Ambiguously Ethnic
This post was submitted by TNG reader, Shawn, a PhD candidate in clinical psychology…
Photo: Ed Jackson ©
Growing up with my mother and sister I learned about the importance of physical appearance. The currency of beauty transcended our housing project on the reservation, extending to the middle and upper classes to which the three of us all aspired. My mother developed fleeting crushes on handsome television actors who played doctors and lawyers, while my sister sought to date such professionals in real life. Because neither of them pursued education beyond high school, my relatives had minimal economic viability and therefore leveraged their high cheekbones and enviable figures to obtain the daily essentials and luxury splurges they could not attain on public assistance and minimum wage. The hours they spent in front of mirrors rehearsing smiles and camouflaging birthmarks would have been lost on me if I did not know from such an early age that I was gay.
My Black South African father and my German and Native American mother gave me a blended skin tone that often evokes flavorful description: mocha, caramel, butter pecan. I have almond-shaped doe eyes, a mop of loose black curls, and long limbs. During middle school and high school, I asked older friends to obtain for me copies of the Abercrombie and Fitch Quarterly, ostensibly to paste together collages of clothing that my family could never afford, but honestly, to ogle the men who would never give me the time of day in college.
The trappings of the most sexually desirable men at Dartmouth were circumscribed heavily to include improbably lean mesomorphs with bright blue eyes, obsessively manicured five o’clock shadows and abs that rippled like waves. Though these guys were not in short supply, it was a coup to snag one. A lumpy brown vegetarian inspired by Us Weekly and makeover reality shows, I launched into wholesale Costco-sized changes so that I might fit within existing parameters of beauty and sex appeal. I stopped consuming fried food, soda, and refined sugar, started exercising regularly, and chopped off my waist-length hair to make myself more conventionally attractive. Between freshman year and junior year, I lost forty pounds and began to compare myself more favorably to the handsome archetype. Emboldened by my success, I asked more guys on dates in the next month than I had since I came out. The rejections I received were friendlier than they had been forty pounds prior, but they stung more: “Sorry, you’re just not my type.” My weight was no longer the problem; my ambiguously ethnic looks seemed the likely culprit. “What are you, anyway?” asked a particularly blunt prospect, as if to confirm his disinterest. While I didn’t, and don’t, begrudge that guy his preferences, my frustration grew exponentially when I realized that my most immutable attributes were those that made me least attractive. I could cultivate an interest in evolutionary biology and downplay my long-time efforts in grassroots activism, but I could not alter my features or level of melanin.
With the aid of my best girlfriends and many a lengthy, aimless run, I had given up on trying to date in college; the pool of out gay men was small and there was very little wiggle room for diversity. Two years ago, I moved to DC to begin graduate school and have since met with similarly limited success in garnering responses to my Internet dating profiles and friendly conversation starters at mixers and social gatherings. Instead of exerting so much energy toward trying to change, I have opted to pursue other ambitions with a faint hope that something sweet will materialize organically, without my ever-watchful eye.
Although I am twenty-four, I find that I relate strongly to older gay men who say that they find themselves rendered invisible by the myopic gay male gaze. I pathologize and criticize my appearance less now than I did in undergrad, and have paradoxically turned inward to discover other characteristics that I like about myself: even outside of a romantic or sexual marketing context. Still, as David Rakoff wrote, “There are days when I would burn every book I own for the chance to be beautiful just once.”
It is difficult to remain optimistic.
Now this is a well-written piece. Thank you, Shawn.
My weight was no longer the problem; my ambiguously ethnic looks seemed the likely culprit.
Shawn, somehow I just don’t buy it. For every guy who complains that gay men only go for a certain type for sexual partners, there are three guys complaining that gay men exoticize this or that ethnicity or type. Why do you assume it’s your ethnic looks that are unattractive to men? Desperation and insecurity are unattractive to most guys. Not to mention hostility. You have contempt for these perfect A&F men, but you want them to love you?
I hope my comment doesn’t sound too harsh. I feel for you. I struggle with this stuff, too. If I may play the older and wiser card, one thing I’ve learned is that these situations are never simple. There’s a lot more going on than just the so-called gay community’s shallowness. And most of what’s going on is going on in your head.
I’m just trying to get you to look at it from a different angle, an angle from which, possibly, you’re not the victim.
This is a really interesting post, because you’re actually saying out loud what a lot of people are thinking.
My thoughts:
1. Young (or at least immature) gay guys often have very bland, conservative ideas about what is attractive, about what they’re supposed to like. That is annoying. I’m like: Loosen up! There are a lot of definitions of ’sexy.’ I happen to prefer guys who have darker features. However, I try not to have a ‘type’ because I’ve had some of my best sex with guys who didn’t fit my preconception. When the lights are off, does any of this really matter? ;-)
2. I have an acquaintance who constantly is lusting after the Abercrombie-and-Fitch types (and only them), yet constantly complaining that no one dates him b/c he’s half-Asian, half-Black. It’s such a contradiction. (Meanwhile, the real problem isn’t his looks but his personality frankly. He’s actually not bad looking.) I’m not saying you’re like this at all. But it drives me nuts to see that he’s so internalized these cultural messages. It’s like the older gay men who are only attracted to younger guys, yet complain that no one wants to date them.
Good points, Ben.
