The Rise, and Fall, of a Gay Asian American Porn Star

In an article in the Asian American pop culture zine Giant Robot, journalist Claudine Ko (1999) recounts her search for Brandon Lee. She refers not to the son of Bruce Lee, who gained cult stardom after dying mysteriously and tragically at a young age while shooting The Crow (dir. Alex Proyas, 1994), but the other Brandon Lee, the gay porn star. Ko reports on rumors that Brandon Lee the porn star had been discovered while delivering Chinese food to a gay porn set. As the story goes, the director asked to see his egg roll and was so blown away by the sight that he immediately cast Lee in a porn video. Later in the article, Ko tracks down Chi Chi LaRue, one of the best-known directors in gay porn, who straightened out the story. LaRue claimed to have discovered Brandon Lee at a gay bathhouse in Los Angeles. Impressed by Lee's good looks and ten inches of manhood, she brought him to Catalina, the popular gay video company, which promptly signed him on, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I am not particularly interested in ascertaining which version of the story about Lee's discovery is true. Rather, what I find compelling is the way the two versions can be read as emblematic of how the image of Asian men in gay North American porn has shifted with the appearance of Brandon Lee. Before Lee, Asian porn actors performed the roles of karate masters, Chinatown grocery boys, or their cousins, Chinese food delivery boys, which is to say, they constituted racialized sexual stereotypes. In contrast, Lee is frequently portrayed as West Hollywood boyfriend material, cast in mundane roles as well as pornotopic parts such as real estate agent, young man who inherits a gay brothel, army recruit, porn star, sex party host, biker dude, and most commonly West Hollywood twink. In other words, Brandon Lee could well be just another random (American) gay guy one could easily find cruising in a West Hollywood bathhouse. He has left his parents' grocery store in Chinatown to live with his white boyfriend in the gay ghetto. This movement from one ghetto to another parallels Lee's transition from ethnic niche to mainstream gay video pornography.

By beginning my study of Asian American masculinity and sexual representation with an examination of gay male video pornography produced in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, I address the common grievance about the representation of Asian American masculinity in American culture, registered in the complaint that mainstream media depict Asian men as effeminate and asexual. At first glance, it would appear that as a top porn star, Brandon Lee is a model of masculine sexual prowess and potency, the rhetorical and flesh-and-blood penis that Asian American cultural critics have been searching for. Put differently, his success would seem to satisfy the goals of Asian American media activism and scholarship. However, in what follows, I look at the ways in which the privileging of topness and remasculinization in the work of Brandon Lee serve to reinforce normative discourses of race, class, gender, nation, and sexuality. The chapter's investigation of contemporary gay male video porn shows how those modalities of difference get articulated through top-bottom sexual positionings. At the same time that I unpack Lee's claim to fame as an Asian top, I also point to the instabilities of his top status by highlighting significant moments in his videos when topness topples as well as instances when bottomhood exceeds its coding as Asian abjection. In addition, I suggest that Lee's emergence marks out a space for a queer, resistant Asian American porn spectatorship that enlarges previous models of porn viewing. Though not without its contradictions, Lee's exceptional porn persona proffers a new sexual visibility for gay Asian American men. His rise, and fall, unlocks heretofore unexplored possibilities for gay Asian men's social and sexual subjectivity, not least by animating new ways of thinking and doing bottomhood. To be sure, the instabilities of his topness illustrate how Lee maintains multiple boundaries (e.g., Asian/American, bottom/top) even as he embodies their blurring.

In his analysis of gay male porn videos employing Asian actors—the one arena where Asian men are depicted engaging in explicit homosexual sex—Richard Fung interrogates the "role the pleasure of porn plays in securing a consensus about race and desirability that ultimately works to our disadvantage [as Asian men]" (1991, 158). Fung describes the feminization of Asian men in gay porn within the context of racialized power relations. Examining the work of Vietnamese American porn actor Sum Yung Mahn, he demonstrates how pornographic depictions of Asian men focus on their submission to the pleasure of white men. In these tapes produced in the mid-1980s, Asian men almost always adopt the bottom role in relation to a white top. In Asian Knights (dir. Ed Sung, 1985), the only exception where an Asian top fucks a white bottom, the Asian character is portrayed as serving the white character domestically and sexually as a houseboy.

The intended audience for these Asian-themed videos is primarily gay white men. A sex scene between two Asian men in Asian Knights is edited to conform to the point of view of a white man. What appears to be an Asian-Asian sexual scenario is undercut when the white man enters the scene and occupies the center of the sexual attention, much the way the man enters into a "lesbian" number in heterosexual porn. Most significantly, the white male fear of being fucked is displaced onto the bodies of Asian men. A scene in Below the Belt (dir. Philip St. John, 1985) has an Asian actor step temporarily into the role of a white character in order to articulate his anxiety about getting fucked. In this sequence, the Asian male body substitutes for the white male body to receive the punishment represented by anal sex.

Despite the critical attention and popularity of Asian male actors in Asian cinemas and their successful crossover into Hollywood (e.g., actors such as Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Chow Yun-fat in the late 1990s), as well as the more recent spotlight on Asian American actors Kal Penn, John Cho, Daniel Dae Kim, and Harry Shum Jr., the depiction of Asian men as sexually appealing scarcely figures in mainstream American popular culture. In the realm of explicit sexual representation, one finds that in marked contrast to the overwhelming presence of Asian and Asian American women in heterosexual pornography, there is a notable absence of Asian American men. Thus, the popularity of Brandon Lee as a gay Asian American porn star represents a startling and unique achievement that demands special attention.

Brandon Lee is the only male Asian American porn actor with the distinction of having a "best of" video compilation, The Best of Brandon Lee (dir. Chi Chi LaRue and Josh Eliot, 1999; figure 1.1). Starting in...