Potato queens are gay Asian men who are primarily attracted to white men.
There are two types of potato queens. The first type was raised in the U.S. and is assimilated into American culture. He usually doesn’t speak an Asian language and has little exposure to a dominant Asian-centered reality. He tends not to hang out with other Asians. His attraction to white guys may be linked to feelings of inferiority and self-hate as an Asian person.
The other type of potato queen comes directly from Asia. He was born and raised there and has no problems with his cultural identity. He is attracted to white men and western culture because of the glamorized images of westerners he sees in Asia and/or because he’s trying to escape the stifling repression of gays in his home country. The West represents freedom to him.
The etiology is different but the end result with both these types is a desire for white men.
To what extent does potato-queenism pervade the gay Asian male community in the U.S.? My perusal of Yahoo personals shows a spectrum of desire among gay Asian men. There are the hardcore potato queens but many of the ads of gay Asian men say they are open to both Asian and white men or all types. There are very few “sticky rice” (Asian men who prefer other Asian men) ads which seems to confirm what I stated in an earlier post “A Strangely Inverted Community”, that sticky rice are a minority among gay Asians in the U.S.
Overall, it seems that gay Asian men in the U.S. lean towards potato-queenism. This inures to the benefit of gay white men who can count on a large pool of ready and willing Asian men to service them. Oftentimes too an older white man can “cash in” his whiteness for a younger Asian man.
Here’s an excerpt from one blog describing a scene at Cafe’ Flore in the Castro in the Spring of 2007:
Indeed, almost half of the couples (if they were couples) were interracial-a white male and an Asian male. This trend prevails among large group of guys [sic] as well… I agree most of the GAM were young (20s) and most of the GWM were older (40s to 50s)… My friend Cary, who is now 40, 5′10, blue eyes, pure white skin, and a muscle jock, says that anytime he walks into a gay coffee shop, gay bar, or gay event, gay Asian men always stare. He recently traveled to Taiwan and every day in the gym, GAM offer themselves to him openly. But Ken said this is true for the older white men as well.
The Asian guy has to trade in his youth in order to get the whiteness, underscoring the notion that being Asian is a liability. Fortunately, nowadays it seems there are more and more white male-Asian male couples who seem more equivalent in age.
Also, nowadays in the Castro, there seems to be a lot more diversity in general with interracial couples of all types. Look carefully and you’ll notice that a lot of this diversity stems from the presence of a lot of Asians and a lot of these interracial couples are white male-Asian male couples. The heavy duty “lobbying” of potato queens to be included in the mainstream gay community is “paying off”. I don’t notice nearly as many Black men.
