5. “Tend to prefer sane, masculine, caucasian (no offense to other flavours though)”: Racial-Sexual Preferences, Entitlement, and Everyday Racism

Philomena Essed, Everyday Racism: Reports from Women of Two Cultures (Alameda, CA: Hunter House, 1990); Philomena Essed, Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1991); Philomena Essed, “Entitlement Racism: License to Humiliate,” in Recycling Hatred: Racism(s) in Europe Today, ed. European Network Against Racism (Brussels: European Network Against Racism, 2013), 62–77.

Jesus G. Smith, “Two-Faced Racism in Gay Online Sex: Preference in the Frontstage or Racism in the Backstage?” in Sex in the Digital Age, ed. Paul Nixon and Isabel Düsterhöft (New York: Routledge, 2018), 144.

Denton Callander et al., “Is Sexual Racism Really Racism? Distinguishing Attitudes Toward Sexual Racism and Generic Racism Among Gay and Bisexual Men,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 44 (2015): 1991–2000; Smith, “Two-Faced Racism,” 135–136.

In addition to the pieces cited in this chapter and in Chapter 2, see also Alexander Chee, “No Asians! Navigating the Pitfalls of Anti-Asian Sentiments in Online Hookup Sites,” Out Magazine, 11 January 2012, https://​www.​out.​com/​news-commentary/​2012/​01/​11/​no-asians.

E.g. Wim Peumans, “‘No Asians, Please’: Same-Sex Sexualities and Ethnic Minorities in Europe,” in Hand Picked: Stimulus Respond, ed. Jack Boulton (London: Pavement Books, 2014), 128–139. But in France, however, the gay magazine Miroir/miroirs focused one recent issue on socio-sexual platforms, but paid no attention to race; and focused another attention on ethnic minorities in the gay scene, but paid no attention to sexual racism.

Sabaah, “[Debat:] Tænder ikke på asiater” [Debate: I’m Not Turned On by Asians], 19 February 2013, https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​qvSuHQPFWGw.

E.g. “Grindr and Sex Culture,” Panel at Copenhagen Pride with Kristian Møller, Fahad Saeed, Niels Jansen, and Andrew Shield, 16 August 2017, http://​kanal-1.​dk/​14-grindr-sexkultur-lystfulde-politiske-hadefulde-perspektiver/​; also Copenhagen Pride 2018 event, “Let’s Talk About Race” with Saeed.

Callander et al., 2015: 1999.

E.g. as covered in Sophie Verass, “Racism on Grindr: Indigenous Gay Man Screenshots Racial Abuse Online,” Special Broadcasting Service/National Indigenous Television, 14 April 2016, http://​www.​sbs.​com.​au/​nitv/​sexuality/​article/​2016/​04/​14/​man-shares-experiences-of-racism-on-grinder.

FS: The Gay Health and Life Mag (Special Issue: “Racism in the Gay Scene”) 148 (June/July 2015). Last accessed June 2015 via http://​issuu.​com/​gmfa/​docs/​fs148.

Panel at the International Conference on Religion and Acceptance with Olave Basabose, Manju Reijmer, Timothy Aarons, and Amna Durrani, University of Amsterdam, 7 September 2017, http://​www.​maruf.​eu/​icra2017.​html.

Regarding “sexual racism” in the UK: Stephen Daw, “Munroe Bergdorf Calls on Grindr to Crack Down on Racist & Transphobic Users,” Billboard (26 July 2018), https://​www.​billboard.​com/​articles/​news/​pride/​8467230/​munroe-bergdorf-grindr-racist-transphobic-users; FS, “Racism in the Gay Scene.”

Jesus G. Smith, “‘No Fats, Fems, or Blacks’: The Role of Sexual Racism in Online Stratification and Sexual Health for Gay Men” (PhD diss., Texas A&M University, 2017). See summary of this argument in Nico Lang, “In Trump’s America, Racism on Gay Dating Apps Is Getting Worse,” The Daily Dot, 23 June 2017, https://​www.​dailydot.​com/​irl/​racism-gay-dating-apps/​.

Jesus G. Smith, personal correspondence, 13 July 2017.

Smith, “Two-Faced Racism in Gay Online Sex,” 135–136.

Smith, “Two-Faced Racism,” 144.

On the purported “colorblindness” of (white) Scandinavians, see, e.g., Lene Myong, “Adopteret: Fortællinger om transnational og racialiseret tilblivelse” [Adopted: Tales of Transnational and Racialised Origins] (PhD diss., Aarhus University, Copenhagen, 2009). For further reading: Tobias Hübinette and Carina Tigervall, “To Be Non-White in a Colorblind Society: Conversations with Adoptees and Adoptive Parents in Sweden on Everyday Racism,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 30, no. 4 (2009): 335–353; Rikke Andreassen and Kathrine Vitus, eds., Affectivity and Race: Studies from Nordic Contexts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); Rikke Andreassen and Uzma Ahmed-Andresen, “I Can Never Be Normal: A Conversation About Race, Daily Life Practices, Food and Power,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 21, no. 1 (2014): 27–28; Stine H. Bang Svendsen, “Learning Racism in the Absence of ‘Race’,” The European Journal of Women’s Studies 21, no. 1 (2014): 9–24.

Myong, “Adopteret,” 245.

Ibid.

Grace Carroll Massey, Mona Vaughn Scott, and Sanford M. Dornbusch, “Racism Without Racists: Institutional Racism in Urban Schools,” The Black Scholar 7, no. 3 (1975): 10–19; Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists, Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, 4th ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).

Bonilla-Silva.

