Source of book: Borrowed from the library
I don’t remember exactly how this book got on my list, but it could have been recommended in any number of sources I utilize to discover newer books and authors.
Matt Ortile is an editor at Catapult, and has written for a number of those online magazines that old guys like me occasionally read, but not like the young people. (Shakes cane.) More than that, he is also a gay Filipino immigrant, which means some intersection with my family history and present.
(As I have noted in previous posts, my dad was born in the Philippines and grew up there. Like pretty much all of us, I also have LGBTQ friends and family, who I have chosen not to reject or antagonize. Instead, I am making a concerted effort to read queer voices and educate myself.)
This book is sort of like a memoir, in that it recounts a lot of the author’s life from his childhood first in the Philippines and then in Las Vegas (of all places), his college education at Vassar, and his life in New York City after graduation.
It also has a good bit of his sex life, which can be uncomfortable, depending on your tolerance for sex in general. (If the gay part is what bothers you, then, well, you might just be a bigot…) For me, I think one of the parts that I found most uncomfortable was the chapter on cruising - I’m temperamentally inclined toward monogamy, and the idea of picking up random persons sounds like a form of hell. But humans vary a lot, and I certainly know gay folk who have been (practically) married for decades, and hetero folk who prefer to date around. But it’s not my vibe.
The other thing that made me uncomfortable was the relationship dynamics - and that is something I find icky in heterosexual relationships too. Maybe it is my experience as a lawyer, but I keep seeing the red flags long before Matt does, and want to tell him to find someone more healthy to be with. Sigh.
What this does mean, however, is that the book is interesting because Ortile wears his heart on his sleeve. And, as it proceeds, it is fascinating to see him recount how each relationship brought him closer to the understanding of the underlying racial dynamics that drove him to seek a certain kind of relationship: one with a wealthy, older, more “together” white guy. Because that would make him fit in - make him white by association, so to speak. Which, well, that’s not how it works.
So, the best part of the book for me was this exploration of racial dynamics, particularly as they apply to someone like Ortile, the exotic sex object with certain “yellow fever” expectations. Not different at all from the same dynamic with certain white guys and their preference for Asian women - or perhaps their fantasy of Asian women.
A lot of the book too is about the quest to become American, particularly in an age of renewed xenophobia and anti-LGBTQ bigotry. What does that even mean? And is assimilation a worthwhile goal? Should he seek to “become white”?
I found myself drawn in to these conversations, and these questions that Ortile wrestles with.
Oh, and I should perhaps mention the source of the title. Ortile followed the famous section of the New York Times with the society marriage announcements avidly. Often, there is a notation of “the bride will keep her name.” But never the opposite - even though one of Ortile’s friends submitted that very phrase. There is the assumption that of course the man keeps his name, while the woman will not necessarily do so.
But what about when the couple is same sex? Well, for Ortile, his dream was always to marry a white man with a generic white name, and shed his “ethnic” one. Which nobody seems to pronounce correctly.
He mentions this straight off in the book, but waits until near the end to actually reveal the correct pronunciation. Those of us who grew up in an area colonized by the Spanish back in the day (California) and remember that the Phillipines were also colonized (and named) by Spain, may have a leg up. It is “or-TEE-lay.”
The writing is excellent, and very much contributes to the way the book draws you in, even if the world the author describes is unfamiliar.
Ortile was, like me, an academically minded nerd - in both of our cases, it was in part an attempt to prove ourselves worthy.
In all aspects of my life, I did what I could to prove my merit. Take off the tailored suit purchased on credit, and you get an insecure kid who grew up in two countries, was bullied for being different in both, felt less-than for simply being himself.
As an immigrant, he endured the usual crap. Although it was particularly hilarious that he was called a “wetback” - white chauvinists are often laughably bad at keeping ethnicities straight. I guess all brown-skinned people look like Mexicans? Sigh. On the other hand, they got the “faggot” part right, as he notes. He knew from childhood that he was gay.
I won’t duplicate all of the history here, but I will note that the Philippines marked the beginning of the US empire, and our global imperialism - we purchased the entire country from Spain for all of $20 million, and assumed we owned its occupants who were, after all, subhuman savages. It’s a sordid story, but one worth learning. I will also recommend both books by another Filipino-American author, Elaine Castillo, for more detail, and for the similar ambivalence about the role the United States has played on the world stage.
