The adult industry is used to the occasional mainstream cross over by now, but one of the newest directors of pornography comes from a decidedly unique background. He’s currently employed as an associate professor of Asian American Studies.
Yellowcaust: A Patriot Act is an 11-minute short film that juxtaposes grim facts about the subjugation of Asians against hardcore sex, and will be screened today as part of the Hawaii International Film Festival, together with a documentary about its making.
Darrell Hamamoto, an associate professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis, hopes to make a point with the short film, and hopes to make a profit with the 50-minute hardcore video called Skin to Skin– that leaves the facts about subjugation of his race out.
“I refuse to allow Asian Americans to be passive victims," Hamamoto told the Sacramento Bee. "There has been a slow-motion, 100-year holocaust of the Asian people. The text of the film talks about genocide and dislocation against Asians by the U.S. military -- it talks about U.S. Marines killing 200,00 civilians in the Philippines in 1898, on through Hiroshima, the Korean War and Vietnam.
"This text crawls across the bottom of the screen. But the visual portion is a full-on sex scene between an Asian man and woman. The contrast -- these evil facts and hard-core porn -- creates a dissonance. It's political theater,” said Hamamoto of Yellowcaust.
Hamamoto made Skin to Skin for only $7,000 in a Torrance Hotel room. The cast consists professional adult performer Layla Lei and a first time performer Chun Lee, 24-year-old Korean American man.
Lei, who has been in over sixty adult videos since entering adult last year, told Salon.com that Chun Lee was her first Asian male costar and she enjoyed the experience. "I feel like when it's Asian and Asian, it's more comfortable," Lei said. "I don't feel awkward when I kiss him."
Hamamoto stressed that UC Davis had no role in financing the film, nor were students used.
There is a connection to the day job however. Hamamoto says the idea of making porn came from hearing his largely Asian students complain about American stereotypes of Asian men as sexless and Asian women as sexually submissive.
Hamamoto's dean, Elizabeth Langland, seems not to have a problem with the porn video, admitting it is within the realm of academic freedom. She noted that Hamamoto laid out his pornography strategy in a scholarly paper in 1998 titled “The Joy Fuck Club.”
The producer of the mainstream hit The Joy Luck Club, Janet Yang, told the Bee she understood where Hamamoto was coming from. "It sounds like he is trying to create entertainment for Asians, and that's not too different from what I want to do," she said.
Before starting her own company, Manifest Films, Yang had worked on The People vs. Larry Flynt, a biography of the famed Hustler publisher - and one of Darrell Hamamoto's personal role models.
"Pornography is one of the red-hot issues that splits people," Yang said. "I think, as an Asian woman, there's a big fantasy factor for white men that is driven by American porn. But, you know what? I don't have to agree with the professor's methods, but what he's saying has sound business value. Porn is tremendously profitable.”
Hamamoto’s primary intellectual argument for making the porn would be to address the basic invisibility of Asians in American culture, other than as computer geeks. One example of this invisibility, he contends, is the absence of heterosexual Asian American men in American pornography. With the exception of an occasional amateur performance, it seems that if there ever was a professional heterosexual Asian male porn star, he wasn’t around long enough for anyone to remember his name.
His primary financial argument is to make enough money selling Asian porn to create an Asian television network.
Yellowcaust: A Patriot Act will be making the film festival rounds, with hopes of appearing at Sundance, alongside a making of type documentary called Masters of the Pillow, directed by James Hou, a former student of Hamamoto's. The documentary includes interviews with notable Asian-Americans such as playwright David Henry Hwang (“M. Butterfly,” “Flower Drum Song”), who is a proponent of what is being called the “yellow porn movement,” by Asian-American Websites and message boards.
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