Related, look for forthcoming work related to the following peer-reviewed conference presentation: Nicholas Andrew Boston, “How Do I Put This Gently? Articulating the Links Between Race, Residence and Sexuality,” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Chicago, 22–25 August 2015.

Philomena Essed and Isabel Hoving, eds., Dutch Racism (Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 2014); Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Markus Balkenhol et al., “The Nativist Triangle: Sexuality, Race, and Religion in the Netherlands,” in The Culturalization of Citizenship: Autochthony and Belonging in a Globalizing World, ed. Jan Willem Duyvendak et al. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 97–112.

Essed, “Entitlement Racism: License to Humiliate,” 74.

Ibid., 62.

Ibid., 74.

Ibid., 62.

Esben Lunde Larsen, Member of Parliament for the Liberal Party and former Minister of Higher Education and Science in the Danish Government; cited in Pelle Dam, “Efter ‘Haribo-racisme’: Politiker vil sige neger om sorte” [After ‘Haribo-Racism’: Politician Wants to Say Negro About Blacks], MetroXpress, 22 January 2014, https://​www.​mx.​dk/​nyheder/​danmark/​story/​15560966. Cited in Danbolt.

Essed, Everyday Racism; Essed, Understanding Everyday Racism.

Ibid., 602.

Ibid., 8.

Ibid.; Preliminary conversations with Danish-born Grindr users of color suggests that repetitive questions about “origins” persist in this online subculture, revealing assumptions between whiteness and Danishness that can be experienced as a form of racism. For many Danish people of color, the question does not relate to their origins, but to the origins of their parents or grandparents; thus the question underscores the poser’s linkages between Scandinavian nationality, whiteness, and belonging.

Once he chatted with a Grindr user who mixed up Iran and Iraq, and when Ali corrected him, he said “What’s the difference?” and Ali “didn’t even continue with him… But that’s more ignorance than racism,” he said.

Andil Gosine, “Brown to Blonde at Gay.com: Passing White in Queer Cyberspace,” in Queer Online: Media Technology and Sexuality, ed. K. O’Riordan and D. Phillips (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 148; Shaka McGlotten, Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013), 68 and 74.

McGlotten, 72.

Lang.

Smith, “Two-Faced Racism,” 144.

Smith.

For brief reflections on social desirability bias in dating profiles, i.e. putting one’s best self forward, “strategic authenticity”: Giulia Ranzini and Christoph Lutz, “Love at First Swipe? Explaining Tinder Self-Presentation and Motives,” Mobile Media and Communication 5, no. 1 (2017): 84 and 92.

E.g. Alexander Chee, “My First (and Last) Time Dating a Rice Queen,” The Strangler, 21 June 2017, https://​www.​thestranger.​com/​queer-issue-2017/​2017/​06/​21/​25227046/​my-first-and-last-time-dating-a-rice-queen.

Jamie Woo, “Open Letter to Grindr Users: I Am Not Rice, He Is Not Curry,” The Huffington Post, 28 June 2013, https://​www.​huffingtonpost.​com/​jaime-woo/​open-letter-to-grindr-users_​b_​3506180.​html.

Ibid.

Nicholas Boston, “Libidinal Cosmopolitanism: The Case of Digital Sexual Encounters in Post-enlargement Europe,” in Postcolonial Transitions in Europe: Contexts, Practices and Politics, ed. Sandra Ponzanesi and Gianmaria Colpani (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 306–308; Andrew DJ Shield, “New in Town: Gay Immigrants and Geosocial Dating Apps,” in LGBTQs, Media, and Culture in Europe, ed. Alexander Dhoest et al. (London: Routledge, 2017), 300.

An interviewee for a 2004 article about gay men’s online cultures concurred: “If they suspect or find out you are black MANY immediately go to the penis size thing.” John Edward Campbell, Getting It on Online: Cyberspace, Gay Male Sexuality, and Embodied Identity (London: Harrington Park Press, 2004), 79; cited in Gosine, 148.

Essed, “Entitlement Racism: License to Humiliate,” 62; Philomena Essed, “Entitlement Racism: A Public Lecture with Professor Philomena Essed & Professor Martin Parker,” Copenhagen Business School, 19 April 2016.

See, for example, Boston’s discussion of “speculators” on Romeo: Boston, “Libidinal Cosmopolitanism,” 306.

All collected in 2015 from PlanetRomeo. In another profile, a user forbade correspondence from users in “Ghana, Togo and likely ‘exotic’ countries”; his use of an Orientalist and sexualized word (“exotic”) provides insight into his imagining of the developing world.

Redacted: “Scandinavian” replaces Swedish or Danish; “Scandinavia” replaced Sweden or Denmark.

Shield, “New in Town,” 244.

These areas intersect also in the ways that she received offensive messages: for example, she loathes being called a “lady boy,” partly for its dismissal of her gender identity (as a woman), and partly for the term’s discursive connections to sex work. I will add, however, that another feminine Asian Grindr user in the greater Copenhagen area does use the display name “lady boy,” so opinions on this term are personal.

E.g. Jakob Svensson, “Gay the Correct Way: Mundane Queer Flaming Practices in Online Discussions of Politics,” in LGBTQs, Media, and Culture in Europe, ed. Alexander Dhoest et al. (London: Routledge, 2017), 192–207; Adi Kuntsman, “Belonging Through Violence: Flaming, Erasure, and Performativity in Queer Migrant Community,” in Queer Online: Media, Technology and Sexuality, ed. Kate O’Riordan and David J. Phillips (New York: Peter Lang, 2007).

Gosine, “Brown to Blonde,” 150.