“When I was 16 and still in the closet, I actually would jerk off to pirated Sean Cody videos,” says adult star Cody Seiya, referring to one of the largest gay porn studios in the U.S. What he saw on Sean Cody didn’t inspire confidence for the Asian and Jewish performer. “It kind of led to this detrimental image of sex, like, oh my god, I’m only going to be into white guys because this is all I see,” he says. Then, 12 years later, he was a pioneer — an Asian guy getting jerked off to by others in Sean Cody videos.
Seiya first started appearing naked on the internet as a teenager, in one of the worst ways possible—as part of revenge porn, when someone released nudes of him on Tumblr without his consent. “That was kind of earth-shattering to me,” he says. What if my family finds out? He thought. Soon a person who saw the nudes reached out to Seiya, and suggested he do porn. “I was like, I don’t want to do that, just because [I have] a lot of internalized shame and guilt for being gay,” he says.
But when in 2020, the movie-star handsome, muscled Seiya, graduated from the School of Visual Arts and struggled to find a job because it was the beginning of the pandemic, he changed his mind. “I was like … ‘I’m gonna reclaim my image and just be proud of who I am and the hard work I put into my body and show it off. So I started an OnlyFans to pay the bills,” he says.
Seiya, who has 643,500 Twitter followers and 45,800 likes on OnlyFans, is one of a number of Asian men appearing in mainstream studio gay porn in the past three years thanks, due in part to OnlyFans, where Asian men have amassed rabid fanbases. Yet deeply entrenched prejudices about Asian men have, at least in the past, prevented porn studios from viewing Asian men as sexy.
Subverting the Stereotypes Surrounding Asian Men
“Asians in America face stereotypes of being quiet, submissive, nerdy, exotic, and foreign,” writes Michelle K. Sugihara, Executive Director of CAPE (Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment) in a 2021 report. Asian women are viewed as “submissive and innocent while remaining sexually available,” says the report. In contrast, “Asian American men are less often cast as romantic love interests because Asian American characters are often emasculated and portrayed as unattractive.”
Seiya has experienced these same prejudices. In Hollywood, “We’re seen as these boyish stereotypes that are incapable of anything deeper than a goofy catchphrase and buck teeth and slanted eyes,” he says.
Asian men are only recently being viewed as objects of desire thanks in part to the first Marvel movie with an Asian male superhero, Shang-Chi, and the Joel Kim Booster-created gay rom-com Fire Island, which featured a cast of sexy Asian men desiring and being desired.
Even though some stereotypes are being overturned, the porn industry still “mostly features big muscular white men because that’s their idea of the market and masculinity,” Asian porn star Caged Jock (CJ) says. Some studios, “…have Asian guys, but the titles will be like, Cum Dumpling,” says adult actor Luke Truong, a Vietnamese immigrant with washboard abs. “So many videos with Asian models [are] some white guy just wrecking this Asian guy’s hole and then just being like, ‘okay bye,’ just treating them as their cumdump,” Seiya says.
CJ, alongside other performers and studio heads, says the popularity of Asian men on OnlyFans has changed the industry. “OnlyFans opened doors for [Asian] performers, because now the studios realize that people … really embrace diversity,” says CJ, who makes six figures from the fan sites 4myfans, Just4Fans, and OnlyFans, and has dabbled in studio porn. Once OnlyFans became popular “the studios were no longer the gatekeepers for … what and who is considered desirable or hot or good looking,” says Jake Jaxson, CEO of CockyBoys.
Mainstream gay porn studios CockyBoys, Treasure Island, Falcon, and NextDoor Studios, recently began featuring Asian performers, some of them found on OnlyFans. In 2019, Falcon, founded in 1971, signed its first Asian performer to an exclusive contract. Since then Truong has joined the company, but only after blowing up on OnlyFans and Twitter, where he has over 400,000 followers and a pinned video of himself in a sex swing that’s garnered 2.1 million views.
“Being a younger Asian man, I’m like, You guys want me? Why? I’m sexy? Well, I guess so. ” he says in an interview with Cashmere. “OnlyFans has maybe led people to recognize there’s a market there.”
But Asian adult actors continue to have to fight to get recognized and overcome stereotypes among fans and porn studios along the way.
Debunking the Myths
Dick Size
One of the most common stereotypes is that Asian men have small penises. It’s all over movies and TV shows. A classic example is in The Hangover 2, when Ken Jeong’s flaccid penis is called a “tiny mushroom dick” by white men. “Stereotypes about penis size normalize the size of whites (just right) and stigmatize the size of blacks (too big) and Asians (too small),” writes Rosalind S. Chou in Asian-American Sexual Politics.
This stereotype appeared at the porn awards a few years ago, according to Danny Zeeman, owner of the Asian-centric gay porn website PeterFever.com. He recalled the host saying, “Well, there’s no Asians because they all have small dicks.”
