On September 8, 1993, Wayne Wang’s adaptation of Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club was released and broke ground when it came to Asian American representation in Hollywood as it bridged the gap between Asian immigrants and their first gen offspring with Ming-Na Wen leading the charge as June.
Although The Joy Luck Club was making waves in the mainstream, earning a BAFTA nomination and numerous accolades, another movie The Wedding Banquet was released nearly a month before more quietly in the theaters.
Directed by Ang Lee, The Wedding Banquet premiered at the 43rd Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Golden Bear. It went on to debut in Taiwan before finally landing stateside. The pic follows Wei-Tung (played by Winston Chao) who marries a woman to get her a green card — but surprise! Wei-Tung is gay and has a boyfriend. When his traditional Taiwanese parents come to New York to help plan a big wedding banquet, secrets start to unravel. This could easily be considered an Asian American film even though it was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 1994 Academy Awards, the same year Tom Hanks won the Oscar for Best Actor for his role in another film with a queer narrative, Philadelphia.
Before The Wedding Banquet and The Joy Luck Club, Asian American films — let alone queer Asian American films — were practically non-existent but we got glimpses of representation with non-identity-focused characters like Dante Basco’s iconic Rufio in Hook (1991) and Tia Carrere’s Cassandra in Wayne’s World (1992). After 1993, which also included the release of Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, we should have seen more representation, right?
Well…
What we saw with the influx of AAPI representation after Crazy Rich Asians in 2018 is what many of us hoped would have happened in 1993. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a Minari, Shang Chi, or a limited series like Beef or Pachinko. Asian wasn’t as cool as it was now.
The window closed faster for AAPI representation in the mid-’90s. Not saying there wasn’t progress. Margaret Cho premiered her sitcom All-American Girl in 1994 while Lucy Liu had a glow up from her role in Ally McBeal which debuted in 1997. We saw the late Thuy Trang play the Yellow Ranger in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and Lauren Tom from The Joy Luck Club appeared in one of the most ’90s sitcoms ever: Friends. In 1997, Michelle Yeoh made her big Hollywood studio debut with Tomorrow Never Dies. The ’90s rounded out with John Cho gaining recognition as the MILF guy in 1999’s American Pie.
The early ’00s saw a little boost. Hollywood gave us some AAPI fare with Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) and Harold & Kumar Go To White (2004), but there was something special about the film Saving Face from director Alice Wu.
The film made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2004 and played at Sundance before making its theatrical premiere in 2005. Like The Wedding Banquet, this was a queer film — but it was more upfront and honest with its queerness. Something I’ve never seen before. It is probably the first time I saw myself represented. As much as I hate hearing that overused phrase these days, it’s kinda true for me.
Saving Face follows Wil (Michelle Krusiec) who is in the closet to her widowed and very traditional mother (Joan Chen). As we find out that she is not the only one in the family with secrets, she develops a relationship with the openly gay Vivian (Lynn Chen).
The film went on to play films all over the globe, gaining critical acclaim, and in 2020, Wu returned with The Half of It with Leah Lewis starring as Ellie, who becomes entwined in a love triangle. If Saving Face was about discovering your queerness, The Half of It is discovering what queer love is.
Wu is easily one of the most notable queer Asian American directors who have served LGBTQ movies from a major studio. As Asian American representation continues to expand and contract in the volatile landscape of post-strike/post-pandemic/post-racial reckoning Hollywood, the place of queer Asian American narratives remains questionable… or dare I say, non-existent?
I looked to the Andrew Ahn-directed Fire Island (2022) as a starting point and worked backward. Turns out there aren’t that many queer Asian American films from major studios — let alone indie films (do indie films even exist anymore?).
* * * *
Written by and starring Joel Kim Booster, Fire Island also starred the aforementioned Margaret Cho as well as Bowen Yang. It is basically Pride & Prejudice by queer and set in the present time in the titular queer locale with Booster as Elizabeth and Yang as Jane.
Originally a Quibi series — which was a thing for a hot second in Hollywood — Fire Island was originally titled Trip and when the streaming platform folded, the project hopped around before finally landing at Searchlight Pictures and released on Hulu on June 3, 2022. (Please read my interview with Cho, Booster, and Ahn when I interviewed the trio before the film was released. It has more details about the making of the pic.)
