The Ass Issue

Sir Mix-a-lot may like a big butt, but anybody who’s actually got back has stressed over its size. Similarly, slim types with smaller handles worry that there isn’t enough of them to love. No matter where each individual body falls on the curvature scale, there’s a stereotype to bring it down: voluptuous types are slutty, the streamlined are asexual, and there are serious consequences if those lady (or man) lumps don’t fit inside the gender box you were assigned at birth. The more racialized a particular body is, the more stringent the judgments tend to be.

This Pride, we present the Ethnic Aisle Ass Issue. Our goal is to dissect how race and ethnicity in Toronto intersect with issues of body image, beauty, sexuality and the all-important ass. We’ve got some fun stuff, including our first-ever audio post and playlist, and some serious thinking. As always, we’re taking this very, very personally.

Karen K. Ho is tall, curvy, and Chinese. Crazy, right?

Hot for teacher: Vivek Shraya shares the story Bubble Butt, from his book God Loves Hair.

Jaime Woo reveals the most shocking thing about being a faceless torso on Grindr.

Our first audio post! In “How To,” MC Jazz takes on the ultimate signifier of feminine beauty: Barbie, of course.

Farzana Doctor’s poem Open Bar is about one-night stands, commitment ceremonies, long-term relationships, and s-e-x.

Shake your rump! Download an asstastic playlist, courtesy of Cherrybomb’s DJ Cozmic Cat.

If Kim Kardashian and Rihanna have taught us one thing, it’s that someone else can like your rearview, but if you flaunt it, you’re a slut. No fair, says Renee Sylvestre-Williams.

“Desire doesn’t care what your politics are.” Navneet Alang kisses a white girl, just like Undercover Brother.

Speaking with Denise Balkissoon, sexual health counsellor Rahim Thawer discusses HIV prevention, fetishes, stereotypes and, most importantly, keeping the ass fun.

Q & Ass with Rahim Thawer

Rahim Thawer works at a sexual health clinic in Toronto doing counseling with gay and bi men. He also works at an AIDS service organization doing bathhouse counseling. On July 1, he’ll be with Toronto’s Ismaili queers as they march in their first ever solo Pride contingent. Here, he talks with Denise Balkissoon about fetishes, racialization, HIV and, of course, The Ass.

DB: Why do south Asians need their own HIV prevention campaigns?

RT: A lot of people think that HIV/AIDS is still a gay white man’s illness, but in Toronto the rates are growing among women, including racialized women. What ethno-specific HIV organizations try to think about is, how can we reach our very unique communities? We’re working very strategically to do outreach in our cultural and religious communities. As great as some of the more mainstream organizations are, I just don’t think they  have the capacity to tap into the important cultural nuances.

So this ad is a new campaign by The Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention (ASAAP) called “Protect Your Love.” That’s me in the train scene, but initially I was hesitant to participate. I thought it might be too reserved. I didn’t know what kind of messages it was sending out, whether it was trying to promote monogamy, or sell a particular version of same-sex love, etc. But, you know, it’s not. And it has some really important cultural nuances that can reach far and wide.

I think that racialized and historically marginalized people putting out their own messaging and doing outreach in their own communities is probably the most effective approach. It’s what community development really is.

DB: Do you meet very many non-white guys in your counselling practice who aren’t out, or don’t consider themselves “gay”? Who are they?

RT: Short answer, yes. But it’s important to recognize that it’s not only racialized men who aren’t out and perhaps married to women or leading otherwise “straight lives.” Our tendency to over-culturalize the phenomenon exposes our subtle racism and negative assumptions about these men.

Having said that, for the guys whom I have had conversations with that are non-white, they often talk about a range of things, from having fallen in love with their current (female) partners to the importance and value of having a family, to fulfilling family duty. Many speak about not having the option to “come out” at a younger age, or not ever considering same-sex attraction as a long-term relationship possibility.

Cozmic Cat’s Asstastic Mix

Exclusive to the Ethnic Aisle, here’s an explicit, downloadable mix via the one and only Cozmic Cat.

One half of Cherry Bomb, Cozmic keeps the beats bumpin all over town. She’s playing a bunch of shows this Pride, including two on Friday the 29th (one at Fly and one at Slack’s), plus Cherry Bomb Pride on the 30th and Flirt on July 1. So don’t miss the Cat!

