and filmmaker.

RICHARD: The first thing we talked about last time was what it feels like to be in a room with Asian men.

DAVE: I can tell you how I feel. I was born in Spanish Harlem and I was raised in Queens. I had a very diverse group of friends, more black friends than I had white, and more white friends than Chinese, Korean, or Japanese. But ironically, my closest friends growing up were Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.

STEVE: Has your sexual experience been limited to one race?

DAVE: Nope. But I've had two relationships in the past, two major relationships. One lasted almost four-and-a-half years. The first was to an English/Italian woman, the second was Italian/Czech. They were very intense relationships. Each time, I had problems with their parents because of my ethnicity.

STEVE: Did that make you feel like you didn't want to be Asian?

DAVE: Actually, in no instance did I feel like I didn't want to be Asian. I mean, I'm an avid basketball player, and I always feel that I'm the last one to be picked. But it helped me. I became stronger that way, I played harder and I got better. One guy nicknamed me Brandon Lee, another called me The Crow. You can laugh at it. You can look at it in two ways, as an insult or as a compliment. And the way that they meant it is as a genuine compliment.

GREG: Could you flip backwards and dunk?

DAVE: Naw. I tried that, and it didn't work.

VICTOR: We're talking about Asian men's issues and Asian male sexuality, and I'm saying to myself, I don't really have a clear concept of that. I mean, in many ways, I have found South Asian male sexuality, especially in South Asian films, somewhat laughable, or sentimental. I don't think I really have a South Asian male hero that I can say embodies sexuality, embodies maleness. In all parts of Asian, in the imagery and the literature, it's highly erotic and sexual. But somehow its influence and impact on us as Asian men in the West doesn't seem to be there.

DAVE: I read somewhere that like, only 3 percent of the American population is Asian. And I know through doing advertising that there's practically no advertising done towards Asians. I mean, I've worked on commercials, and if you're lucky if you see two black people in them. I modeled for two-and-a-half years. It was very hard, my first year, to get work. You take underwear advertising, any type of sexual advertising, take Tyson for instance. You have yet to see him do one piece of underwear modeling for Ralph Lauren. But you've seen Marky Mark. In general, the underwear models are all white.

VICTOR: It's actually startling, to wonder why there are no images in this culture of Asian men. I mean, let's face it, we don't sell. That's the message.

STEVE: They don't put us out there, so we don't sell.

VICTOR: But why aren't we out there? The Asian consumer is very important. I mean, if Asian males were perceived as having some kind of sexual power, we would be up there.

DAVE: I think the reason why we're ignored is because we're perceived to have no voice, politically speaking, socially. We may be out there, we may be spending the money. You've got a lot of young Asian Americans who are into fashion; they've got Calvin Klein, they've got Hilfiger, Polo Sport, all this other stuff. Most of them are probably first generation. They're looking not toward that Asian image, but toward that American image, which reinforces the thinking that we don't need to sell them this, because they're not buying it themselves.

GREG: The refusal to perceive Asian men as sexual beings, I think, has important political consequences. Sexuality itself is so much connected to power. The way white, dominant culture attributes sexuality to blacks and to Asians is indicative of how it tries to deal with people in terms of power. In war, soldiers kill the men and rape the women. I think it is an explanation of why Asian women are appropriated, or accepted, in mainstream culture and not Asian men. Because if you deny them sexual power, you deny them power, period.

RICHARD: There were those postcards a couple of years ago. On the front, there were Asian men basically wearing nothing except an American flag draped across their private parts, and it said, "Made in the U.S.A." It created a lot of uproar, but it made me realize: Why do we have to compare ourselves to an image of a tall, white person with a big dick, who has blue eyes and blond hair, whatever? I mean, that's nothing I am. I was figuring out for myself that being dark, having black hair, being short, brown, was beautiful. I never considered that while I was growing up.

DAVE: One day, it was my friend's bachelor party, and we were in a strip club. This one waitress came up to us, my friend and I, and said, "You know, you're really not bad-looking for an oriental man." I remember that I stared at her right in the face. There must have been a minute of silence. And she said, "You know, a thank you will suffice." I was saying to myself, how many bouncers are in here? Maybe I could just smack this girl.

VICTOR: I think there is a deep self-hatred that Asians in this country carry around. I think it's more desirable for upwardly-mobile, middle-class Asian Americans to assimilate, to get out, not to stay ethnic. You've got to put as much business as you can between that ethnic identity and yourself if you're going to somehow make it in America.

