“It is here that I find a sonic metaphor for my thesis of Queer sound - an irresolvable sound which declares its presence at the same time it eviscerates itself.” - Terre Thaemlitz on Queer Sound

“Love is a dream where both of us are trying, at the same speed, without quitting.” - John Keene

Having been raised in Hong Kong for twenty-something years, I only learned about my Chineseness and Queerness when I moved to Canada four years ago. Growing up I was never asked the question Where are you from? Thinking back, there is a certain thinginess that comes with the migration process and spending the last few years in suburban Ontario. It all felt like a third puberty — learning how to swim again but this time in olive oil. Breathing at first was hard but as the old saying goes, you get used to it.

The scholar Kathryn Bond Stockton writes about how queer child “grows sideways,” because queer life often defies the linear chronology of marriage and children. Stockton also describes children of color as growing sideways, since their youth is likewise outside the model of the enshrined white child. I have been thinking about how Queer Asian comes to their reckoning through a meandering fuckery of sideways and straightways and sideways. We are being told we fit in and that we can assimilate, yet we are different because of our queerness; we have been told that Asians in America have it good despite our realities tell us otherwise. Where is the Queer Asian heading?

In 2010, the Chinese comedian Joe Wong performed at the Radio & Television Correspondents Association (RTCA) dinner in front of a convention hall full of the ex-vice-president Joe Biden together with a wide cohort of media professionals. He described his immigrant experience with his classic dead-pan delivery:

When I graduated from Rice, I decided to stay in the United States because in China, I can’t do the thing I do best here, being ethnic.

Wong describes succinctly how America’s racial history and the conception of multiculturalism have rendered him an Asian subject — meaning both as an autonomous subject and a passive subject under authority or control. The truth is, I don’t think my self-alienation from/between these markers is a unique experience but part of the shoring consequence of American exclusionary immigration histories. Most of the time, “Queer” and “Asian” for me still felt like two separate pavlovian signs later for my mind to catch on — oh, that way, and my body follows. I think so much of that dissonance with identifying as a Queer Asian is that identity politics in a “me generation” tends to bypass a collective consciousness and catapult into aestheticism, or a commodifying of aestheticism. Cathy Park Hong explains in Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, of how minor feelings as “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.” This needling packaging and processing of minor feelings becomes a Queer Asian survival tactic between tolerance and acceptance by the mainstream.

When we think about “Queer Asian” do we think of it as a singular phenomenon or part of a bigger movement? With recent award-winning productions like Everything Everywhere All At Once, Crazy Rich Asians, Fire Island, Parasite, and Minari — we are undeniably witnessing a change made up of victories that at times felt particular and singular. At the 2020 Oscars, the director of Parasite Bong Joon-ho made waves with his statement that the Oscars ceremony itself was “very local” and earlier at the Golden Globes, he encouraged Americans to watch more foreign-language films, saying “once you overcome the one-itch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” I want to ask, how much of our current “Queer Asian” dream project is led and necessitated through the North American articulation (most of the time through the model of visibility)? How might we situate Queer Asian articulations within a larger context of global movements and the aftermaths of colonial histories? From a more current perspective — from resumes, cover letters, exhibition didactics, artist biographies, and social media hashtags #diversity, lived experience statements, and diversity statements — identity seems to have taken shape into a currency for another market for various gains. If we are so good at the language-hacking game of identity politics, then where do we go from here, and how far do we have to look?

In 2020, led by Tina Campt, Zara Julius, Jenn Nkiru, and Alexander Weheliye — “Frequencies of Blackness: A Listening Session” all responded to the question “What does frequency offer us as a framework for understanding Black life?” The question of black frequency has shaped my thinking not only about queer nightlife but my Asian (up)rootedness — what do the allure and various textures of techno house dance music and foggy dance floor tease out conversations about Queer Asian belonging, coalition, and visibility?

There are so many heroes that I look up to from the dancefloor altar — Terre Thaemlitz (DJ Sprinkles), Tim Lawrence, Ciel, Ani Phoebe, Kfeelz, Peggy Gou, Octo Octa, Ron Trent, Larry Heard, madison moore, David Manusco — how their musical histories, struggles, localities have weaved into a bigger archive of intersecting gender, class, race identities. And reversely, why and how do these people, given all their differences — come to this site called dance music and doing the werk? As someone who is living in a city lacking venues to play and listen to dance music, I tended so much time online diving into tracklists (”Track ID?”), digging for new tracks, listening to archived radio sets, getting my first digital controller, debuting at a local club — I am slowly allowing myself to build this world that tells me “we are all part of something bigger than ourselves.”

Out of all the electronic music workers, I am particularly indebted to Terre Thaemlitz’s extensive work of positioning dance music within a larger context of gay & trans liberation and exilic histories, capitalism, anti-production, feminism, and migration. From his album titled 120 Midtown Blues, Thaemlitz plainly states that “house music is not universal” and that “house music isn’t so much a sound as a situation.” For Thaemlitz, House music is not a saves-all antidote to the social standings of life. There are just as many people who dance to remember and people who dance to forget. In a later track titled “Ball’r (Madonna-Free Zone)”, Thaemlitz responds to the appropriation of underground black and brown queer ballroom culture by the white mainstream artist Madonna, and narrated his analysis over a steady deep house beat:

When Madonna came out with her hit "Vogue" you knew it was over. She had taken a very specifically queer, transgendered, Latino, and African-American phenomenon and totally erased that context with lyrics about how "It makes no difference if you're black or white, if you're a boy or a girl."

Madonna was taking in tons of money, while the Queen who actually taught her how to vogue was sitting at a table in front of me, broke.

So if anybody requested "Vogue" or any other Madonna track, I just told them "No, this is a Madonna-free zone!

And as long as I'm DJ-ing, you will not be allowed to vogue to the decontextualized, reified, corporatized, liberalized, neutralized, asexualized, re-genderized pop reflection of this dance floor's reality!"