Star Boy was a member of DC Comic’s Legion of Super-Heroes. The Legion was set in the 31st century and featured a vast roster of characters. As a fourteen-year old boy, they caught my imagination in a number of ways. It was not a solo hero, nor pair, nor foursome, but a full cast - a show of how groups of people act together. Unusual for comic books of the time, it showed both ethnic and alien diversity, though the half-Japanese character was called, in stereotypical fashion, the Karate Kid. I paid attention to the male heroes, garbed in a variety of sleek costumes, which showed off their muscled forms. They pulled me towards my sexuality. Star Boy had a full beard and was particularly masculine. He was born, a child of astronomers, with the superhuman ability to temporarily increase the mass of an object up to that of a star. Most memorable was his full-body star field suit. Excluding his white gloves, boots, and handsome face, his form practically disappeared while in space. The men in Young Sun Han’s portraits do not fully melt into the background, nor are they lost in space. The human form placed against the sublime could show how small we are, dwarfed by an ocean, mountains or the whole universe. But these men are suspended, at ease and confident, equal to the glorious images of galaxies behind them. They are relaxed. Playful? They are not responding to something or someone else. If they are defying stereotype –being captured in a passive pose, being dressed in Asian references, or given a backdrop of the Forbidden Palace, they do so without aggression, perhaps by ignoring it. I’d like to be impartial like that. This morning, I caught an Australian children’s program on TV, two presenters making sponge paintings of trains and stars. They both had the Aussie accent that I, as a Canadian, adore, but one was of Asian race. I cheered. Which is a bit silly, really: Asians are everywhere these days in the public eye, from glamorous Chinese movie stars to hunky reality TV show contestants. But I’m 38 and my experience, growing up in Canada, was of few Asians on TV, in movies, ads or newspapers (there was that Chinese couple in the laundry detergent commercial though). This continued with my entrance to gay life: not only often invisible, but confronted with the idealization of white beauty. No matter how self-assured I was learning to be, it always felt like something was not quite right. It was such a difficult concept to explain to friends: the weight on one’s psyche and self-image to not find yourself reflected back from the world around you. Stereotyping was another issue. It was easy to describe the basic concept. But the actual details of the experience were difficult to convey. It was tiring and damaging to come across the same preconceptions over and again of who I was, defined by someone else, their conclusions about the meaning of race, culture and nationality. Eventually, I also learned non-aggression. Friends and strangers meant no harm. It did little good to become upset, though I wished to say: drop expectations, know that all of us are of complex background and origin, find out more simply by listening. Asians are marked by the shape of our eyes, by our dark pupils. Light, or the stars themselves, are glowing through the eyes of these cosmic men. It reminds me of trying to talk to someone wearing sunglasses. You can’t quite respond because you can’t see their expressions and signals clearly. I think then, a space opens up to listen. Do these men in space speak words or nothing at all? They are Asian by one marker, or not Asian, if you ignore and transcend it. They are sexually desirable according to your taste, but they are not objects of desire. They are not posing to be consumed, admired or fancied. They maintain their own thoughts, their subjectivity and desires. You can’t see what they’re thinking. Andy Quan |