Ortile certainly experienced prejudice for his skin color, his national origin, and his sexuality. His family was spat on and told to go back where they came from, and a teacher went so far as to suggest he read about Matthew Shepard. That’s…pretty awful, although I will say my own kids endured similar crap from certain teachers at their school, one of which was later fired for (and you would never guess) appallingly racist stuff said to black students. It’s as if those are all related.
But to witness such prejudice, in my own time and in my history books, has taught me that racism, homophobia, and xenophobia are fixtures of life in the United States.
The author’s initial approach to this situation was to lean in to the “model minority” myth. Which exists primarily as a weapon to use against African Americans.
The model minority theory is a myth. It suggests that Asian Americans are the ideal foreigners: they are productive and respectable, proving that, in America, anyone can succeed, regardless of ethnicity or race, as long as you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It is a popular fallacy that hangs is believability on the fact that Asian Americans have achieved significant levels of socioeconomic mobility in the United States: above-average household incomes, high rates of educational achievement, overrepresentation at the top forty universities and among US hnoriees of Nobel Prizes.
This is related to contemporary stereotypes of Asians: the studious, diligent Asian; the upwardly mobile, law-abiding Asian; the inoffensive and unremarkable Asian. It positions Asian Americans as minorities of merit…
In the framework of the Boston Globe comic, it’s the “after” in the assimilationist makeover for Filipino, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese Americans. From being seen as lower-class and uneducated blue-collar workers, in the age of exclusionary acts and the so-called Yellow Peril, we became, by the latter half of the twentieth century, paradigms of middle-class mobility…
There is more, and it is quite spot-on about the fact that all of this is a creation of a white supremacist society - different groups are treated differently and pitted against each other.
It was up to me to reframe the facets of my Filipinoness as nourishing things, to reclaim them from my internalized colonialism, this parasite that made a host of me. I fed it by eating up myths that upheld the status quo, myths I accepted as truths universally acknowledged about structural inequalities that seemed natural because I was mis-educated to think so. Colonialism is a structure built on lies, tricks its subjects into being the architects of their own oppression.
The same is true of colonialism’s kissing cousin, Slaveholder Religion (aka white Evangelicalism). It is a structure built on lies, myths that support the status quo.
That first chapter is titled after, and discusses, the Barong Tagalog, the traditional Filipino shirt. I mention that in part because it was a thing familiar to me as a child, and in fact, my late grandfather wore one for his third marriage. (There is a whole story there, and you can read a bit about it in this post.)
Another chapter is somewhat about astrology. I was kind of surprised about this, but apparently astrology has made a huge comeback among younger millennials and Gen Z. Who knew?
Ortile is a typical Millennial about it, though. He doesn’t take it that seriously, and more as a framework, a way of understanding personality traits. Which, I guess it is about as defensible as some of the other frameworks. I grew up with the Briggs-Myers one as the most reputable, and these days, it has been questioned. (FWIW, I straddle the line between INTJ and ISTJ, but I also don’t test out strongly to one side on any of the axes - and my feeling side has definitely had its chance to be acknowledged more as I have distanced myself from gender essentialism.)
The other frameworks that my birth family used were significantly less reputable, and more harmful. One was the thoroughly discredited “birth order” one. I think Kevin Leman is a basically decent guy, and was trying to help - and his ideas on discipline were far less abusive than those of James Dobson and Bill Gothard. But in our particular family structure, I had a LOT of supposed “first born” traits projected on me that were really just my parents’ trauma from their first-born parents.
The other, the “spiritual gifts” one was so out there that it barely warrants mention, except that, again, it was used to project ideas on me that were not true about me, and as a weapon against my particular personality traits that make me who I am yet were rejected by my parents.
So, by comparison to the weaponized religious psychobabble I endured, astrology seems almost quaint and harmless. I still think it is superstitious woo, but your mileage may vary, I guess. That said, Ortile’s take on it is actually rather fun at times. Ortile mentions Barthes throughout the book - and now I realize I really need to read him. This quote was particularly fun.
Barthes compares astrology to literature: both are exercises in dealing with the real, seeking to know it by naming it - just as the Greeks called the moon Selene, as Keats called beauty truth.
And then there are dating apps. I agree with Ortile’s assertion that matchmaking apps are even weirder and less explicable than astrology. So too is our bizarre obsession with monetization.
