SEXUAL RACISM
Dream When You Dare To
Bigger Than “Preference” It’s obvious that racist attitudes in love and sex are rooted in structural racism, and yet people tend to (and maybe prefer to?) personalize it: “Oh, it’s just my preference”
SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2021
By Jaime Woo
Recently I was asked for my dream celebrity threesome. A flurry of names popped into my head: Idris Elba! Patti Harrison! Gael Garcia Bernal! Kade Gottlieb! All great choices, but in the end I had to whittle down my choices: Harry Shum Jr., whom I’ve crushed on since he premiered on Glee’s fourth episode, and Ludi Lin, recently of Mortal Kombat and the 2019 Black Mirror episode “Striking Vipers.” The visual of Harry, Ludi and I – maybe after a long bike ride, sweaty in our gear.… I had to stop writing for a spell just to recover from the thought of it. The first Mortal Kombat film came out in 1995, as did the Sega arcade game Fighting Vipers, which the Black Mirror episode’s 22
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title nods to. I was in high school, and the celebrity who soaked up a lot of my attention was Chris O’Donnell, who personified peak twink as Robin in Batman Forever. The year before it was Brad Pitt, in Interview with a Vampire; the year after, it was all about Leonardo DiCaprio, dripping wet, in Romeo & Juliet. Can you say “trend alert”? There’s no denying the magnetism of these men, and yet my tastes back then ran a tad same-y. Growing up in the suburbs outside Toronto, they were built in the same vein as the jocks and student council presidents of my high school. Like many ’90s kids, I grew up watching the puckish Zack Morris on Saved By The Bell, whose
