BOOK REVIEW: Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu is the winner of the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The book is a short, clever exposition on stereotypical media portrayals of Asian-Americans. It uses the narrative conceit of appearing to be a screenplay of a television show that features Willis Wu as a “Generic Asian Man” who is trying to be cast as the ultimate character for an Asian male: “Kung Fu Guy.” But generally Willis only gets roles like “Background Oriental Male" and “Delivery Guy.“ Willis lives in a SRO tenement with a number of other Asian-Americans which has a Chinese restaurant on the first floor named Golden Palace Restaurant.

One of the central bits of Interior Chinatown is the depiction of a television show called Black and White. This is a stereotypical cop show featuring a Black man (named Miles Turner) and a white woman (named Sarah Green) who are police partners who solve crimes. Miles is very muscular, handsome, but curiously bigoted towards Asians and is the “bad cop” while Green is also very attractive, statuesque and is the “good cop.” Yu uses the trope of the buddy cop show to highlight other familiar stereotypes (about cop shows, Black people, women cops and many more). Willis eventually gets a role on the show where he has to speak in a broken-English accent and do a bunch of kung fu before he gets shot and killed in the main dining room of the Golden Palace Restaurant. This then makes Willis subject to the rule that he can’t appear on TV for another 45 days.

Without the ability to appear on TV, Willis’ story switches focus to his private life. Here Interior Chinatown begins to lose its way by sticking to the screenplay format even though now we are following the "real" story of the actor Willis Wu who had appeared on the fiction show Black and White. The “show” the book/script is now following becomes a family drama as Willis dates a pretty biracial actress named Karen Lee whom he met on the set of Black and White (in the episode in which his character died). Karen and Willis get married and have a little girl named Phoebe. But they do not live happily ever after because Willis is obsessed with being cast as Kung Fu Guy and even when Karen gets the opportunity to be the lead of her own show instead of being happy for her, Willis is resentful. So then he finds himself playing the role of Part-time Dad to his daughter.

Eventually Willis does become Kung Fu Guy but he realizes it’s a role that he’s not suited for and storms off the set. Bizarrely, Turner and Green show up and arrest him for being responsible for his own disappearance. He’s put on trial and his lawyer is Older Brother, who makes an impassioned argument that Willis has an inferiority complex because of all the examples of anti-Asian policies and practices in American law and culture which have oppressed people who look like him. 

One of the central ideas of the book is that there are multiple levels of “fictionality” occurring in the story simultaneously. The story Interior Chinatown is telling is always in the form of a screenplay, even when the focus switches from the fictional cop show, to the "real" family drama of the actor Willis Wu to the courtroom drama of his disappearance. It is very clever writing and allows the author to communicate multiple messages simultaneously but instead of working on more than one level, for me the book ceases to be an enjoyable one. That being said, like a screenplay, it is a very quick read. There’s a lot of white space and it’s well under 250 pages. Despite being short, Interior Chinatown is definitely not a lightweight book, even though its format would tend to send that message. Although ultimately the book didn’t “work” for me, I am glad that I read it and I do agree that the topic of anti-Asian sentiment and stereotypical portrayal of racial and ethnic minorities in the media is an important topic that the book dramatized in effective fashion. I just think Yu tried to do to much at once, and thus blunted his own overall impact.

Title: Interior Chinatown.
Author: Charles Yu.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 273 pages.
Publisher: Pantheon Books.
Date Published: January 28, 2020.
Date Read: April 23, 2021.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★☆☆  (3.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: B  (3.0/4.0).

PLOT: B-.
IMAGERY: C+.
IMPACT: B+.
WRITING: A-.

Lori Lightfoot Elected First Black Lesbian Mayor of Chicago

Lori Lightfoot is a 56-year-old former federal prosecutor and private attorney who just became the first Black lesbian to be elected mayor of Chicago. Lightfoot will become the highest ranking openly LGBT mayor in the country when she takes office and mayor of the largest city to be run by a Black woman, although not the only one. San Francisco (London Breed), Atlanta (Keisha Lance Bottoms), and Washington, D.C. (Muriel Bowser) are just a few.

Congratulations, Mayor Lightfoot!

CELEBRITY FRIDAY: London Breed Elected First Black Female Mayor of San Francisco

London Breed will become the first African-American female mayor of San Francisco when her main rival for the position, openly gay former State Senator Mark Leno conceded defeat. San Francisco is California's 4th largest city (behind Los Angeles, San Diego and San Jose) and the nation's 13th largest. Breed, 43, is the President of the Board of Supervisors and will become the only women of color to currently lead a major American city.