Seiya says he was not immune to the small-penis stereotypes. “I believed that,” Seiya says. “I’ve had folks be like, ‘Oh, you have a really nice dick for an Asian.” Then about a year and a half ago, he was performing with another model and the guy told him, “You have a really nice dick, you should use that,” he says. At that moment he began to think differently.
Truong too has internalized the small dick myth. “I thought I had a small dick… I just think being in the porn industry, and not having the representation of these Asian men with huge dicks [has led to my misperception].”
Femininity
Another persistent myth is that Asian men are feminine. Liang Cao, a Ph.D. candidate in linguistics at Simon Fraser University who analyzed PeterFever’s films, says that in North American society the white gay male gaze promotes the feminization of Asian guys. “In the Asian gay community we kind of internalize that,” he says.
Gay Asian American porn star Peter Lee started PeterFever in the 1990s to overturn these stereotypes and showcase “Asian men as being more masculine, more muscular,” Zeeman says. “Before PeterFever was around, really the only Asian porn you could find out there was mostly more twink kinda guys.”
Yet PeterFever traffics in some stereotypes, according to Cao, who says, “I feel like it’s definitely catering to the white gaze.” Seiya says PeterFever has reached out to him, but he’d never work for the studio “just based on the fucking name and the fact that it’s run by a white man and this shit is bordering on race play.” Cao doesn’t think PeterFever is changing perceptions of Asians. “Their slogan is trying to challenge the stereotypes, but when they portray Asian tops based on the same values that sustain white privilege it’s another way of reinforcing [them].”
Bottoms
Side-by-side with the stereotype that all Asian guys are feminine is the myth that all gay Asian guys are bottoms. Tyler Wu, a gay Asian performer, who is a lithe former Disney on Ice star, thinks this stereotype emerged because “Throughout culture, especially American culture, Asian men have always been seen as submissive. … When Chinese people first started coming to America, they didn’t want them having too much power.”
When Seiya first started out in gay porn, he thought he had to bottom. “That’s all the people tagged me as, and so I only thought I was a hole,” he says. “But I am also a pole.” Truong, who is a bottom, has a complicated relationship with the stereotype. “Me being Asian doesn’t mean I just like taking dick. I mean, I do. I’m a bottom most of the time and I’m okay with that.”
Accent
While the performers I talked to say they weren’t asked to use caricatured accents, Cao has found that some men are using fake accents on PeterFever’s site. In the 1990s, Lee adopted such an accent. Cao believes Asian men are asked to use accents sometime because it makes them more sexually desirable because they are seen as a sexually desirable, flawed, “other.”
Critiquing the Studios and Industry
Fetishization
Given how few Asian performers are in the gay porn industry and how common stereotypes are, performers were initially wary when studios reached out. When Sean Cody approached him, Seiya says, “I was a little apprehensive at first because I was like, oh shit, am I a diversity hire? It turns out I kind of was but at the same time, I’m like, I’m really stoked to have this opportunity and prove that Asian men are capable of intimacy and to be seen as sexy.”
Stereotypes in studio porn sometimes start with the setting. Gay porn is often set in San Francisco because that’s where the first Chinese immigration was, Cao says. “Gay porn kind of mirrors the larger society as well, in terms of racial stereotypes,” he says.
Gay Asian porn models continue to struggle at studios. After working for Sean Cody for a year, Seiya was negotiating a contract renewal when they declined to renew his contract, citing rebranding. “By rebranding, [you mean] more trollish-looking white boys,” he says. “We just want fresh faces,” they responded.
Seiya’s time at Sean Cody increased his fanbase, but it also led to “more hate,” he says. “I’m pretty sure that their clientele are closeted, Midwestern husbands who are beating their meat when the wife’s away. So they wanted to see these corn-fed white boys… I would see a lot of comments from them saying on their Twitter, bring back the old models. And by old models it’s like, Caucasian.”
Wu never aspired to be in studio porn. The audience for studio porn “wants to see white people, statistically, that’s what sells,” he says. “I don’t see that as a hindrance for myself. I see that as an opportunity.” Wu’s subscription site, WuBoyz.com, features a lot of Asian performers, including Seiya.
Porn Awards
Even the porn awards have shunned mainly Asians. For years, no Asian people were nominated for GAYVN awards, says Zeeman.
At the 2019 GAYAVN awards, Zeeman sat at a table near the front of the stage with Peter Fever models, when he heard the Filipino host ask, “Why are there no Asian porn stars out there?” “We were all just shocked when he says that. We were nominated for a couple of awards…and we were a sponsor on top of it…It doesn’t make our porn stars feel good when they’re sitting in the audience being treated like they’re invisible,” Zeeman says.