My Big Banana Body

By Karen K. Ho

I am five feet, eight inches. I am also Chinese. Surprising but true: not all Chinese women are short, skinny and small-footed. I suspect this perception and outdated stereotype comes from a period when nearly all Chinese people were very poor and had rice-heavy diets. Many Chinese women are still short and skinny, but my guess is that that’s less about genetics, and more due to a modern obsession with thin-ness and a lower prevalence of fast-food outside major city centres.

Growing up in north Scarborough, I always felt like my head was in-between two cultures, Chinese and Canadian. I only just realized my body reflects that in-between status too. There are parts of me that are completely (stereotypically) Chinese, and there are parts that are much more Canadian (or, maybe, north American).

In this top-down, completely unscientific survey, I’ve tried to figure out once and for all if my physical makeup is more reflective of my parents and ancestry, or whether I’m a product of Canada, the only land I’ve known my entire life.

Hair:
It’s black, straight, thick. The kind seen on the heads of many Chinese, Filipinos and other East Asians and Pacific Islanders. To me, my hair lacks personality, and over the years I’ve attempted to perm it and/or dye it unnatural colours like blue, purple and red. This doesn’t exactly make me more Canadian, just an angsty 20-something. People all over the world chemically alter their hair. What grows out of my head is very Chinese.

Bubble Butt

by Vivek Shraya

Illustration by Juliana Neufeld

We are junior scientists with our microscopes. We discover what mitosis and meiosis look like under the lens. But the real focus is always on each other, specifically each other’s body parts: Krissy Bell’s huge breasts, Zack Mason’s huge biceps, Travis Reeves’ supposedly small penis. And Mr. Mitchell’s bum.

Mr. Mitchell is my gym teacher and he is perfect. His polo shirts stretch over his heroic shoulders and chest, as though they were tailored for his body alone. All the women teachers seem to smile just a little bigger when he talks to them. Even his supposed flaws are attractive, like the way his forehead shines where his sandy hair has begun to recede. But his real gift is behind him.

I have never really paid attention to any bum before, but Mr. Mitchell’s is hard to ignore, especially in the tight blue jeans he wears. It is magnetic. Juicy even. Just the right amount of lift and bounce. Lisa Tober calls it (and him) “Bubble Butt.”

This fascination with my gym teacher’s bum has led to an intense curiosity about what kind of underwear he wears. I approach him when he is sitting on the bench, legs open, and find any excuse to engage him in conversation.

How was your weekend Mr. Mitchell?

Can’t believe it’s still snowing, eh, Mr Mitchell?

Are you going to supervise the school dance Mr. Mitchell?

He always responds with a cocky ease and I smile and nod, waiting for him to blink or look away after the socially appropriate amount of eye contact has ended, so that I can steal a peek up his shorts, an image I will summon later that night.

On the day he catches me peeking, he is wearing boxers with little dogs on them.

Vivek Shraya is a Toronto-based multimedia artist, working in the mediums of music, performance, literature and film. This story is from God Loves Hair, his first collection of short stories.

Of Mice and Faceless Men

By Jaime Woo

When I’m bored or restless, I turn to my iPod and open up Grindr, the popular and mildly infamous cruising app for men seeking other men. The app is location-based and uses GPS to determine who else is around: within seconds, my screen is populated with scores of images of men tantalizingly nearby. It’s a delightful hit of instant gratification, a marvel of modern technology, and a progressive juxtaposition to a time when gay men hid in the shadows and bushes.

The land of plenty is not paradise, however. There is a cultural brouhaha amongst cruising app users: a divide between the Faces and the Torsos.

The Faces are the more familiar tribe, recognizable from other social media services like Twitter or Facebook. They present through self-portraits, some choosing close-up beauty shots, others going head-to-toe. Many smile, just as many pose, and an oddball contingent try to appear aloof, as if unaware of the camera’s eye.

The Torsos prefer chest to cheekbones, cropping their photos from the clavicle to just above the hip bones. Often (but not always) the men are lean or muscular, at once devotees to the societal signifier of male virility yet also a middle finger to that same society’s widening masses. The Old Spice Guy may have popularized the idea of comparing himself to the schlub you’re with, but the gays did it first (and did it better).

Shirtless men are hardly shocking: in gay clubs, attendees strip, strut, and sweat in great swarms. Being topless is the de facto gay male uniform. But on Grindr, Torsos make a willful choice to become literally faceless, one of an often interchangeable series of bodies. This withholding annoys the Faces, who see it as cowardly, brusque or disrespectful.