Breed will serve out the rest of Mayor Ed Lee's term (until January 2020) and has not said whether she will run for re-election in November 2019. It is worth noting that te next Governor of California is likely to be Gavin Newsom, who became known to voters as the Mayor of San Francisco. Breed will be the second woman to serve as Mayor; the first is Dianne Feinstein, who is now California's senior U.S. Senator.

POLL: 12% Of California Voters Are #LGBT

Equality California has released a poll which shows that 12% of California voters identify as LGBT. Interestingly, this number varied only slightly by geographical region in the state, from 10% in the Los Angeles area (11% in Los Angeles county) to 14% in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The poll discusses the margin of error:

The survey’s margin of error is plus or minus 4 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence level. This means that 95 times out of 100, if a response to a given question to which all respondents answered was 50%, we could be 95% confident that the true percentage would fall within +/-4% of this percentage - or between 46% and 54%. As 12% of respondents in this survey answered “yes” when asked if they were a member of the LGBT community, we can infer that the sampling error specific to that response is +/- 2.4% or between 9.6% and 14.4%.

The poll's methodology of asking the question "Are you a member of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community, also known as the LGBT community?" online may be an explanation for why they received such larger values than the more typical 2-4% number  that we have been more used to.

CELEBRITY FRIDAY: Famous Neuroscientist Oliver Sacks Was Gay!

Noted neuroscientist Oliver Sacks died last weekend at age 82. I was unaware, and I suspect many of my readers are also, that Dr. Sacks was (sorta openly) gay. Thanks to my local NPR station (KPCC 89.3 FM) I learned not only that Dr. Sacks was gay but that as a young medical resident he spent a fair amount of time in Southern California, including at famed Muscle Beach in Venice, CA where he was known as "Dr. Squat" because he could squat lift 575 pounds!

Apparently he was very conflicted about his sexuality, as this excerpt indicates:

He had here his early struggles with his gay identity — he was celibate from his 30s until he was 75, when he met the love of his life, to whom he dedicated his last book — along with ensuing, difficult relationships. He got into a couple of biker brawls. He had a mad drive to prove himself as a body surfer in Venice (where he dislocated a shoulder and broke a few ribs) and a Muscle Beach muscle man.

His last book was published this year and titled On The Move. In it he mentions more details about his love life, including the name of his lover, Bill Hayes.

The picture at the top of this post show Sacks in 1961 (at age 28) and then later on years later. He apparently loved motorcyles his entire life as well.

Doh! HBO Cancels Gay Drama Looking After 2 Seasons

I just watched the finale of Season 2 of Looking with the Other Half last night and both of us were quite impressed. It was probably the best episode of the show in its 18-episode history.

Sadly, today comes word that HBO has cancelled the show and decided that there will be no more episodes of Looking, although there will be a final movie:

Looking was never a strong ratings performer. Last year, HBO executives proceeded with a second season renewal encouraged by the attention the show was getting in the cultural conversation and by its week-to-week ratings growth. Unfortunately, the second season couldn’t build on that, falling from the Season 1 highs and drawing 300,000 viewers for its last episode.

Hat/tip to Joe Jervis

Gallup Ranks U.S. Metro Areas By LGBT Population Percentage

There has been a bunch of chatter in the blogosphere recently about the release by the Gallup organization of the top 10 metropolitan regions ranked by LGBT population percentage. Unsurprisingly, San Francisco is ranked #1 and the usual suspects are found in the Top 10 (Austin, Portland, Seattle, Boston, Los Angeles and Denver). The big surprise is that Salt Lake City is at #7.

The Williams Institute looked at the difference in the Top 10 most LGBT metropolitan areas from 1990 to 2014:

Only San Francisco, Austin and Seattle are in the Top 5 on both lists. In 1990 Salt Lake City was at #39. Dr. Gary Gates explains why:

The substantial change in the position of Salt Lake City in the 1990 same-sex couple rankings compared to its position in the recent rankings based on LGBT identity offers evidence of increased LGBT visibility even in conservative states like Utah. This may be a factor in why, in 2015, Utah became the first state in the last seven years to pass a law that prohibits discrimination in the workplace and in public accommodation based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The majority of states still do not have such laws on their books. Substantial increases in LGBT visibility in more socially conservative places like Salt Lake City, Louisville, and Norfolk likely mean that these areas are not as different from cities like San Francisco, Austin, and Seattle (all with long histories of fostering social climates where LGBT people felt more comfortable) in their acceptance of the LGBT community today than they were twenty years ago.