RICHARD: Do you think that happened to you? I mean, in marrying...

VICTOR: Oh, absolutely. The fact that I married a white woman, it was proof that I arrived. I know that by marrying a white American woman, I was being validated as a man. It wouldn't have been the same kind of validation if I had been with a first-generation South Asian woman who was going to Queens College and living in Jackson Heights.

GREG: I'm thinking about my father, and in terms of sexuality, I don't think I've ever tried to learn what it is to be a man from him. I really tried to learn not to be what he was.

VICTOR: I did not think of my father as a particularly masculine man. He didn't embody the qualities I thought a man should have. He was short, he was soft-spoken, he would avoid any kind of physical confrontation. Now I believe he actually believes in non-violence as a philosophical and spiritual principle. What I got from him was a certain pride in knowing that there was a higher ground. I did take that from him, and I essentially live by that principle myself. There is a different way to think about your relationship to the world, to nature, to other people, and to your body. The spiritual practices are ancient and run deep in the culture. That is my strength as an Asian male. I still have to battle this other fear, this other sense of inadequacy. I don't have what it takes by those standards, to punch the other guy out, to smack somebody if they insult my girlfriend.

STEVE: My dad ran into problems when he was dating my mom. My Asian grandfather had called up my white grandparents when my dad was first going to meet them, and told them before he got there, that my dad was just using her for sex until he found an Asian girl. He got there and said, "Hi." And they said, "GET OUT!" That's the time he rejected his parents and kind of denied his Asian heritage.

RICHARD: How was that growing up? You had an Asian dad and a white mom.

STEVE: The story of their meeting is very interesting. My dad's a doctor and my mom's a nurse. She was pushing along this corpse at the morgue. It started to slide off, and she tried to grab it, but it was this big, fat guy. So he put the fat guy back on the table and got her number. When he called up the nursing dormitory, the women said, "Sheila, Chinaman's on the phone." He asked her out and she said okay. He said, "I have a friend, too." She asked the others, "Does anyone want to double date?" "Another Chinaman?" they asked. "He's Jewish," my dad said. Both of the couples who went on that double date got married.

RICHARD: It must have been much fiercer for your dad then than now.

STEVE: They were rejected from apartments. People would stare at them when they were on the street. People would ask her if she needed help. They would ask her where she borrowed her children from. "Did you get these kids from the Indian reservation?" I pretty much saw in my father a lot of the negative qualities I saw in men in general. He grew up smack-in-the-face with anti-Asian racism, and he fought it really hard. He became very macho, aggressive. He'd just come home and get angry and yell, throw things, hit us, or go to sleep. And he didn't treat my mom very well. So I projected onto him all the negative qualities of a man, and from that I projected that into being Asian. I just looked to myself, to my friends or to the movies to see that I thought of as being good in a man. So I pretty much took the moral highground from the macho aggressiveness and said I was above that. I made my own life.

VICTOR: My father wanted authority at home. My mother was second fiddle to him, no question about it. He definitely inherited that from his father, that you have to be in charge and you have this authority given to you by god, practically, because you're the man.

STEVE: I see that is pervasive in Asian society, and I don't think that's necessary anymore.

GREG: I felt a lot of anger towards my father. I saw his sexism and how it hurt my mother, and I resented that. My first meaningful and deep relationship with a woman, I didn't have until college. In terms of creating my sense of masculinity, it reflected off the relationship, how I related to her. I didn't want to be the kind of man my father was. I wanted to be gentle and egalitarian. I wanted to be sensitive.

STEVE: It's hard to identify with being dominant when you're being dominated.

GREG: He was at times violent towards his children and towards my mother. For years I really struggled with that. Also, he was not a good teacher as a parent. I didn't feel like he raised us or taught us well. He wasn't very communicative. He was very silent.

DAVE: He expected you to know...

GREG: Yeah, and he didn't really teach you. Just by aggression. And he didn't deal with his emotions very well. He just took it out on us. I'm not supportive of hanging on to those qualities of Asian male sexuality that are abusive and hurtful to women. But I think it's important to somehow bridge Asian culture and life here, because I feel like the easiest thing to do would be to adopt the white culture. It doesn't hurt as much. It's hard to tell children growing up, "don't try to be white."

DAVE: I want to talk about fetishes.

