Men Loving Themselves and the “White Night” Riots
While Vancouver had facilitated Lim’s political coming out, living in San Francisco enabled him to more fully participate in gay sexual cultures, including the bondage, domination, and sadomasochism (BDSM) scene.[1] He recalled “dressing very differently,” and began to acquire a “reputation as the Asian clone,” replete with “crew cuts and bomber jackets and everything.”[2] Although he experienced discrimination based on stereotypes about Asian men as sexually passive, Lim found that the culture of BDSM, which privileged the performance of power, enabled a partial loosening of racial hierarchies.[3] Lim’s sexual self-exploration also pushed him to challenge his own unexamined racial biases. On a trip to Los Angeles, he visited a local bathhouse advertised in a gay newspaper, possibly the Midtowne Spa downtown, unaware of the fact that this bathhouse was popular with Black men who have sex with men.[4] Although most of his sex partners had been Asian, white, and Pacific Islander men, Lim found himself welcomed at the bathhouse and had a “wonderful time,” an experience that would later inform his antiracist activism.[5]
Lim also began to embrace visibility as a strategic intervention into racial discrimination in the gay community. Frustrated that he “didn’t see any Asians in porn” – an absence belied by his own abundant, often joyful sexual experiences – Lim decided “it was important for gay Asians to start saying, ‘hey, photograph us.’”[6] Following his own advice, Lim posed and wrote a brief essay and poem for the noted sexologist Jack Morin’s Men Loving Themselves: Images of Male Self-Sexuality, a 1980 anthology aiming to destigmatize masturbation.[7] The volume was published by Down There Press, an independent feminist institution started by the noted sex educator and activist Joani Blank, well-known for founding San Francisco’s Good Vibrations sex shop in 1977.[8] A 1981 review in The Body Politic, which included a photographic image of Lim in the throes of pleasure, opined that although the book would probably fail to reach “het men,” it was nevertheless praiseworthy for the racial and bodily diversity of its “hot pix.”[9]
But pornography was just one of the forms that Lim’s political engagement in the Bay Area took.[10] The assassination of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, California’s first openly gay elected official, and his political ally, Mayor George Moscone, on November 27, 1978, by ex-Supervisor Dan White provoked widespread outrage and grief. On May 21, 1979, White’s acquittal on murder charges and light manslaughter sentence – based on the notoriously spurious “Twinkie defense” – led to the “White Night” riots in San Francisco.[11] Writer and filmmaker Gael MacLean, who later became Lim’s close friend in Vancouver, recalled that it was in protesting White’s slap on the wrist that the two first met.[12] Although the riots only damaged police and city property and caused no fatal injuries, MacLean recounted, “protesters were tear gassed and brutally beaten” by police.[13] Lim, she noted, “was a major participant in this event,” which expressed “the power of justified anger.”
In 1980, Lim left San Francisco for Toronto, Canada, where he was soon hired as an advertising agency art director and took courses in art and social work.[14] As San Francisco was being demonized by Toronto’s mainstream media and political conservatives as a cautionary tale in the excesses of sexual liberation, Lim would arrive in “Toronto the Good” with experimental and democratic sensibilities forged in the bars, baths, and streets of San Francisco.[15]
[1] “Racism and Gay Male Porn.”
[2] Ibid.
[3] Orientations. On the potential and limits of BDSM for transgressing race and class hierarchies, see Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Lim was somewhat less optimistic about BDSM in later interviews; see “Racism and Gay Male Porn.”
[4] Although issues of Bob Damron’s Address Book from the years when Lim might have visited Los Angeles (1977-1980) do not indicate which baths were popular with men of color, they do indicate a concentration of gay bars popular with Black men downtown, where the Midtowne Spa was also located. The Midtowne Spa was also routinely advertised in Data-Boy, a gay entertainment magazine based in Santa Monica popular in the 1970s. I could identify no advertisements for bathhouses in The Advocate or Data-Boy in this period that explicitly welcomed men of color. But a 1978 Data-Boy profile of the Midtowne Spa includes photographs of both Black and white patrons, and advertisements for the spa in late 1979 and early 1980 sometimes used a black silhouette image of a chiseled male figure, possibly a coded reference to racial inclusivity. See, for example, Bob Damron, Bob Damron’s Address Book ’78 (San Francisco: Bob Damron Enterprises, 1978); “Spotlight on Midtowne Spa,” Data-Boy, Oct. 27, 1978, 6-8; “LA’s Standard of Excellence,” Data-Boy, Dec. 13, 1979, 72.
[5] “Racism Tape,” 1983, Box 2: “You’ve Got a Nice Body for an Oriental” – Tim McCaskell, Tim McCaskell Fonds, The ArQuives; “You’ve Got a Nice Body… For an Oriental,” The Body Politic, Apr. 1984, 33-37.
[6] “Racism and Gay Male Porn.”
[7] Jack Morin, ed., Men Loving Themselves: Images of Male Self-Sexuality (San Francisco: Down There, 1980).
[8] “Sexuality Stuff,” Joani Blank’s Web Spot, https://www.joaniblank.com/sexuality-stuff/. See also Josh Sides, Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
[9] “One on One, or Sex and the Single Man,” The Body Politic, Apr. 1981, 34. Lim’s photographs were also republished in Rites on several occasions. See, for example, “Racism and Gay Male Porn”; “Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder,” Rites for Lesbian and Gay Liberation, July 1986, 16.
[10] “Lim,” May 9, 1983; “Racism Tape,” 1983.
[11] Susan Stryker and Jim Van Buskirk, Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area (San Francisco: Chronicle, 1996), 78-81.
[12] Gael MacLean, interview with the author, Apr. 30, 2024.
[13] Gael MacLean, interview with the author, July 22, 2024.
[14] James Johnstone and Martin Laba, interview with the author, Apr. 23, 2024.
[15] McCaskell, Queer Progress, 130-134.