Abstract
The book Brown and Gay in LA: The Lives of Immigrant Sons by Anthony C. Ocampo explores how Filipino and Latinx men (predominantly from Mexico) living in Los Angeles make meaning of, and navigate, their sexual identities. Interviewing 63 cisgender men over the course of 4 years, the ethnographic project follows the lives of second-generation migrant men, outlining their journeys from childhood to adulthood, paying attention to the ways sexuality, masculinity, race, and their migrant pasts shape the way these men move through the city. The book centralizes on key social spheres the men navigate: the family, education systems, and nightlife.
Beginning with childhood, Ocampo outlines how in families and early classroom experiences, men are policed on their gender expression and presumed sexualities. The men interviewed learned to navigate their sexuality and migration histories with carefulness, often facing extreme policing or dismissal when their worlds converged. Chapters three and four outline how for some, education settings served as a place where they could explore their sexualities, but as Ocampo shows, the same educational settings simultaneously often excluded the men through racialized scripts. When these young men reach college, many of them find an LGBTQ+ community for the first time, but also find an escape from family networks. Moving beyond the education system, “Becoming Brown and Gay in LA” shows the alternative world-making that occurs. Nightlife, particularly for the men who do not have access to college networks, serves as a place where queer Latinx and Filipino men could meet each other and form community. However, the men face discrimination in West Hollywood spaces, often leading men to search for alternative spaces where their Latinx, Filipino, and queer experiences are represented, and in some cases, celebrated.
Lastly, Ocampo wraps up by outlining how many of the men learn to be “Not That Gay”—an elusive performance of downplaying their queerness and exaggerating their masculinity to make their families comfortable—often at the expense of more effeminate gay men and transgender women. Challenging this, Ocampo discusses how the men interviewed often fall into a trap, wherein to feel accepted by their families the men had to perform being the ‘right’ kind of gay person, which “often predicated on their ability to be seen as respectable, not in their willingness to reckon with queerphobia” (p. 162). Ocampo ends by encouraging a framework that moves beyond simple acceptance, showing the power of representation, family acceptance, and recognition in the lives of the men interviewed.
Drawing from Jose Muñoz’s The Sense of Brown, Ocampo utilizes Brown as the term through which to explore the potential of shared and interlocking racialization of the men in the study. While Ocampo’s choice is understandable, particularly given the period in which the research was conducted, I do wonder as more conversations develop within sociology discussing the racial heterogeneity of Latin America, what new questions could be asked. While Ocampo does show how racialization impacts the lives of the men he interviewed, I am curious how a Latinx person impacted by anti-Blackness or anti-Indigeneity might face a differentiating racialization. If we understand Latinx as an ethnic as opposed to racial category, what new findings might emerge? Additionally, I wonder how gender may function in the lives of second-generation queer individuals who are not cisgender men, especially those who may face different outcomes and influences of masculinity. Ocampo’s book importantly opens the door to these type of questions for scholars to take up and explore further.
This project aimed to bring conversations about race, migration, and sexuality from academia into the broader world, a task that I believe Ocampo thoroughly accomplishes. Throughout the book, we are shown how the men interviewed navigate Los Angeles, constantly finding a mixture of inclusion and exclusion that highlights the interconnected role of race, migration, gender, and sexuality at each stage. Given that many of the men interviewed for the project felt their experiences were underrepresented in their day-to-day lives (and as evidenced in the book, this underrepresentation shaped their experiences in school, the clubs, and beyond), Ocampo’s book serves as the representation I imagine many of these men seek. The book is not simply a sociological quest, but rather, a documentation that queer second-generation men live complex lives that deserve to be studied and understood. The book will be beneficial to a range of audiences, from undergraduate classrooms to the broader public. Ocampo’s book is an easily approachable and enjoyable text that intervenes in conversations within the scholarship of sexualities and migration studies but also—and perhaps more importantly, for Ocampo– serves as an intervention in the lack of representation that has placed the experiences of Filipino and Latinx queer men on the sidelines.