“…a blended skin tone that often evokes flavorful description: mocha, caramel, butter pecan. I have almond-shaped doe eyes, a mop of loose black curls, and long limbs.”
Yeah, that sounds unattractive.
Seriously, the article should include a pic of you. You would be getting people who thought you were beautiful and who wanted to date you.
It’s interesting to say that you can relate to us invisible older guys. When I was younger, I wanted to date only other white guys with basically the kind of A&F looks you describe, only slightly goofy to take the edge of blandness off. But as I turned 40, I suddenly (or so it seemed) became more attractive to non-white guys of various races and ethnicities. I felt like I’d spent my 20s looking at only half of humanity.
Actually now, as someone over 60, I’m no longer astonished to find that everybody – and I mean everybody – has plenty of people on this planet that find them attractive and desirable. More than they could possibly deal with.
So I’m actually half-Black, and half-Indian. Until I threw up a profile on some random dating sites and started talking with a couple of guys there, it never once occurred to me that I would be sought-after or shunned because of my skin color. The same even goes for my height. I’m 6′4″ and met a 5′3″ guy who said flat out that he’d have issues dating me just because of the mechanical aspects of a 1-ft height difference.
Interesting. To some, I’m “tall, dark, and handsome” (I swear I got that line once). To others, I’m “not their type.” I’m not even sure I have a type, other than “someone roughly at the same point in his life” and “good looking,” which I can’t describe other than “I’ll know it when I see it.”
So I’m there with ya, waiting patiently to stumble upon that random perfect guy through work, play, or friends.
After reading the essay several times, I wanted to say this:
The author raises some interesting issues, but overall I think he is feeling sorry for himself because white guys aren’t interested in him, or at least the ones who are stereotypically “hot.” As a black gay man, I have seen many non-white gay men fall into this trap, and I’ve done it myself.
As I’ve gotten older I have come to believe that everyone has admirers, you just have to find them. People are interested in you, but you may need to open your mind to possibilities you hadn’t previously considered, whether it be different personalities, classes, body types, ethnicities, ages, etc.
So many people complain about the limitations of gay male culture, I think it’s because we buy into a mainstream portrayal of gay life that does not work for us. We have to accept, understand, and love ourselves instead of letting other sources define us.
not really sure why everyone is tripping so hard on white guys, i mean yeah there are some hot ones but um hello! there are so many FINE non-white guys to choose from, seriously.
Thanks all, for your thoughts. I wanted to take this opportunity to clarify a few points.
During my time in undergrad, I had something of a fixation on the muscle-bound Abercrombie archetype in small part because they were foreign (few of them existed on the reservation) and in large part because I thought they were gorgeous. It seems important to note, however, that this was not the only type of guy I found attractive; in fact, my first boyfriend was a rangy biology PhD student with feather-duster eyelashes and an easy smile.
As some of the comments alluded, I did feel sorry for myself for not being the target of these guys’ affections, but I wasn’t contemptuous of them. If anything, I was envious of them for being more conventionally attractive than me and having their pick of men. In my then-regular bouts of self-criticism, I identified a number of elements that made me different from them (e.g., weight, lack of muscle tone, long lustrous curls) and made efforts to compensate for or change those things. As I developed other interests and began taking better care of myself, I found that I had more self-confidence and less urgency in finding a guy to call my own. I concluded that my “ambiguously ethnic” looks were the problem because other gay men who were more identifiably Black or Native or Latino had paired up rather quickly. I don’t have much interest in being fetishized or exoticized, but then again I also haven’t run across anyone looking specifically for my blend.
I recognize now that many stars have to align (e.g., timing, self-perception, availability, openness to relationship, sexual drive) for attraction and attractiveness to work. Knowing these things doesn’t make the “you’re just not my type” comments or the lack of response to online dating e-mails any less painful. Tall, muscled white men are highly desirable commodities across ethnic groups in the gay community, which is why I expressed concern to the editor of my piece that I might come across as whiny or mopey. In summary, I wrote this essay to express candidly my frustrations in attempting to date at an elite college and in a much more diverse city. I feel that I have a lot to offer someone special in the context of a long-term relationship, but that I don’t often get the opportunity to share these qualities because of the mismatch between my appearance and what other men find attractive.
Just thought that I would post some interesting research on this topic out of the University of Toronto: http://www.xtra.ca/public/Toronto/Calculating_erotic_capital-6276.aspx
Who is desirable in the gay community is an interesting topic and I am inclined to believe that advertising has an affect on that desire. The one difference in the gay community between white gay men and other miniorites is that white gay men who did not diclose their sexuality have not been historically blocked economically. Therefore, in the 80’s when marketer’s discovered the DINKs, white gay men who were identified as having the most disposable income were the one’s being advertised to..ie:contribution towards shaping desires. Just a thought, and I recognize that a link has not been made yet. All and all, one stat I read concluded that 60% of gay men will be single for the majority of thier lives. Guess lots of us are trying to figure out how to get into that elusive 40%, maybe it’s race, maybe it’s internalized homophobia, could be biological, could just be that men don’t really know how to communicate very well. Either way….I empathize with you Shawn and and all the guys who don’t fit into the majority. Can feel like an eternal adolescence of watching the popular kids from the sidelines. Sounds to me like you are doing amazing things with your life though and if the teen dramas are correct at all…you really aren’t missing out on anything.
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