Week 7: Reading Response for "Gay Asian American Male Seeks Home", question number 1.

Reading Response for "Gay Asian American Male Seeks Home", question number 1.

In this essay, Chong-Suk Han makes a few different arguments as to what sort of stereotypes and cultural ideas non Asian Americans have about Asian men and how those stereotypes hurt that culture. One of the cultural ideas that he points out is that of the western world having a sense that it is macho and brave in the world while the eastern world is more artful and subservient. This stereotype plays out in our roles in society and how we view one another every day. In his essay Han points out that this is compounded many times when it comes to gayAsians and how they are regarded in American society. The gay Asian-American that Han speaks of ends up without a real place to stand in his community. He is not claimed to be part of the larger Asian-American society which has its own stereotypically conservative ideas, nor is he particularly embraced into the gay community. He is seen more as an exotic stereotype than as a person on his own. This double marginalization that Han writes about leads these mean in his opinion to lead a much more dangerous lifestyle. The increased figures for unsafe sex between gay Asian-Americans, heattributes to a low self-esteem from these ideas. From the essay it seems like the average gay Asian-American man ends up right in the middle of it all, exotic to some people, shunned by other people and not really absorbed by any one group.