Asian Identity Formation in a Western Hothouse

In the Mandarin-English film The Map of Sex and Love (blogged about earlier) the long-haired Hong Kong dancer - who has never set foot outside Hong Kong - asks the bespectacled Chinese American man he is looking to pick up, "Do you go to Christopher Street often?" Behind them, across the waters, glow signs of multinational companies such as Hitachi and Siemens. It is interesting that two Chinese individuals are establishing contact with each other in Chinese-administered Hong Kong and the event is framed by the presence of globalisation, be it in the form of glow signs declaring the omnipresence of Japanese and German companies or be it in the mention of Christopher Street, an address of mythical significance to American gay identity formation. That a Chinese gay man is aware of the presence of Christopher Street is an indication of the fact that Western - especially American - gay culture, as has been shown by Dennis Altman in his work, can and often does serve as a template on which Asian, non-Western gay identities are formed. In the Israeli film The Bubble (blogged about earlier) there is a scene in which a group of gay Israeli men discuss gay male British pop stars. Names such as George Michael, Morrissey and Stephen Gately (of Boyzone fame) are mentioned. The camera also focusses on a wall covered with pictures of gay British singers cut out of magazines.

In the Indonesian film Arisan! (2003), similar influences are seen in the identity formation of gay Indonesians. The two gay men in the film, Sakti (Tora Sudiro) and Nino (Surya Saputra) first meet and greet each other (although they had earlier discreetly eyed each other up at the gym) in a restaurant that can only be described as a square mile of intensified America in Jakarta. As the middle image shows, when Nino (in a white shirt) and Sakti (in black) leave the restaurant, the camera follows them, taking in an arrangement of small American flags and a Coca Cola sign on the wall. When the two men leave the place, the camera stays inside but turns its gaze on a huge poster of Marilyn Monroe on the wall. This is what Gerard Genette in Narrative Discourse (1980) calls an "advance mention". The significance of the Marilyn Monroe poster would become clear at the end of the film when one of the lady friends of Sakti declares that not diamonds, but "a gay man is a girl's best friend" referring to Monroe's song in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). The fact the film seems bracketed by the Monroe motif is yet another example of the hothouse Western environment in which global gay identities take shape in Asian countries.

When we first see Sakti he is just finishing his daily workout. He stands in front of the mirror and beams, joyfully, at his reflection in the mirror. Here is the joyful acceptance of one's identity as theorised by Lacan when he speaks of the "mirror stage". What has to be remembered is that the beam on Sakti's face is an affirmation of the fact that he has been able to conform to the imaginary of the global, ergo Western, gay man - toned body, flawless skin, perfect teeth, straight-acting.

It is not my job to judge this teleology of Asian gay self-fashioning, but merely to say that such processes of identity-formation are being cinematically represented with greater and greater frequency. And in a way this is rather appropriate, isn't it? What better medium than cinema to exemplify a kind of identity formation which depends on the visual? After all it is called the imaginary!