Millennials like me have been told constantly to organize our daily lives in pursuit of maximum productivity. Time is capital, so preaches the Church of Optimization, and every year is the Year of the Hustle. We devote ourselves, then, to work and what it offers us: a salary, health insurance, proof of our life’s worth under late-stage capitalism. As investments, courtship and matters of the heart are too volatile. We turn to technology to reduce the risk and effort. In a way, this faith in tech requires grand optimism: Stop trying so hard, we tell ourselves, and be chill. Let love come to you.
Perceptive stuff. I haven’t been on the dating market in over a quarter century, and I am glad I am not. But if I were, I seriously get what Ortile is saying here. And honestly, I apply a lot of this to potential friendships these days.
When I meet someone new, I dive deep into their social media to probe for signs it won’t work. I pass on dudes who want kids, since I don’t; on guys who, judging by their pictures, only have white friends, since I’m not. I swipe left on men who say their political views are “conservative” or “moderate.” To possess an ideology that’s right of left evinces a heart that considered the lives of queer people, people of color, women, the poor, the disabled, immigrants and refugees, and combinations thereupon as lesser than one’s own.
It’s sad to have to admit that, but these days it is true. (In no small part because particularly in the US, “left” means everything from center-right to center-left, while “right” means fascism and social darwinism, and “moderate” means “I don’t want people to think I’m a racist and sexist and bigot…but I really am.”) Sooner or later, it is inevitable that a “moderate” will come out with something about “the Hispanic problem” or “black people are just more prone to criminality” or “women are just too emotional to be leaders” or “transgender people aren’t real: they are just perverts preying on children.” Every time.
The chapter on “Rice Queens and Dairy Queens” is excellent and fascinating. The terms, if you aren’t up on the lingo, refers to white gay guys who want to date the “exotic” Asian sorts, and white gay guys who only date white guys. See “yellow fever” above, or any number of nativist white guys. It’s all the same thing.
What is intriguing about this chapter is that Ortile internalizes all of the cultural crap, from the underwear ads to the whiteness of “acceptable” masculinity in our culture. Since he mentions Marky Mark as an early crush, I figure I have to link to one of my favorite songs of that era, “Good Vibrations.” And yeah, hella homoerotic, but I’m here for Loleatta Holloway’s badass vocals and that banging piano solo.
He talks a good bit about J. C. Leyendecker, one of the most influential ad men and artists of a certain era - and very gay. I may indeed be one of the few men in America who can casually drop that reference, and my wife knows exactly who I am talking about. She’s amazing that way.
But these very white ideals became Ortile’s internalized script, and it negatively affected his love life. This passage is fascinating.
I didn’t see myself as anything but a twink, at the ages of twenty and twenty-one, with only the nubile charms of a Filipino boy to leverage in uber-competitive New York. While some men took this bait, more common were those who disclaimed in their profiles, “no fats, no femmes, no Asians.” (Or, “no spice, no rice.”) Sometimes, men who wrote such slurs fucked me anyway, reminding me how racists might make exceptions in the name of conquest.
On that last note, I am reminded of the certain sort of rapey douchebro who ostensibly wants only thin, white, conventionally attractive women, but who seems to fantasize about raping those outside the fantasy, including lesbian women. Exceptions in the name of conquest indeed.
In a later chapter, which includes a passage contrasting Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, Miss Saigon, and David Henry Hwang’s later parody of the genre, Ortile returns to this troubling approach of white culture to Asian humans.
In a 1988 afterword to his play, Hwang describes how it was easy to believe in the play he wrote because “the neo-Colonialst notion that good elements of a native society, like a good woman, desire submission to the masculine West speaks precisely to the heart of our foreign policy blunders in Asia and elsewhere.”
As with the US in Vietnam, a white man thinks he can save the East and its people as he belittles them, as he ravishes his lotus blossom.
The thing is, there is a LOT of intersection of American history and Filipino history, but it tends to be forgotten, or even suppressed.
Just one example the book brings up: at least here in California, we learn about Cesar Chavez. In Bakersfield, you might find Dolores Huerta dancing the cumbia at a local music event (and she enjoyed some tunes by our string quartet, and one of my kids has spoken with her about civil rights issues at a protest) - and that’s great!
But even if you know about the Delano Grape Strike, do you know that it was led, not by Chavez, but by Larry Itliong, and consisted mostly of Filipino American laborers?
