The Scarcity of Diverse Asian Gay Porn
Ever wondered why you’re not getting high-quality, professionally made gay porn from different kinds of Asian ethnical backgrounds unlike Latinos, or Czechs, or British? Whether it’s produced in Asia or not, we’re pretty sure we lack pornographic films and actors from this region.
When you try to google “Asian gay porn“, the search engine will return a bunch of results ranging from porn video streaming sites to western porn studios featuring Asian men. If you click on the first entries, it’ll direct you to adult video hosting websites’ “gay” page and will give you a bunch of either amateur gay porn from all over the east and southeast Asia and of course, an abundant amount of professionally produced gay pornography in either Japan or Thailand. The amplitude of diverse pure Asian races in gay pornographic materials is visibly less to none at all. The dearth is undeniable since demand is growing but stagnantly, in a developing level.
REPRESENTATION AND CONCENTRATION
There’s no doubt that there is a sizeable sexually attractive Asians pre-Harry Shum Jr era. Despite this, Asian gay pornographic actors have not been found to be potentially marketable yet, these actors of color sought their way to stardom. Take one of Chi Chi LaRue’s fine discoveries Brandon Lee for instance. He was 18 back then when he was discovered. His films were under Catalina Videos. A context implicating Lee’s exposure to Western gay pornography as a “breath of fresh air” and an unmasking of his racial ambiguity appears in a passage from “Porn Studies” edited by Linda Williams:
“The racial/ethnic ambiguity of Brandon the porn star proves a bit trickier. For example, he first appeared in a gay porn video entitles Glory Holes of L.A. (dir. Bianco Piagi, 1997) under the name Sean Martinez. It was not until his second video, Asian Persuasion, that he took on the name Brandon Lee. In the context of mainstream gay video pornography, where young, white, well-built actors are the unquestionable norm, any departure from this type represents a ‘special niche,’ a context in which differences such as race become heavily commodified.”
Lee was dubbed as the first and one of the most popular Asian gay porn actors in the western pornographic industry. He’s muscular, innocent but raunchy looking, and super hung. Those are perfect ingredients of a desirable male porn star. Though if you’re going to look at the ratio of non-Asians versus the number of Asian models in a single western studio, the latter would be greatly outnumbered. The good thing is we are seeing great efforts from these big studios to raise these actors into prominence. However, due to lack of abundance, Asia may have also hesitated to produce their own gay porn ’cause they cannot really gauge how bankable ethnic Asian actors can be in this type of industry just yet.
We may still have a long way to go but diversity and representation have come a very long way. We are lucky to be alive in this time where political correctness has become a consideration which shape marketing strategies and rumination for different types of media. But on a brighter note, we get a whole lot of handsome actors to feast our eyes on and we’re still hoping for more to choose from!
PORN IN ASIA
As you can see, most of these Asian territories outlawed pornographic industries and settled with the black market sales of such materials. There are some countries in Asia that deem all forms of porn illegal but the law is not religiously enforced like in South Korea and Thailand which makes an intelligible idea why Thai gay porn films, from softcore to hardcore, are still circulating the world wide web. However, countries in the middle east are stricter as how you would expect it like in Saudi Arabia where Islam opposes it.
Nonetheless, the most porn you can scour from most countries in Asia is homemade, amateur gay porn and softcore ones. Most of them can also be seen posted on social media just like in Indonesia where selling and production of pornography may be outlawed but minimally enforced. Most of them resort to shooting it in low quality as means of production then sell it thru social media as exclusives or have them posted in exchange of “Likes” since professional production is expensive and they cannot risk putting up studios where they are really not expecting to earn enough revenue to produce more.
The abundance of gay porn in the Asian region is minute because of restrictive laws but this does not mean that Asian people cannot watch porn. The thing is, their exposure with the adult film industry production is very limited to the extent that they cannot even attain really large global publicity plus the fact that it is being regulated by their countries’ respective laws. Hence, hindering them to market their works to a wider audience.
CONSERVATIVE CULTURE
Asian people are known for radical preservation of culture. One of these traits that define this compact culture is being conservative. Well, some may raise eyebrows and say otherwise but we couldn’t agree more regarding the evolution of the Asian people when it comes to traditionalism. But the parents of this generations are still very much alive and kicking. That previous generation is still known for moderate to full-on cultural preservation so these kids of our generation are still pretty much guarded.
In the Philippines, the country has outlawed producing, distributing, and selling any forms of pornography, and The Philippines remains the only UN-member state without legal provision for divorce. These laws are influenced by religion and conservativism since a large population of the country believes in Roman Catholicism. In Vietnam, porn is also illegal. The rationale behind this law is that pornography harms traditional Vietnamese values. As a result, they may have gay porn in their countries but they keep the anonymity of the actors or participants since these countries have established a reputation on traditionalistic culture and conservative ethics. You might mistake their amateur porns for “leaked sex tapes” but they are not. They were actually made for public consumption for the gay community in their respective countries to enjoy.
Quartz Media published porn statistics back in 2014, only 2% of searches on PornHub from India were for male homosexual content. However, this on that year, gay searches have jumped by a massive 213%. As per Alexa.com, India is the second Asian country next to Japan with the highest percentage of visitors from the said porn hosting site. However, gay sex is still a crime in the country despite these visible exposures to sexually explicit materials.
It is really hard for the gay porn industry especially for established studios to penetrate the Asian market since most of these countries are still intact with their cultural preservations. They end up relying on free porn with lower quality which makes it difficult for the porn industry to concentrate on those territories and sell their works. Because of this, these countries lack inspiration for hardcore homosexual porn production and we don’t think we can get anything from them soon.
HIGH HOPES FOR THE FUTURE OF ASIAN GAY PORN
It all boils down to profitability and commercial consumption. Every industry is a business. As long as external factors are triggering the demands, the production is greatly affected. Just like a simple lesson you learn from your economics class. We’re very glad to see new generations of adult film actors like Ken Ott, Axel Kane, and Peter Le represent their ethnic backgrounds in the western media but we wanted more like them. Perhaps we could see more south Asian adult performers in the near future. We’re also hoping to see more professionally made, higher-budgeted gay porn and stable adult film studios originating from Asia since they bring bring more authenticity to the sensual vibe of the material much like how Japan exhibit their sex culture through pornographic means. It’s genuine, eccentric and sexy. And it’s a good way to introduce us to other people’s rich culture of sex and intimacy.