VICTOR: I react strongly to erotic images. I'm very turned on by seeing women wearing panties and just seeing the area between her thighs. And feet. I have this tremendous attraction to feet. I find feet enormously...

STEVE: Dirty?

VICTOR: Erotic. I love kissing feet and sucking toes.

STEVE: After the shower?

VICTOR: I don't discriminate between dirty and...the state of cleanliness.

DAVE: I just like the way they look. Ugly feet are ugly feet, but a nice looking foot is a nice looking foot. Manicure and pedicure and all that stuff. I think dark skin, you know, that olive skin? I like really short hair, sort of, like, boyish.

STEVE: So do I.

DAVE: I like jet black hair, or platinum blond. I was actually platinum blond for six months. It was painful.

RICHARD: I can remember the first time I saw a porn film, it seemed vulgar and nasty. To see men with huge penises and women with totally big tits and asses and stuff, it just totally disgusted me. I just thought it was so repulsive.

VICTOR: I can't comfortably look at porn.

DAVE: I can.

VICTOR: I don't really find it a turn on. I feel like I'm a spectator of someone else's fun. I'm much more turned on by the suggestion or intonation of sex. I don't understand when people, as couples, watch porn together. I know some heterosexual couples who do this as a way of getting turned on. I've never done it, and I just can't relate to that.

STEVE: When I was younger, my dad had left this stack of porn magazines with big tits and asses in your face and closeups of genitalia. I used to get excited by the women in those photographs. I think it's because they were illicit, I wasn't supposed to see it. It was a secret thing.

GREG: I saw my first explicit film about gay sexuality this summer. There were a lot of explicit sexual acts, and at one point I found myself actually having an erection. But if I tried to imagine myself having sex with a man, what I think I would fee, I would be repulsed by it. I don't recall a moment when I've looked at a man and felt desire. But when I saw the film, maybe it was just the eroticism displayed that I was responding to, not so much seeing a man's body.

STEVE: Has anyone else seen gay porn?

VICTOR: I've seen magazines. I respond fairly neutrally. It hasn't been much of a turn-on, but it also hasn't been a turnoff. I know that I find men attractive. But it doesn't translate into a sexual desire.

STEVE: When I was first coming out and dealing with sex, I was kind of turned off by the whole thing, a guy and a guy. The whole seduction, the approach, everything just freaked me out. The first time I went to a bar and saw guys dancing, bumping, and grinding, I was like, "Oh my god! What is this!"

VICTOR: I've had very intimate friendships that could easily have gone in a sexual direction. With straight men, it was just like a mutual contract. You just don't go there. In the case of one particular gay man that I've been close to, I prevented myself from becoming physically intimate. It was just one step away. But I never did that. He was perfectly willing to respect all of my limits. It was very safe. But it was like a prohibition. This is something you don't do.

STEVE: (choosing another question.) Have you ever wished that you were a woman?

VICTOR: Shockingly, I have never wished that. I've always seen women as my opposite and the object of my desire. But I never want to be the object of my desire.

GREG: Masturbation. I think that is sort of like being the object of your own desire.

STEVE: Masturbation is homosexuality.

GREG: No, I didn't say that.

STEVE: Because you're the object of your own desire.

RICHARD: Where is your erogenous zone?

DAVE: I know I enjoy being touched on the back. I like massages. I enjoy that whole experience.

RICHARD: Is your penis your most sensitive area?

DAVE: I guess it is. But I'm trying to move to other things besides the obvious when I'm with someone I genuinely care about. When I really, really feel so much for her, my sensitivity overall...it doesn't really matter where she touches me. My whole body is very sensitive, very responsive to any sort of touch.

VICTOR: Can you have sex and feel satisfied without ejaculating?

DAVE: Sure. When I was younger, I had plenty of one-night things where you just get off and get out. But I'm not about that. I get a lot of satisfaction out of giving pleasure.

VICTOR: If I'm having sex, it's hard for me not to have an orgasm. I want to go to that point. I get antsy. It raises my tension level if I don't have one.

GREG: I enjoy having sex without orgasming, but orgasm is where all that intense energy is. If I stop before, it's like I'm on my way up, and it doesn't feel as satisfying.

DAVE: The trick is to maintain it. That's multiple orgasm for guys.

STEVE: Have you guys given oral sex, and do you like it?

RICHARD: That's one of the best things, I think.

DAVE: Eating someone out.

RICHARD: To stick your penis in a woman's vagina is still very precious in a heterosexual relationship, but at the same time, the tongue is like this extension of you. It's another powerful tool.