It is a bit easier for those of us who live here, where mid-sized cities in California boast high numbers of Filipino residents - rivaling the big cities in the Philippines! For my wife, working in nursing, Filipino nurses are the backbone of our medical system everywhere in this state - and immigrants generally are vital for providing healthcare, even in white communities.
But our official history books tend to ignore this. (Although to be fair, the state of California is working on improving our curriculum to include a more diverse (and thus far more accurate) account of the past.)
I studied the history of Filipino America outside school, had to collect its disparate fragments and piece it together because the culture at large didn’t care to remember us. This forgetting is a predominant theme in the scope of Asian American histories. The Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese American internment during World War II, US involvement in Vietnam and the following refugee crisis - my teenage textbooks made footnotes of these events, centered their chapters on America’s victories, its generals and politicians, and ignored whole lands and peoples used as props in the game of American imperialism.
Something to remember when MAGA sorts talk about needing a “patriotic” curriculum rather than a “woke” one. What they really mean is a return to a whitewashing of history, one that erases the roles of people who are not white males.
Another chapter which I really loved was “Balikbyan,” which is a Tagalog word referring to Filipinos who return to the Philippines after a stay in the US. This chapter is all about immigration, and the author’s work to get dual citizenship. (And thus two passports.)
Since Ortile’s mother naturalized him as a child, he had less in the way of hoops to jump through, but even getting paperwork as a naturalized citizen was stupidly complicated. (I can attest to this from the issues faced by friends and family. Our system is seemingly calculated to make it impossible for people who aren’t rich and educated to navigate.)
This chapter also gets into his complicated relationships with his family. His parents separated when he was young, and his parents took very different approaches to him. His mother always knew he was gay, and supported him. (And his stepfather did likewise later.) His father kept trying for years to “fix” him, although he later came around enough that they have a relationship.
These summer trips were dutiful attempts to maintain good relations with a man around whom I wasn’t sure how to act. In other words, we were your typical dad and gay teenage son. Though my father has always loved me - I know that - our relationship was strained after years of comments like “stand up straight like a man.” His demands that I “man up” echoed the bullying I faced at my all-boys school in Manila, from classmates who told me I was going to hell for being a “sissy,” a “bakla,” a “girl.” As a young gay boy, I counted my father among my tormentors, people who would rather I weren’t myself.
His mother was a huge contrast, and I am a bit jealous that he had a parent who actually seemed to understand him, at least most of the time.
She and I were your typical mom and gay teenage son. Both new immigrants in the States, with my stepfather still living in Manila, we only had each other. She was my best friend, the first person I told I was gay, at thirteen. I sought her counsel in the face of adversity, as I faced new teenage tormentors, patronizing teachers, and homophobic priests. Confused and hurt at how efficiently people in America could hate, I was still that three-year-old boy at his uncle's wedding, running to his mother whenever he felt uncomfortable and hurt. I felt safe coming out to her, felt safe coming to her for everything, knowing she would do all she could to protect and care for me.
And yes, it is appalling how incredibly efficient Americans are at hating. It is part of our national character, unfortunately.
There is another passage about his mother, that I think is so badass.
We were at Sunday mass in Las Vegas, in the summer of 2008, when a priest gave a homophobic homily, speaking against the legalization of same-sex marriages in nearby California. It was the same familiar message, condemning homosexuality as a sin and sentencing such sinners to hell. My ears grew hot. My mother walked out of the church with me in the middle of the service. She assured me that she loved me and all facets of my identity, told me that God did too, that He loved all His creations. I appreciated her support, always have. Still, the hateful priest underscored the fact that, as a gay man, I would face hate on all sides of the Pacific.
I had a similar experience of a viciously anti-gay sermon, and I wish I had had the courage to walk away then and there. As it was, it took another year and a half before we left organized religion, but the roots of it were there.
I did speak up a few months later when our former pastor made the bullshit assertion that “christians ended slavery,” glossing the fact that they fucking CREATED chattel slavery in the US in the first place, and that the theological ancestors of our tradition were thoroughly pro-enslavement.
And also, that sermon was the end of my last vestige of homophobia - I realized it was all rooted in bigotry, not in Christ’s teachings and example. When we finally left organized religion in the wake of the Trump and MAGA takeover of Evangelicalism, I did have a conversation with our kids, where I stated outright that I did not believe God made mistakes, and that gay and transgender people were part of His intentional and lovingly envisioned creation. I still firmly believe that.
Later in the chapter, he offers some incredible hope about his father, though, which I thought was touching. His father actually learns how to listen.