Basically, the entire country is more accepting as a whole so the geographical variation is much smaller (the difference between the #1 area of San Francisco at 6.2% and the median nationwide percentage of 3.6% is not that great) so that even the the area with the lowest LGBT population (unsurprisingly, Birmingham, Alabama) is only one percentage point below this mark.

WATCH: Trailer for Season 2 of HBO's Looking

The first season of HBO's gay dramedy series Looking was uneven but I was generally pleased to hear it was renewed for a second season. The show is set in San Francisco and revolves around the lives and loves of four gay men, with the central character being played by openly gay actor Jonathan Groff. The trailer for the second season is now available.

Most of the actors playing the characters in Looking are gay (with the notable exception of  Raul Castillo's Richie, who is probably my favorite character). The acting is fine, my issues are with some of the writing, and primarily with the presence of one of the characters I think is just useless (Frankie J. Alvarez's Agustin).

Anyway, I'm looking forward to watching Looking until the 5th season of Game of Thrones begins to air!

MadProfessah Is On Vacation (SFO & SLC) June 6-16

I am on "vacation" from June 6-16th, visiting family and friends up in San Francisco, attending two academic workshops (one at Brigham Young University and one at Pepperdine University) related to my day job as a math professsor and in between  those workshops I will be checking out the natural beauty of the state of Utah, probably around Moab and Arches National Park.

Blogging may be (s)lower than usual during that time, but will probably accelerate again once Wimbledon begins!

Season 1 Finale of HBO's Looking Tonight

The first season of HBO's gay "dramedy" series Looking ends tonight when the 8th episode airs. The show has already been renewed for a second season and revolves around the loves and lives of three openly gay guys living in the San Francisco Bay Area. The lead character is played by openly gay actor Jonathan Groff and the central tension of the show is about whether his somewhat neurotic videogame programmer Patrick will choose Richie (Raul Castillo, who is straight in real life), a cute and very decent working class Latino barber with apparently little ambition, or Kevin (played by openly gay Russell Tovey), his handsome, British boss who has a longtime boyfriend and some palpable physical attraction towards Patrick. The series is co-created by Andrew Haigh (who directed Tovey in the sleeper gay hit film Weekend).

The other storylines involve the "co-lead" characters Dom (openly gay Australian actor Murray Bartlett), a just-turned-40 waiter who is starting to realize he needs to do something with his life before he can no longer get by on his good looks to hook up with twinks) and Augustin (Frankie J. Alvarez), an unlikable artistic type who is Patrick's college buddy and used to be his roommate until he moved out to Oakland to live with his very attractive (and Black) boyfriend early in the season.

The show is only 30 minutes long so I would prefer to see more of the Richie-Patrick-Kevin triangle as well as the potential courtship between Dom and older man Lynn (played by Scott Bakula).

Also ending its first season tonight is HBO's True Detective which stars newly minted Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as two detectives in a very atmospheric show about child murders and police misconduct in the Louisiana countryside and bayous. Apparently, neither Harrelson or McConaughey will appear in Season 2, so this may be the last time to see these two great actors facing off each other on "the little screen."

HBO Renews "Looking" For 2nd Season

The most high-profile gay series on television, HBO's Looking, has been renewed by the cable network for a second season despite relatively low viewership. The show is currently approaching the end of its first 8-episode season (didn't we used to call seasons this short miniseries?), with episode 6 (probably the best episode to date) airing last Sunday.

I like the show but it has some significant problems. It's what used to be called a "dramedy" (comedy-drama) in the vein of HBO's Girls but the characters in Looking are not as well-drawn as on Lena Dunham's show.

The show is set in San Francisco's predominantly gay scene.

WATCH: Trailer for HBO's new gay series "Looking"

The 8-episode first season  of HBO's new drama about the life and loves of modern gay men set in San Francisco called Looking stars openly gay Jonathan Groff (Glee) and Scott Bakula (Quantum Leap, Men of a Certain Age) premieres on January 19, 2014.

The trailer doesn't look like the series is going to be featuring diverse characters, but since there is so little original gay content from major media sources I will probably watch it. It basically looks like a gay version of Lena Dunham's Girls.

