My Influences

When I came to the US in 1993, I was an emotional and psychological wreck. I just finally realized I am gay and the initial shock from American culture left me feeling like a fish out of the water and in the frying pan. I avoided friends and I was planning how to die. I came to the US as a liberal. I still am but there are many elements in American liberalism that I detest as either kind-hearted naivete or downright reactionary.

When I arrived, Political Correctness was at the height of its Orwellian reign and it would be years after that before it became a late night show punchline. I tried to embrace American liberalism but I felt dirty doing it, and even dirtier still that I couldn't embrace it. I felt like a traitor. I was ashamed. I attributed all that to my state of mind, after all, I was undergoing a major identity reconfiguration at the time. So, there I was, running away from heterosexuals and trying to embrace an ideology I didn't believe in but felt I should. I felt like an impostor either way. I was neither good at acting straight nor at believing someone else's faith. I couldn't be the person I was discovering I am in either one.

Camille Paglia's book, Sexual Personae and Dinesh D' Souza's Illiberal Education were the first to reassure that I wasn't alone and that it's alright. Two other mavericks inspired me not too long later - Andrew Sullivan and Ward Connerlly. Paglia is an anti-gay, anti-feminist lesbian feminist who constantly skewers trendy queer and gender theories that dominate in gay and women's studies. She became an instant hero to me. D 'Souza was an instant inspiration as well when I learned about the horrific inversion of justice that affirmative action had become and its chilling effect on the discussion on race and gender. Just as D'Souza described the fate of the politically incorrect, both he and Paglia have been denounced as reactionary, even racist and sexist. But by then I was already convinced that witchhunts characterized the weather in the current Orwellian climate.

Andrew Sullivan is a pioneer in marriage and military service rights for gays. An anti-gay homosexual himself, he is also an anti-conservative conservative who argued with homosexuals and straights about the primacy and urgency of the right to marry and serve in the military. His position was both radical and old-fashioned and directly conflicted with anti-heterosexual queer theory which held that marriage and the military are sexist, patriarchal, hetero-centric institutions that must be dismantled, and certainly not to be encouraged by homosexuals least of all. I cringed when the homosexual intelligentsia attacked him and I cheered when he debated Richard Goldstein. Sullivan won over the crowd by the end of that debate and exposed how ridiculously out-of-touch the ruling homocrats are. It may have also heralded a changing tide for in the next few short years after that, gay marriage had become a major civil rights issue with the last remaining pockets of whimpering opposition coming from doomsday christian evangelists and the queeriest theorists, creating a rather apocalyptic union that probably marked the coming of the gay messiah.

Ward Connerly, a black civil-rights activist successfully overturned affirmative action in California and Michigan and is leading the campaing against affirmative action in several states.

These four provided so much support and inspiration when I felt like I were a depressed Asian-racist, sexist-homosexual loner.