We were fresh out of the pandemic and many were still a little cautious when it came to watching a movie in theaters so Fire Island not getting a theatrical release wasn’t a terrible thing. This would work in its favor considering it would reach a wider audience on a streaming platform like Hulu. This would be great because a queer Asian person who feels isolated in the middle of the country would be able to watch this. This would make them feel seen — because representation matters, right?
Considering it premiered on Hulu, there is no way to measure how many people actually watched it but according to Mashable, Fire Island was the sixth most watched movie across all platforms during the week of June 11, 2022. There’s no clear way can’t measure the impact or the demographic that watched the movie. Sure, there were a couple of queer events surrounding the movie, but those were organized for people who were already going to watch the movie. It felt like it could have been a moment for the LGBTQ community in the Asian American diaspora, but like other major queer AAPI films, it got treated like the gay Asian cousin: it was kind of the Black sheep of the family… or should I say rainbow sheep?
From filmmakers to publicists to journalists, I spoke with Asian and Asian Americans working in the industry (most of the names have been changed) about Fire Island and bluntly asked them: Do you think the Asian American community showed up and supported Fire Island?
“Honestly, I don’t think Asians showed up for Fire Island,” said a hetero-identifying, male Asian American journalist, “but I still think it takes an arm and a leg for Asians to show up for anything.”
Simone, a queer Asian American writer and director agreed. “I don’t think many Asians watched Fire Island,” they said. “But my Asian cinephile and queer friends did!”
Charles, a queer Asian American publicist working at a major studio, adds to the chorus but changes the key: “I think queer Asians in America align themselves with the white queer experience, so having Asian stars didn’t do anything for them.” He also added that Booster is not a draw for the Crazy Rich Asians crowd.
“Crazy Rich Asians brought out the crowd because it’s exactly how Asians want to see themselves: rich and successful,” he pointed out.
“I feel the most acceptance for queer Asians in cinema is when they are more ‘straight’– or funny like Bowen Yang,” said Simone. “Even then, some Asian people only accept Bowen cause the whites do.”
Charles noticed the same thing with the Latinx community when Tanya Saracho’s very queer STARZ series Vida debuted in 2018. “[Asian Americans] are on the more conservative side of the coin and Fire Island is not the sort of representation that attracts them.”
As a queer Asian American, Charles admits that he didn’t feel targeted. This poses the question: was Fire Island marketed well?
“I watched it and loved it but I think it was more a marketing/distribution problem than Asians not showing up,” said journalist Rebecca Sun.
I guess people can’t show up for something they don’t know exists.
Writer Valerie Complex agrees that Searchlight Pictures dropped the ball on the marketing. A couple of months after Fire Island debuted, Universal Pictures released Bros in theaters nationwide. Since Bros and Fire Island are both queer movies, all eyes were going to be on them to see how they perform. “Bros probably had a bigger budget and a whiter cast so they pushed that one heavily,” said Complex.
She was right about the budget (and about the whiter cast). Bros had a budget of $22 million compared to Fire Island‘s $10 million. Bros also premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and premiered on 3,350 screens and Universal spent an estimated $30-$40 million to promote it.
“For Fire Island, I think there was some fear on the half of this on behalf of the studio,” Complex said in regards to how the studios handled the promotion of their respected movies. “It’s wild because Fire Island had the better cast, story, [and] the better movie, but I think that says more about the state of the industry.”
* * * *
Upon researching queer Asian American films, a lot of Asian (not Asian American) queer films surfaced. Queer content has been part of foreign cinema for a while and Asian cinema isn’t any different. From Happy Together (1997) to The Handmaiden (2016) to Joyland (2022), queerness has always been present in international cinema.
When it comes to queer Asian American narratives in film from major studios and the mainstream, it’s scarce. In addition to Fire Island, Spa Night, The Half of It, The Wedding Banquet, and Saving Face, there haven’t been many queer Asian American films that were prominent in the cultural zeitgeist. In 2018, HP Mendoza released the indie Bitter Melon while Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca (2019) garnered critical acclaim after premiering in Venice. It went on to be acquired by Ava DuVernay’s ARRAY and debuted on Netflix.
The Oscar-winning A24 juggernaut Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) was queer-lite and was embraced more as an awards season darling than a queer movie. The fact that Stephanie Hsu’s character — and Michelle Yeoh’s character at one point — are queer (or at least queer coded) is great, but having an entity like Michelle Yeoh in such a maximalist movie, the queerness isn’t talked about. This seems to be the most acceptable way for queer Asian American in film and TV — for it to be built on a heteronormative foundation to make it four-quadrant friendly — or at least more approachable for the average to above average moviegoer. It’s apparent for non-Asian American queer films too.
