The sexual history of Asian diasporas is being written across nations, institutions, their publics. In this essay, I would like to speak about one privileged site and set of institutions in which the “sexual history” of the Asian diaspora is produced, organized, and subjected to regulation. That is, I would like to investigate the “history of sexuality” for Asian diasporas whose lines of dispersion cross U.S. space. What kind of “history of sexuality” is being written in this collision of diasporic groups and U.S. space?1 For nearly two centuries this collision has, in actuality, produced a genealogy of sex for both the U.S. nation-state and “modernized” diasporas. The “Chinese prostitute” consecrated by the Page Law of 1875 and the “Chinese bachelor” formed in the residue of successive Chinese Exclusion Acts from 1882 to 1943 are just some of the most famous figures to emerge from this collision. But I set my sights today on one of the newest figures to emerge from the annals of the sexual history of the sian diaspora.2 This figure, like his counterparts in previous historical periods, is to be found in the legal text and its supplementary genres, such as public health, anthropology, and psychology. The figure is named the “gay Pakistani immigrant,” and he is found in immigration proceedings, juridical cases, and legal journals. Though murmurs of his existence have been heard before, and debate as to whether he was real continued for a number of years, he crossed a certain threshold of reality in the mid-1990s and emerged onto the legal, cultural, and social scene in an attire and voice fully suited to claim equal personhood at the table. And like his predecessors, U.S. immigration law remains the defining apparatus for his juridical and discursive constitution.