OBITUARY: Sean (from MTV's The Real World) Is Dead

Remember Sean from MTV's The Real World? His full name is Sean Sasser and he was Pedro Zamora's boyfriend in the show and in real life. Pedro was the first HIV-positive person very many Americans got to know through his appearance on the hit MTV reality series in the mid-1990s. (They appeared in the 3rd season of the show, the one set in San Francisco in 1994). Zamora died the day after the last episode of the show in which he appeared aired, and he and Sasser held a commitment ceremony on the show which was broadcast on MTV. Even though same-sex marriage was legal nowhere in the world at the time, the desire and need for governmental recognition of same-sex couples' relationships was made very clear by the event to many of those who saw the episode.

According to Joe.My.God and other press reports, Sean Sasser died of cancer-related causes this week at age 44. Sasser and Zamora were one of the first gay and HIV-positive couples to appear on television and had an impact on how countless Americans viewed these marginalized groups.

The Root analyzes the impact of Sasser's life:

But the time when discrimination based on sexual orientation and HIV status was the national norm was not so long ago: Such bias was alive and well 19 years ago, when the third season of MTV's The Real World: San Francisco introduced a gay couple, both of whom were HIV positive.  

One half of that couple was Sean Sasser, who became engaged to Pedro Zamora, a Real World cast member, during the show's run. Sasser, who was black, and Zamora, who was Hispanic, became one of the first high-profile gay and HIV-positive couples -- and one of the first gay power couples of color -- represented in mainstream media. Their presence on the show sparked powerful discussions and debate on HIV awareness and education, same-sex marriage and a host of other issues that are regular parts of the national discourse today but were not in 1994. 

When I was growing up in a conservative part of Texas, Sasser and Zamora represented my first exposure to seeing a gay couple living their lives just like everybody else. I know I'm not the only one. Watching them strive to build a life together is one of my earliest memories of beginning to contemplate the idea that same-sex couples would want the same things that most couples do.

It's great to see another appreciation of that season of the The Real World: San Francisco and to see the names Pedro and Sean again.

Hat/tip to Joe.My.God.

Gaytterdämmerung: Prop 8 is Dead! Marriage Equality Returns To California

With a short 1 sentence order published at 3:21pm PDT, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the stay of their 2012 decision in Hollingsworth v. Perry, eschewing the typical 25-day wait for the United States Supreme Court ruling to be officially communicated to them, putting the district court ruling of Perry v Brown back into effect, returning marriage equality to California and its nearly 40 million residents.

The order was simple but its effect was not: "The stay in the above matter is dissolved effective immediately."

American Foundation for Equal Rights sent out the information 12 minutes later by tweet:

BREAKING: The stay has been lifted. Gay&lesbian couples can now get married in California.  

Details> http://t.co/mV8ERz1s5H #Time4Marriage
— AmericanEqualRights (@AFER) June 28, 2013

The above picture is of the Northern California plaintiffs, Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, getting their marriage license in San Francisco City Hall. with Bruce Cohen, Dustin Lance Black, Chad Griffin in the background behind them.

Woo hoo!!

Male Escort Listings By U.S. City

Which city do you think has more male escorts than others? Not surprisingly, it seems pretty closely correlated with population and wealth. According to a long and well-researched (well-hung?) article at Buzzfeed, the Top 5 are Manhattan, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and Washington, DC. The article goes onto discuss how the new world of social media and geo-location apps has impacted the business of male prostitution.

Hat/tip to Joe.My.God

Where We Live: The "gayborhoods" of America

This is interesting! The real estate blog Trulia did an analysis of 2010 U.S. Census data which recorded in what geographical census tracts same-sex couples lived and overlaid it with median price per square foor for homes listed to come up with the list of the Top 10 "gayborhoods" in the U.S. by percentage of the neighborhood which is either male or female same-sex couples. One interesting thing to note is that of the Top 10 the only jurisdiction where same-sex couples can get legally married right now (or in 2010 when the data was from) is Provincetown, Massachusetts (although I suspect many of the California couples would have been married in the June 15-November 3, 2008 173-day window when marriage equality was legal in my home state).

To summarize

Just three neighborhoods — Provincetown, Rehoboth Beach, and the Castro — are on both the men’s and women’s top lists. The top four women’s neighborhoods, including Provincetown, are in Massachusetts. But one of the biggest differences is that the top men’s neighborhoods are much gayer than the top women’s neighborhoods: just one women’s neighborhood breaks the 5% barrier, while five men’s neighborhoods have more than 10% same-sex male couples. Remember, there are roughly the same number of male and female couples in the U.S. So, that means that male couples are much more clustered in particular neighborhoods than female couples are: female couples are more likely to be the only ones on their block.


