Nguyen Tan Hoang
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Nguyen Tan Hoang (born c. 1971) is a gay Vietnamese American video artist and academic. Nguyen's own research interests include Asian American masculinity in gay male video porn and Hollywood and international cinemas.
Hoang left Saigon, Vietnam, with his family in 1979, when he was nine years old. After spending a year and half in refugee camps in Malaysia, the family arrived in the United States. Hoang grew up in San Jose, California, and received his B.A. in art and art history and a M.F.A. in studio art, and as of 2002 was a PhD candidate (Film Studies Program, Rhetoric), at University of California, Berkeley.
Nguyen Tan Hoang's creative work has been widely featured in festivals around the world. Nguyen's artistic agenda is a political one: to create a popular culture for gay Asian Americans. Nguyen often uses appropriated film footage, combining pastiche, kitsch film and music references to speak of his homosexual positionality.
Hoang's writings have appeared in Porn Studies (Duke University Press, 2004), Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular (http://vectors.usc.edu), and Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America (Duke University Press, forthcoming).
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[edit] Partial filmography
- A Horse, A Filipino, Two Women, A Soldier, and Two Officers (2005)
- K.I.P. (2001)
- Experimental video featuring images of the maker inserted into classic 70s gay porn footage of Kip Noll
- The Calling (2000)
- Catholicism, homosexuality and “cinematic men of the cloth”
- Cover Girl: A Gift from God (2000)
- The strange tale of Dalena, "a blond-haired, blue-eyed, all-American white woman who is also a Vietnamese American pop star...A gift from God, she possesses the uncanny ability to sing in perfect Vietnamese."
- Crimson (2000)
- A video collage/memoir about two buddies who drift apart, a bit, when one changes gender.
- PIRATED! (2000)
- Trauma and erotica conflate in the revisionist memories of a Vietnamese filmmaker who encountered Thai pirates as a young refugee
- Forever Bottom! (1999)
- Defiantly (and hilariously) celebrates bottomhood while simultaneously challenging dominant myths about gay Asian sexuality
- Maybe Never (But I'm Counting the Days) (1996)
- This innovative short uses pop music to interrogate queer life and love in contemporary society; skillfully examines anxieties, restrictions, and prohibitions in gay life in the age of AIDS.
- Love letters 1 & 2 (For Julian Love, Hoang) (1996)
- Forever Linda (1996)
- Details a young Asian American teenager's obsession with Supermodel Linda Evangelista
- 7 steps to sticky heaven (1995)
- A documentary of interviews with a group of young gay Asian men in San Francisco on a range of subjects; a musing on the politicization process of becoming "sticky rice", a gay Asian male (GAM) who dates other GAM’s
- Forever Jimmy! (1995)
- As a reaction to the lack of sexy Asian men in U.S. media, the film inserts Asian male pop stars into films in a barrage of seductive, fast edits and pornographic intertitles.
[edit] Acolytes
A fellow Vietnamese-American by the name of Thanh "Johnny" Chiem is an up and coming gay activist and writer, also a student in one of the most conservative schools of the United States, Texas A&M. His popularity is largely due to the high traffic of his online journal "Gay and Asian in Texas", which has been shut down by Xanga.com because of his crude detail and violation of pornographic image rules. Although he is a Pre-Med student, he often poses for various gay Asian fetish websites such as http://www.asianguys.com and http://www.icsvideo.com/ in order to assist in payment of tuition and other college related expenses. He is quite popular on these gay pornographic websites, as well.
"At first, it was very difficult to be gay with such a traditional Asian family, I wasn't sure when to come out and talk about it," says Chiem, "but the work of people like Nguyen Tan Hoang has helped me realize I'm not alone, as well as the support of my fans. I hope to meet him one day, and maybe even work with him."
And in comment to the stereotype of small penis size in Asian males - "I think that it's offensive. It's true, though, I'm a biology student and I know that our genes haven't made us the best endowed, but I believe its different for homosexual love. Penis size isn't even an issue, it's more about what you do with it."
[edit] References
- Williams, Linda (2004). Porn Studies. Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-3312-0.
- Nguyen Tan Hoang, contributor: "The Resurrection of Brandon Lee: The Making of a Gay Asian American Porn Star
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- By comparing porn star Brandon Lee to martial arts actor Bruce Lee (as well as his son Brandon Lee, who died during the filming of The Crow and from whom the porn star took his name) Hoang examines recent changes in the images of Asian men in porn and cinema generally. Hoang compares Bruce Lee's tasting his own blood in Enter the Dragon with Brandon Lee tasting his own cum in Asian Persuasion 2 and understands both images as a series of complicated messages about the acceptance and voiding of Asian male identity.