Growing up in a Chinese household, I heard a lot about face. To “bei meen” to someone, literally to “give face” in Cantonese, was to have respect for that person. As a child, I heard of people who were “without face,” those considered to have little social capital or hadn’t much respect for themselves. (The English saying to “save face” probably has similar roots.) When I first began to think of Grindr’s Faces and Torsos, I assumed that to be a Face was to give face.

How To…

 MC Jazz for the Ethnic Aisle – How To by Ethnic Aisle

MC Jazz is a queer, Egyptian rapper and poet who is proud to be a part of Toronto’s innovative and diverse music scene. Here, for the Ass Issue, she performs “How To,” a funny, smart, biting spoken word piece about Barbie and body image. This Pride, she’ll be performing on the south stage on June 30th at 6 p.m., and at Blockorama on July 1, also at 6 p.m.

Open Bar

By Farzana Doctor

The baby dykes on the dance floor
Wanna know
How long have you two been together?

Just met today, I tell them
But they can’t hear over the thrum
Of music, bodies, lust

Three hours, I yell
And cast a glance at my date
We share a middle-aged smirk

But there is approval
In their mock-matron eyes
And they lean in to say:

We’re having a big gay marriage!
With an open bar!
A roast beef dinner!

Been there, done that.
My date mutters in my ear
Me too, I whisper

I close my eyes and remember
That ours was a commitment ceremony
She and I weren’t legal back then

I wore my mother’s bridal gagra choli
And my aunties gave blessings with
Tin-foiled coconuts circling my head

I open my eyes to see
My handsome butch date
Watching me. You OK?

I nod, pull her in closer
Her hand reaches up my skirt
I suck salt off her neck

Later, she drives me to her place
I stay two hours
Before kissing her goodbye

Farzana Doctor’s second novel Six Metres of Pavement won the 2012 Lambda Literary Award and was named as one of NOW Magazine’s Top Ten Books of 2011. She will be reading at Proud Voices on June 30th at 5pm.

The Ass and Body Confidence

By Renee Sylvestre-Williams

Toronto’s Pride and Caribana festivals may not be strictly about the ass, but both definitely celebrate it. I’m Trinidadian, so I’ll talk about Caribana. It’s now played by not just West Indians, but a variety of cultures that see awesomeness in slipping into something tiny, sparkly and wining in hot sunshine. Good times are had by all.

The bottom is an interesting thing. All genders appreciate a good ass, but the everyday bottom talk conversation tends to be under the radar. The exception is Brits who vote in the Rear of the Year award (which is won by one man and one woman) and fans of Desmond Morris.

Here’s a theory (not that my research has been exactly scientific): cultures that appreciate the bottom tend to have women and men who have a lot of body confidence.

White Women and Everything You Dream Of

by Navneet Alang

So there I was, blissfully happy, sitting next to a beautiful white woman. For some reason, it’s her toes, painted bright red, that stick out in my memory. And if with that I evoke slightly queasy echoes of the fetishistic, then at least I’ve started at the right place.

It was a few years ago now, this improbably idyllic summer romance. That day we were on a beach in the west end on one of those hot, pale Toronto mornings where one’s sense of time fades into the hazy space between lake and sky. We sat like two teenagers who, the morning after a first kiss are suddenly shy, bodies hesitantly brushing against each other. I remember the milky white skin poking out from under her dress and then a sudden burst of perfectly brushed red. Like something from a movie. Like an image cut out of a magazine.

I can only ask you to forgive me these unpleasant, adolescent clichés. I know, quite well in fact, that they are wrong.  This is the thing, though: you can spend your life arguing against “objectification” and “Eurocentrism” and still be unsure if you fell so hard for someone simply because of who they were—or because of what they, their looks and the colour of their skin represented. This uncomfortable, unavoidable truth hits home especially hard for people of colour: desire doesn’t care what your politics are.

There’s a perfect scene in Undercover Brother just after the film’s hero sleeps with Denise Richards’ “White She-Devil” character. Returning to the headquarters of black power group “The Brotherhood”, the reaction Undercover Brother receives there perfectly captures the strangeness of cultural desire. Dave Chappelle, playing the militant “Conspiracy Brother”, isn’t betrayed or shocked—he’s jealous. “Was it everything I dreamed of?” he asks, incredulously.