So a couple of days ago, I gave a lecture for a good friend’s class in SFSU’s Asian American Studies Department on HIV/AIDS and the queer API men’s community. It brought up a lot of interesting memories, since I used to teach and lecture about the history and sociology of queer Asian American men in grad school, and it’s something that I haven’t really touched or thought about in ages since I made my dad really happy, er, left sociology grad school and decided to try to get into pharmacy school to improve people’s health outcomes more directly (and make more money doing it) .
Going through my notes and old bookmarked websites that I used for my research to prepare for this lecture, I came across a site that I hadn’t really been on in years, called downelink.com, a social networking site originally designed by and for queer Asians to date each other. The website’s based on the term “downe”, an expression first used by Asian men who wanted to date each other, but didn’t necessarily identify as gay/bi/queer/whatever in the mid-1990s, on AOL chat (that shows you how old I am, AND how long I’ve been involved in the community). Downe was more commonly used by West Coast (SF and LA) queer Asian men in their 20s at the time, who identified more strongly as queer men of color, rather than with the mainstream gay white men’s community, and who saw each other as friends and potential lovers, rather than rivals to date white men.
Downe isn’t the same thing as the down-low, another term used to vilify closeted queer men of color (usually black men) but that’s another thing entirely.
I remember being curious and interested as the term became popular among the queer Asian youth that I would hang out with a few years ago. I started to see it as a way to define young queer Asian men who refused to identify with the mainstream gay white culture whose emphasis on expressing individuality at the expense of one’s family and cultural identity was being actively rejected. Those who identified as downe wanted to integrate one’s sexuality with one’s ethnic/racial identity, and that ultimately identifying as being into the same sex/gender didn’t automatically mean rejecting one’s Asian-ness, and that those who identified as downe were mostly queer Asian men who wanted to date (and hook up) with each other.
Of course, now that downelink.com has been bought by Logo, I’m not exactly sure how progressive this term is anymore. Even now, as the term’s become more popularized among queer Asians, it seems that downe has now become interchangeable with using gay or bi. The site itself is now mostly populated by young queer people of color (according to one blog, 72% of all users are Asian, African American or Latino), mostly Asian/Pacific Islander men and women, and seems to be one of the few spaces out there that actually exist for these people to really meet that’s not like MySpace or Facebook.
However, talking to a guy who’s doing his master’s thesis at SFSU on the term downe and the young queer Filipino American men’s community, he said that he couldn’t pinpoint a common agreeable definition . “Ask 5 people what downe means, and you’ll get 5 different answers,” he said.
So to all my fellow queer folk who read this, what DOES downe mean? Is the term even relevant to the community? I’ve always felt more comfortable using “queer” to define myself, but downe seems to have been milked for all its worth (especially if the downelink website was bought by an MTV affiliate!).