Unequal Treatment
Seiya says that while working for studios he’s been paid less than white performers and had worse accommodations than they had. A studio once put him up in a Motel 6 while the white performer stayed in a Holiday Inn. When he discovered this, he asked his director if he could move to the Holiday Inn. The director says the Holiday Inn was full. He told a Filipino director, who wasn’t involved with the film, what was going on, and this director immediately got him a room.
OnlyFans and Performer Power
After Sean Cody declined to renew his contract, Seiya began working with Jaxson’s CockyBoys, and brought along Wu, in a scene where they also cuddle and kiss. Usually “we’re trying out performers,” Jaxson says. “ But with the two of them, I really got the sense that they were really trying us out … I really liked that, because the studios now are essentially collaborators with their performers.” Because of OnlyFans, “performers have an ability to define their image and how they want to be perceived.”
This is a boon for Asian performers who for too long have been defined by stereotypes created by white people, including the myths that they’ve got small dicks, are feminine and have heavy accents.
Moving away from caricatures is also good business. “If you create something that’s just based on stereotypes, it just gets gobbled up and spit out. It’s not authentic or real,” Jaxson says. Seiya appreciates Jaxson’s approach. “They do not tout us as like, ‘Oh, check out these two hot Asian boys.’ They’re not fetishizing us at all, which feels really welcomed,” he says. Truong says that Falcon doesn’t fetishize him either. “They don’t care if I’m Asian. They’re just like, You’re a great model,” he says.
“Rice Queens” Pay the Bills
But Seiya and other performers continue to face fetishization from performers and fans on OnlyFans, where they still post content while doing studio work. Seiya receives requests from fans to act out Squid Games in custom videos. And some performers “spout microaggressions without fucking thinking,” Seiya says. And so-called “rice queens,” guys who fetishize Asian men, make up a large proportion of their fans.
After six months of being on OnlyFans, Truong amassed a significant following (he currently has 29,900 likes on OnlyFans), many of them rice queens. “Honestly, I don’t mind using them. You can fetishize me, you can give me money. I’m not going to date you though,” he says. Seiya says he has a lot of rice queen fans too, about 40 percent. “I find it to be very problematic in that these people have these preconceived notions of how Asian men will act, be it submissive, bottoms, very demure,” says Seiya. “If I hook up with someone like that, or speak with someone that expects that of me, it’s always fun to break their hearts a little bit and be like, Hey, we’re not all like that. This is something that’s been perpetuated in media beyond just porn, in Hollywood too, the desexualization of Asian men.”
Truong and Seiya say they also frequently receive “compliments” like these: “You’re really hot for an Asian guy.” Truong responds, “Thank you very much. I would like you to say I’m just very hot.”
Seiya pushes back too. When Seiya recently received a similar message from a fan—“I’m not into Asians but I really want you to top me lol. I’m not racist, I’m Asian too lol.”—he responded thoughtfully, “Thank you, and I know you mean it as a compliment but it definitely comes across as internalized racism.” Yet the man shot back indignantly, “I am greatly amazed on how you respond and treat what little fans you have left. At the end of the day you’re the one is going to get sick of being a trashy whore.”
Seiya says that “It’s tiring being me sometimes, that I am the only contact that some people have to Asians. I have to assume this role of educator so often.”
Representation Matters—Even in Porn
Yet there is a positive side to the fame. The visibility performers have gotten from porn studio work has inspired some of their fans. At gay clubs, young Asian men go up Truong and thank him. “I get to represent the Asian community in a positive way by getting railed by big dicks,” Truong says. But Truong says he’s not doing studio porn to make a difference, he’s doing it because it makes him happy. “Me being Asian shouldn’t matter,” he says.
Seiya too has heard similar sentiments. “I’ve had so many people be like, ‘Thank you so much for the work that you do and showing that Asian men can have agency and intimacy in a sexual setting. I’ve had a few people be like, thank you for helping me also come to terms with my sexuality, and being comfortable with being a queer Asian person,’” Seiya says. “It just means a lot to me knowing that I’m able to empower people, and, really provide much needed visibility for the community.”
Wu says when he gets compliments like that he gets “flustered because all I do is put out my craft and people like it. I’m not anyone’s hero… but sometimes people find it validating.”
Things Are Changing
Will studios continue to hire more Asian guys? It’s too soon to tell. But if the experience Jaxson has had at CockyBoys is an indicator, audiences are receptive. Since the studio has hired a number of Asian performers, fan response has been largely positive. Fans thank Jaxson for “highlighting Asian performers on your site.’”
However, even if studios shun Asian performers, they have another option. OnlyFans allows them to make a six-figure living and portray themselves sans stereotypes. Studios “don’t have a corner on [the Asian] market. That market is fully open for these Asian men to do whatever they want,” Truong says.