What the fucking hell? Someone actually changes for the better?
Yeah, sorry, I am pretty bitter and pissed that my own parents have consistently refused to listen to me for the last, like, 35 years. I’m jealous of Ortile. But also encouraged that at least some people are capable of positive change. Anyway, he listens, they talk, and he offers this surprisingly good bit of advice:
“Sometimes, the roles people play in your life…They change. You learn to let them go.”
Ortile thinks about it, then realizes that things have shifted between them.
I wasn’t sure what had changed, encouraged by my candor. Maybe it was that I began to let go of the memory of my father who didn’t understand me, welcoming into my life my father who was willing to try.
Seriously, that made me cry. I so very much wish that day will someday come for me. Even though I realize it never will. My parents were fully willing to throw me away rather than listen, let alone change. This is my life, and I have no control of that part of it.
Instead, I have had to make peace with something that the author notes is the norm for LGBTQ people: we embrace our chosen family. Those who accept us for who we are, and who love us rather than try to change us. I am so incredibly grateful for my chosen family - you know who you are. And I include some amazing people who stepped in to be the grandparents to my children my parents refused to be.
Chosen family is defined by care and mutual support, the kind of compassion and grand acts and little gestures that nourish us as individuals, whether together or alone.
The final chapter, the one that gives the book its name, is another favorite. I am happily married (23+ years!) to an amazing woman. We have an egalitarian relationship. But I also confess that both of us have some significant discomfort with the institution itself, which is explicitly rooted in some really misogynistic beliefs. The author sums it up pretty well.
I should not want to get married. I should not buy into the wedding industries’ ritualization of capitalism. I should not long for a legal status rooted in the patriarchal subjugation and ownership of women. I should not wish to go through this rite of passage that promises a vision of idealized love, nor seek validation from cultural and social authorities by participating in said rite, a legal right that such authorities have denied queer people. I should not support a marriage equality movement that has historically excluded trans and queer people of color, that trades on heteronormative respectability politics and hinges my worth as a queer person on how closely I resemble the straight majority. I should not at all aspire to a wedding so fabulous, a marriage so conventional, nor a love so Instagrammable.
Nevertheless, I do.
Yeah, I concur with literally everything in that statement except the part about being queer. I am boringly cishet, and secretly like the whole pomp and circumstance, even as I hate the root meaning of so much of it. If I were to do it again, I would obviously want to marry my wife, but I would probably elope next time - and definitely tell my parents and sister that they could either shut up, or go fuck themselves if they couldn’t keep their big mouths shut about our lives.
Ortile envisioned for much of his life, a lavish wedding, and the chance to shed his “ethnic” last name and become a white American. But as he grew and matured, he realized that all of this was an attempt at gaining approval from a system which creates brutal hierarchies rather than equality. I think this passage is incredible.
It’s no wonder I so easily bought into this sort of attitude, this heteronormativity. It closely resembles the Asian model minority myth, which proposes the idealized image of boot-strapping Asian Americans who aspire to whiteness and are thus deemed unthreatening by white Americans. Within these two frameworks, both animated by a deference to the dominant group, those who prioritize assimilation are rewarded, deemed worthier than other minorities of rights and privileges, thereby inhibiting solidarity with those who don’t follow the same path.
And that’s the thing. Even as I am a white guy, married to a white woman, with white kids, I find white supremacy to be damaging and corrosive to everyone, myself included. And as a cishet married guy, I find heteronormativity - aka gender essentialism and hierarchy - to be damaging and corrosive to everyone. Both need to be destroyed and replaced with a true equality, one envisioned in Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Ultimately, our relation to each other should not be founded on a hierarchy of whiteness, of heteronormativity, of wealth, or any other human-created distinction, but on our common humanity.
That, ultimately, is the strength of this book. It always takes the marginalized to see these truths - which is one reason I seek out books written by those outside the usual rings of power and privilege. Ortile brings these ideas to life as part of his own life. Don’t let the sex get in the way of seeing the bigger picture.
I will end with something a bit lighter. There is a passage where Ortile visits the Philippines, and mentions Jollibee and Chicken Joy. There was a huge stir when this chain came to Bakersfield. And now we have a Max’s too. This is like McDonalds coming behind the Iron Curtain-level stuff. I still haven’t gotten to Max’s yet, but for my money, it is worth the drive to Best Lumpia in Stockton…if you know, you know.
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