A View from the Bottom is bookended by references to two trends on gay male sex cruising websites: the “douchebags of Grindr” who routinely express preferences like “no fats, no femmes, no Asians” on their profiles and the resilient GAMS (gay Asian men) who recycle racist epithets into online handles that they adopt without shame. This move from abjection's violence to its potential utility parallels the book's own trajectory. Drawing from a diverse range of visual media, author Nguyen Tan Hoang compiles an eclectic “archive of bottomhood” to show us how “the threatening force of bottom-as-abjection” (21) can be received and transformed rather than disavowed.
Nguyen approaches his material from highly original perspectives and with intriguing points of focus. In chapter 1, the “rise and fall” and subsequent comeback of gay Asian American porn star Brandon Lee provide the lens through which Nguyen observes the racial dynamics of 1990s West...