Although All of Us Strangers featured queer actor Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, who identifies as straight, co-starred and made it more palatable for more conservative cinephiles. Luca Guadagnino’s not-gay-but-gay tennis thriller romance Challengers starred larger-than-life movie star Zendaya as well as Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist. More people were concerned with the threesome of it all rather than the actual queerness it represented.
When it comes to mainstream/studio queer Asian American films and projects, there is support, but with colonizer conditions. Queerness was hyper-present in many Asian cultures before colonizers and religion got in the way. Just like two-spirit in Native American cultures, pre-colonial Asian cultures like hijra, bakla, and mahu celebrated gender fluidity and queerness — read all about it in the Britannica.
That said, the treatment of queer content in Asian American space feels very colonized Asia. It’s great to see all kinds of queerness in Kung Fu, Never Have I Ever, Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, Good Trouble, and in the comedy feature Joyride (which was another marketing mess) but it’s never the centerpiece of the show. It’s always secondary, unlike Sort Of which is queer but is a Canadian production. For the aforementioned TV shows, it feels like Hollywood doing exactly what they are good at: having enough of a heteronormative foundation to bury the queerness. That will make it palatable. Many queer people in the AAPI community could relate. You can be gay, but not too gay. Be a lesbian, but don’t bring it home.
“The frustrating part is that there are some Asians who say they don’t want to watch dry and long international art films that are queer,” said Simone. “OK, that’s great. Then why not watch Fire Island? It’s not dry or long and it’s not an ‘art film’ that premiered at Berlinale. It’s got a goddamn Britney Spears scene and an SNL cast member for crying out loud!”
They continued, “More people would watch Fire Island if it was a hetero film with a bunch of bros going on an island to meet girls.”
* * * *
If you notice, the names that were changed in this article were mainly Asian and Asian American people I talked to. The fact that they don’t want to use their real name is not cowardly. It speaks volumes about how open our community is to criticism and how safe we feel… in our community.
May and June are big months for the Asian American queer community. It’s a month where we can celebrate major parts of our identity. In May, we come through for Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month as much as we come through for Pride in June.
I have a friend who is queer and Asian. Let’s call them Foxy. Foxy used to be very involved in Asian Hollywood, showing up to all the major events. After a while, she stopped attending the scene Asian American Hollywood events. I asked her why they stopped going to all the Asian events. Turns out she was spending more time in queer spaces admitting they felt safer and more accepted in the LGBTQ community than in the Asian one. When Foxy said safe, she meant comfortable, without judgment — fully seen.
I get it. Navigating a siloed Asian American diaspora is challenging, and adding queerness to that adds to a bumpy identity journey — but we’re figuring it out.
More recently, Roshan Sethi’s A Nice Indian Boy starring his real-life boyfriend Karan Soni premiered at SXSW — but has yet to land a distributor. Fawzia Mirza’s The Queen of My Dreams and Amrou Al-Kadhi‘s Layla have Western connections and are guiding the way when it comes to giving us more films with queer Asian faces and rich, enlightening stories — much like Fire Island.
There is a place and need for studio films like Bros, Brokeback Mountain, Call Me By Your Name, Milk, Carol, Dallas Buyers Club, Rocketman, or anything done by Ryan Murphy. It’s Hollywood’s aspirational version of anyone who is a member of the LGBTQ community, or as Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers coined on the Las Culturistas podcast: the “legebatique” community. Movies like these showcase a queerness that is “acceptable”.
Fire Island is easily part of the queer cinematic canon of films like But I’m A Cheerleader, Bottoms, The Inspection, Shiva Baby, Dicks: The Musical, Tangerine, A Single Man, Pariah, and even Andrew Ahn’s upcoming remake of The Wedding Banquet. They push LGBTQ narratives forward. It shows us where we should be going because the LGBTQ community is always looking for what’s next. Not what’s now. It just takes a while for others to catch up.
Going back to my original question: Did the Asian American community support Fire Island? According to the handful of people I interviewed, the answer would be “no”. I realize it’s way more complicated conversation but I personally (only partially biased) agree. Fire Island is one of few queer Asian American queer films. The ones before it like Saving Face and Spa Night got the same type of casual support — why would Fire Island be different? There is a huge catalogue of queer Asian narratives in mainstream foreign cinema but Asian American queer cinema… not so much. The community cannot support queer Asian American movies if they aren’t getting made.