VICTOR: Masturbation has never been a very big thing with me. I always feel very flat after I do it. I feel there's an emptiness to it. I came to masturbation late. I don't think I really masturbated in any real way until I was in my 20s. It's strange, because I had sexual experiences relatively young, intercourse when I was 16.

RICHARD: I never even though about it until I was watching the movie The Right Stuff. There was that one scene where he's masturbating because he needs to have a sperm sample. And I was saying, "What is he doing?" And I couldn't sleep, because I was thinking about that the whole time. Everybody had this thing in school. "You masturbate. I know you do, because you look like the type who masturbates." "No! No! I don't!" And when I did, I felt so guilty.

STEVE: Does your girlfriend masturbate as well?

RICHARD: Actually, there were some times when I thought, that's a really long shower!

VICTOR: In a lot of heterosexual fantasy, I think prostitution is a big one. I know it was with me. Certainly the fantasy of a woman being available just for sex.

GREG: I don't think it's wrong. I just don't find it attractive or desirable. I can't imagine myself having sex with someone I don't know.

DAVE: Why should you pay for sex? It just doesn't do it for me. I wouldn't get aroused. I'd be like, "Give me my money back!"

STEVE: Do you guys have lesbian fantasies?

DAVE: I had a menage a trois. Twin sisters. Identical. I was seeing one of them, and somehow the other got on top.

STEVE: What?!

RICHARD: Somehow? Was she like, hey can I borrow your toothpaste?

DAVE: I had no idea what was going on. First I freaked when I saw another set of hands on me.Then they just kind of laid me back. You catch on quick and just get into it.

STEVE: I would never like to do anything with my brother or my sister.

DAVE: No, they weren't really into each other. The focus was on me.

GREG: The first time I had sex, we did foreplay for two hours.

RICHARD: You didn't ejaculate for two hours?

STEVE: Actually, once I was in the same bed with another guy, and we had foreplay from 8 at night until the next morning, when I had to get up and go to class. We did not sleep at all, and neither of us ejaculated. I think I had the biggest case of blueballs ever.

VICTOR: Have you ever had sex with a woman?

STEVE: No. I once was on a couch kissing a woman and I did get erect. I was thinking, "God, can I do this?" But I would never want to experiment with a woman just to experiment with a woman.

RICHARD: What's the one thing you'd like to do before you die?

VICTOR: One thing I'd like to do before I go is be in a lasting relationship, above all else, to have a life partner whom I feel connected to, physically, spiritually...all of it.

STEVE: I think for me, one of the biggest fears probably is having found a perfect relationship and then fucking it up. That's a huge fear. It's not a realized fear.

DAVE: In my family, there's a huge communication and cultural gap, as far as what my parents believe in and what they aspire me to be. When I was younger, my father used to be ashamed of me and used to compare all the Asian kids together. I was really good in art, I was very athletic, but everybody else was an amazing piano player or something like that. You don't know whether to please yourself or please your family. Even now, I'm still faced with this, probably will be forever. The great thing is, every time I achieve something that is worthy of recognition, my father recognizes it, and my mother too. The more you go along, the more they shut up.

GREG: I fear that when my parents get old, there will be no one to provide for them. They've been struggling with their business for the past few years, they have tremendous debt. I will be their safety net. It's been a big factor in thinking about pursuing a performing career. Actually, my parents think I'm applying to medical school right now. I feel terrible, but I lied to them. There was so much pressure from them.

RICHARD (reading aloud): "Describe the perfect relationship." Boy, I guess you hit that one on the nose. The relationship that I'm in feels like this is the one. We've contemplated: Are we going to get married yet? She's older than me, at a different place than I am. I say, "You're going to marry an artist. I don't have any money." "Then get a job, a real job." I'm at that point where tomorrow, I'm going to be doing the corporate thing, and I'm freaking out. But a part of me is saying that I have to take on that responsibility, not that I'm going to give up my artistry, but if I want to share something, it means everything, all of the baggage that comes along with it. We learn from each other, and I think that's what makes this so important: the differences. She's Chinese and I'm Filipino, she is an immigrant and I was born here, she knows her own language and I don't. Sometimes we are at each others' throats. But literally, we are always thinking about the same things. All those things make this relationship seem like it could be...

STEVE: How would you know?

DAVE: You just know. You feel it.

RICHARD: Time is a big thing.