Fridae

It is often said that gay men are more highly-sexed than straight men. I disagree. I think straight men would do as much as we do, if only they could. That's the basis of it: we do it because we can. And when we can't do it we watch others doing it. Look on the shelves of any gay man's apartment and beside the techno and trance CDs and the occasional classical music compilation you will find a humungous stash of porn in magazine, photograph, video cassette, VCD, and being the progressive modern things that we are, DVD format. Is our appetite for naked male flesh insatiable? Well, yes!

Having lived and worked in Taiwan for almost four years I wasn't that surprised to find out that my supposedly prudish and conservative Chinese cousins are just as greedy for porn. American flicks seem to be the favorites as they feature unfeasibly large penises, and in the words of one raconteur, gay men are either size queens or liars. But there is a very busy Asian industry based in Japan, a country which continues to dominate the rest of Asia culturally (like it or not).

"I have never seen an Asian gay porn movie," admitted Gary Tu, a friend and erstwhile bed partner. OK, so he's a potato queen, but surprisingly a lot of the guys who are only interested in Asian guys admit to preferring American porn. "It's just better quality," says Louis, manager of a straight bar in Taipei. He, like most guys, has a selection of Asian movies as well, but the American stuff forms the majority of his porn collection.

It was in the mid-eighties, that Taiwanese boys started to get hold of pornography. However, as in many areas of life, the material was 'a little behind' the west, as it were. The average Taiwanese 30-something gay boy has grown up on a diet of - believe it or not - straight porn.

"There was nothing else available when I was coming out. I wanted to look at the men. I tried to blot out the woman," explains Joseph Cheng to this incredulous Irish writer in the bar one night. But it was simply a case of faute de mieux. There was no gay porn in Taiwan at that time and straight porn was a ready source of naked men in a state of sexual arousal.

At this point, his friend Billy Huang pipes up: "I don't like gay porn. I don't think the man is a real man if he gets fucked. I like to see him doing a woman. It is sexier."

In fact, Billy's attitude is not uncommon. He has watched a lot of gay porn and gets disappointed when the guy he likes ends up getting fucked.

I have come across this attitude before in Asian men, that a man's masculinity is tied to his sexual role. In Taiwan you will often be asked by a gay man if you are a one (top, active, fucker, masculine) or a zero (bottom, passive, fuckee, emasculated). The numbers are supposed to be figurative, one being an erect penis and zero a butthole. Being versatile, I have to say I am a ten, which really confuses people. The fact that I enjoy being fucked means I am a slut to most of my Taiwanese peers. If only they knew the half of it.

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This rigidity crosses over to pornography where each character has a specific role which is top or bottom, and this does not change through a movie - and also through a career. In Japanese porn there only seems to be one person enjoying the sexual experience, i.e. the top. The bottom squirms and squeals as he is "forced" into being fucked and the top gives it to him without any remorse, or attention to the bottom's orgasm. If the bottom does come, he has to jerk himself off while the top waits impatiently for him to finish so that he can have another go. The Taiwanese porn I have seen follows this model, but even the top has his eyes shut and seems drugged.

If you have seen any straight Asian porn, the parallels are striking. The girl squeaks and puffs her way through the sexual encounter with eyes shut tight, like Minnie Mouse being raped. She is not supposed to enjoy it. It is her duty.

Euan Tu is a sex worker in Taipei who has posed for magazines and acted in movies for a local porn operation. I asked what he felt as he made the movie. "Nothing much. I just closed my eyes tight most of the time and let this guy fuck me. It hurt a little, but they paid me NT$5,000 and I needed it to pay my rent. It's just a job." In fact, when Euan compared it to doing a trick with a few extra people in the room - and Buddha knows he's done that before - it isn't that difficult to see that it is a small step for him to make. But a sex worker's career, like a professional sportsman's, is notoriously short. What is Euan planning to do in the future? Well, the sensible young man has a pension plan and a portfolio of stocks. "I'll retire when I get to forty and open a bar in my home town of Ilan," he says wistfully. He's now 32.

Euan's work is part of the new generation of porn which has moved from magnetic to digital media. In a society as traditional as Taiwan, many single men still live with their parents, or room with distant relatives. The opportunities for meeting guys and getting it on used to be very limited. Then the PC came along, and - Silicon be praised - the Internet. Taiwan is a very tech-savvy society and the most 'Netted in Asia. They are also unskilled socially, having spent most of their formative years in eye-straining study.

Gay men form a large part of that Net population, and it is only natural that they should devour digital porn. There's no social contact required, it's safe and it's readily accessible. For the fee that Euan was paid you can buy almost 100 VCDs of guys getting it on. The local stuff I have seen is dreadful: lots of unwilling participants in various seedy little rooms indulging in the most functional of sexual acts. No bouncy buffed boys. No pleasure, just perfunctory sex. But now almost everything is a click away for a fee: American, European, Japanese, Thai, Filipino and even local stuff. Have we really cum of age in Taiwan?