[...]


The gayest male neighborhoods are a mix of well-known urban neighborhoods (Castro,West Hollywood), less-well-known communities (Wilton Manors, FL; Pleasant Ridge, MI), and vacation areas (Provincetown, Palm Springs, Rehoboth Beach).

Trulia also did an analysis of the gayborhoods in my hometown of Los Angeles:

 The gay center of LA for men includes two zip codes in West Hollywood: roughly from Doheny Drive to Sweetzer (90069, $481) and from Sweetzer to La Brea (90046, $465), as well as the Hollywood Hills (90068, $410). By Los Angeles standards these are expensive areas, though New Yorkers might not think so. Much more affordable, and still very gay relative to the rest of the region, is Signal Hill (90755, $200), a small city surrounded by Long Beach, about 30 miles south of West Hollywood. 

Long Beach also hosts the six neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of female couples in the LA area. The top three are Belmont Heights (90814, $278), Plaza / South of Conant (90808, $299), and Eastside (90804, $207) – all of which are far less expensive than West Hollywood.

Where do you live?

Hat/tip to Towleroad

San Francisco Police Department: "It Gets Better"

Harvey Milk May 22, 1930 – November 27, 1978

Harvey Milk, the most famous openly gay politician in U.S. history, was assassinated in San Francisco on November 27, 1978, 33 years ago today.

Bob Slatten of the blog I Should Be Laughing posted some of Harvey Milk's most memorable quotes today in remembrance. My favorite is:

“If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.”

Unfortunately, a bullet did enter Harvey's brain on that fateful day in November 33 years ago, but there are still far too many closeted people, especially politicians, often letting their internalized homophobia lead them into committing external acts of homophobia as well.

Heterosexual Supremacists Appeal Judge Ware Ruling

Good grief! The heterosexual supremacists who believe that they are "defending marriage" by supporting Proposition 8 in federal court have appealed Federal District Court Judge James Ware's decision denying their motion to vacate Judge Vaughn Walker's ruling which struck down the measure.

The San Francisco Examiner says:

Attorneys for Prop. 8 filed their appeal this afternoon before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the same court that is hearing an appeal of Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling last August that the law unconstitutionally violated the civil rights of gays and lesbians.

Earlier this year, Prop. 8 sponsors had asked Ware, Walker’s replacement as chief justice, to throw out Walker’s ruling because of an interview he did with reporters in April, after his retirement, during which he discussed his long-term relationship with a gay man. They argued that Walker should have disclosed the relationship and whether he intended to marry before last year’s trial.

Attorneys for the same-sex couples who sued over Prop. 8 argued at the time that the motion was “frivolous” and “offensive.”

Ware denied the motion, saying there was no federal precedent for disqualifying a judge solely because he shares a characteristic, such as sexual orientation, with a litigant.

It should be interesting to see which case they lose first, the Perry v Schwarzenegger lawsuit (the appeal of Judge Ware's ruling) or the Perry v Brown lawsuit (the appeal of Judge Walker's ruling). I expect they will lose them both.

Judge Ware To Rule On Prop 8 Motion To Vacate Tomorrow

Federal judge James Ware, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, says he will rule tomorrow on a desperate motion to vacate last year's decision in Perry v. Schwarznegger striking down Proposition 8 as unconstitutional because the federal judge who issued it, Vaughn Walker, is openly gay and should have disclosed that fact at the time. Walker was previously chief judge of the same district but retired at the end of February 2011.

The motion by the heterosexual supremacist proponents of Proposition 8 has been widely ridiculed by the vast majority of legal experts and on the editorial pages of major newspapers.

It should be a delightful to read Judge James Ware's decision tomorrow. In other news, the judge has also said that he will deny the motion of the proponents to attempt to collect all the videos of the trial's witnesses and order them destroyed. Our side is arguing that the testimony is  a public record (the transcripts are available from the court) and that the entire video record should be released. There is some important, powerful testimony from expert witnesses explaining the nature of marriage and demolishing the arguments of the heterosexual supremacists that they would dearly not like to get into public view. I dearly hope the videos of the Prop 8 trial "leak" at some point in the future.